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THE EGYPTIAN REVIVAL
Ancient Egypt as the Inspiration for Design Motifs in the West
JAMES STEVENS CURL
First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2005 James Stevens Curl Foreword © Peter A. Clayton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
ISBN10: 0–415–36119–2 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–36118–4 (pbk)
ISBN13: 9–78–0–415–36119–4 ISBN13: 9–78–0–415–36118–7
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Contents A good Memory is the best Monument. Others are subject to Casualty and Time, and we know that the Pyramids themselves doting with age have forgotten the names of their Founders.
THOMAS FULLER (1608–61): The Holy State, Book iii (1642): Of Tombes, last paragraph, lines 1–4, in the 1647 edition (Cambridge: Roger Daniel).
List of Illustrations x
Foreword by Peter A. Clayton, F. S.A. xviii
Preface Introduction xx The Argument xxvi
Acknowledgements xxxi
Chapter I Egypt and Europe 1
The Idea of Egypt in the European Mind 2 The Isiac Religion 12 The Absorption of Egyptian Religion into the
Græco-Roman World 16 Obelisks 22 The Isæum Campense 30 Pyramids 39 Epilogue 41
Chapter II Some Manifestations of Egyptianisms from the Time of Trajan to the Early Renaissance Period 43
Introduction 44 The Villa Adriana at Tivoli 47 Egypt, Rome, and the Emperors 55 The Reality of Egypt in Recession 60 The Transformation of Isis 62 The Proto-Revival and the Survival of Egyptian and
Egyptianising Artefacts 73
vii
Chapter III Further Manifestations with Egyptian Connotations in Europe from the Renaissance to the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century 109
The Mensa Isiaca 110 Records and Drawings 112 Egyptianisms in Design 116 The Hermetic Tradition 128 Some Manifestations of Egyptiana 133 Travellers and Speculators 134 Bernini 137 The French Connection 139
Chapter IV Egyptian Elements in Eighteenth-Century Europe to the Time of Piranesi 143
Explorers of the Eighteenth Century 144 Further Baroque Themes 146 The Search for Stereometrical Purity 154 The Individual Contribution of Giovanni Battista Piranesi 155 The Legacy of Piranesi 168
Chapter V The Egyptian Revival from the Time of Piranesi until the Napoleonic Campaigns in Egypt 171
Introduction 172 The Tomb and Egyptianising Forms 172 Egyptianisms in Design before the Impact of Denon
and the Description 193 The Invasion 200
Chapter VI The Egyptian Revival after the Napoleonic Campaigns in Egypt 203
Introduction 204 Denon 204 Thomas Hope and the Neo-Classical Use of Egyptianisms 206 The Description and the Glorification of Napoléon 225 Freemasonry 230 Furniture Design, and Other Egyptianising Manifestations 234
viii
CONTENTS
Chapter VII Applications of the Egyptian Style 249
Introduction: Die Zauberflöte 250 Stage-Designs and Mozart 252 The Commercial Picturesque and the Adoption of Egyptian Forms 260 Other Egyptianising Designs 273
Chapter VIII The Egyptian Revival in Funerary Architecture 281
Introduction 282 Funerary Exemplars 283 The New Cemeteries 286 Pugin 304 Commemorative Egyptianisms 306 Conclusion 310
Chapter IX Aspects of the Egyptian Revival in the Later Part of the Nineteenth Century 311
Introduction 312 Travellers and Scholars 317 The Egyptian Revival in the Hands of Serious Egyptologists 320 The Individual Contribution of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson 334 The Victorian Vision of Egypt 341 Eclecticism and Design 343
Chapter X The Egyptian Revival in the Twentieth Century 347
Introduction 348 Egyptianising Architecture from 1900 to 1922 366 Tutankhamun and Art-Déco 373 Later Developments 389 Epilogue 395
Chapter XI A Postscript 397
Introduction 398 The Longevity of Nilotic Themes 400 Afterword 411
Select Glossary 415
Select Bibliography 471
Index 533
ix
CONTENTS
CHAPTER X
The Egyptian Revival in the Twentieth Century Introduction; Egyptianising Architecture from 1900 to 1922; Tutankhamun and Art-Déco; Later Developments; Epilogue
In the afternoon of time A strenuous family dusted from its hands The sand of granite, and beholding far Along the sounding coast its pyramids And tall memorials catch the dying sun, Smiled well content, and to this childish task Around the fire addressed its evening hours.
ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON (1850–94): Underwoods (1887), XXXVIII, lines 5–11.
At last have made wonderful discovery in Valley; a magnificent tomb with seals intact; re-covered same for your arrival; congratulations.
HOWARD CARTER (1873–1939): Telegram to George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert,
5th Earl of Carnarvon (1866–1923), on the discovery of the Tomb of King Tutankhamun, November 1922.
347
Introduction
We have seen how Egyptianisms in design persisted through the nineteenth century, and that they were not merely a passing fad in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Campaign in Egypt. Almost as soon as the twentieth century began Berlin Zoo acquired its delightful ostrich-house, created in 1901 to designs by Heinrich Kayser (1842–1917) and Karl von Grossheim (1841– 1911),1 the interior of which was decorated with a reproduction of the Zodiac of Dendera and a diorama representing the colossi of Memnon.2
Far away, in Edinburgh, the Supreme Grand Royal Arch Chapter of Freemasons of Scotland obtained its splendid new Chapter Room at 78 Queen Street in 1900–01 to designs by Peter Henderson (1848–1912) (Colour Plate XXXVIII). Egyptianising motifs were included in furnishings and carpets, and the room was supposed to be ‘in the style of an ancient Egyptian Temple’.3 Henderson designed the entire decorative system, including the handsome chairs with Egyptianising head terminals.
Egyptianising furniture by Liberty and other firms became popular, and even became associated in the Italian mind with Art Nouveau to the extent that the style was called the Stile Liberty in Italy. Even elsewhere Art- Nouveau buildings and artefacts often acquired Egyptianising infusions: an example of 1906 can be found at 10 Rue du Général-Rapp in Strasbourg by Adolf Zilly (built, of course, when Strasbourg was within the territory of the German Empire), in which exuberant Jugendstil architecture is enlivened with Nilotic scenes in polychrome decorative panels.4 Egyptian elements occur in Italian design of the early years of the twentieth century, and are strongly represented in the work of one of the most gifted designers of the time, Carlo Bugatti (1856–1940). The room Bugatti designed for Lord Battersea’s house at 7 Marble Arch (c.1903) is a strange and exotic amalgam of Egyptianising and other elements: it was designed and made in Milan, and erected in London by a team of Italian craftsmen. Although the Egyptian motifs had become transformed in the design, their origins were unmistakeable: even the circular feature containing the two mirrors had stepped ‘corbels’ that recall post-Piranesian openings, while the fan-like feature between the two mirrors recalled the lotus-flower. Furniture had echoes of Regency Hopeian designs mixed with the robust imagination of Dresser, yet transformed into something quite new by Bugatti (Plate 205).5
348
THE EGYPTIAN REVIVAL
1 Founded in 1872, this architectural firm was the epitome of a successful architectural practice in the Second Reich, and was renowned for its application of polychromy.
2 The exterior is illustrated in HUMBERT (1989a), 78. 3 Building News (26 July 1901), 105. See also CONNER (Ed.) (1983), 96. 4 See HUMBERT (1989a), 79. 5 The Author is indebted to Mr Christopher Wood, Miss Sylvia Katz, and the Design Council for
information. Mr Wood kindly permitted the use of his photograph here.
349
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350
Plate xxv Schinkel’s design for the Closing Scene of Die Zauberflöte in the 1816 Berlin production at the Königliche Schauspiele-Opernhaus, showing the temple of the Sun. In the background is Osiris the Resurrected, the Invincible, the All -Wise, flanked by Apis-Bulls. On either side are Piranesian figures in attitudes of adoration, and in the distance is a huge pyramid rising from the light of the sun behind the head of Osiris, with pylon-towers and obelisks on either side. The colonnades in antis on each side are based on Denon’s Voyage and other elements come from Piranesi and from Schinkel’s own Diorama project Das Labyrinth von Creta of 1807. The Osiris figure mixes the Hadrianic figure of Antinoüs with elements from Piranesi’s DM, and is the centrepiece of a spectacular final scene in which
Die Strahlen der Sonne vertreiben die Nacht, Zernichten der Heuchler erschlichene Macht (the rays of the sun scatter the night, breaking asunder the might of the false dissembler).
Here, Strength, Beauty, and Wisdom are lauded in the final chorus: words with powerful Freemasonic connotations. So Sarastro and his priests, presiding over the Egyptian Mysteries, represent the triumph of Benevolence and Freemasonry over the forces of superstition, lies, and darkness (see Schinkel Museum, SMB, Th/3) (THIELE/BL.1899.c.5).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:01 pm Page 350
351
Plate xxvii Bronze medal commemorating the erection of the obelisk from Luxor in the Place de la Concorde, Paris, on 25 October 1836. The inscription gave details of the obelisk’s size and weight and of its re-erection (PAC).
Plate xxvi Bronze medal commemorating Giovanni Belzoni’s opening of the pyramid of Kephren at Gizeh, 1818, made by T. I. Wells after a design by William Brockedon (1787–1854) (PAC).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:01 pm Page 351
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Plate xxix Mausoleum of the 2nd Earl of Kilmorey (1787–1880) and his mistress, Priscilla Hoste (died 1854). It was originally erected to designs by Henry Edward Kendall the Younger (1805–85) in Brompton Cemetery, London, in 1854, was moved to Woburn Park, Chertsey, in 1862, and then translated to Gordon House, Isleworth, Middlesex, in 1870 (MaCh A240902).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:01 pm Page 353
354
Plate xxx Details of coloured decorations from Grave 24 at Saqqara, recorded in LEPSIUS (1849–59), i, Abth. I, Blatt 41 (UC).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:01 pm Page 354
355
Plate xxxi Two bell-capitals, a bud-capital, and three columns from the great temple at Karnak, from LEPSIUS (1849–59), ii, Abth. I, Blatt 81 (UC).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:01 pm Page 355
356
Plate xxxii Bell and bud-capitals with the full Order of columns, base, capital, and entablature from the hall of the temple of Rameses II at Thebes. From LEPSIUS (1849–59), ii, Abth. 1, Blatt 90 (UC).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:01 pm Page 356
357
Plate xxxiii Various coloured capitals from Philæ. An example of the meticulously detailed and finely printed plates from LEPSIUS (1849–59), ii, Abth. I, Blatt 108 (UC).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:01 pm Page 357
358
Plate xxxv The Egyptian Court (1850) in the New Museum, Spreeinsel, Berlin, designed by Stüler, and decorated in the Egyptian style with Lepsius as consultant. From a lithograph entitled Ägyptischer Vorhof im Neuen Museum (Plate VII) in Stüler’s monograph, Das Neue Museum zu Berlin (1853), based on a painting by Gärtner (1850) (Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Kupferstichbände B73).
Plate xxxiv Wall-decoration of XVIII Dynasty, New Kingdom, Thebes. From LEPSIUS (1849–59), vi, Abth. III, Blatt 115 (UC).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:02 pm Page 358
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360
Plate xxxvii Israel in Egypt (1867) by Sir Edward John Poynter (1836–1919). Oil on canvas, 137.2 × 317.5 cm. The artist’s scholarly composition includes the Great Pyramid of Gizeh on the left; two of the temples at Philæ and the Trajanic Kiosk to the left of the pyramid; the temple of Seti I at Qurna behind the lion in the foreground; the pylon-towers of the temple at Edfu on the right, with an obelisk from Heliopolis and the large black seated figures of Amenhotep III from Thebes in front of them; and a much enlarged lion based on the fine pair brought to The British Museum in 1835. Despite its virtuosity, the anachronisms are somewhat startling: the ‘Kiosk’ for example, dates from the early Christian period, and did not exist when the Israelites were held captive in Egypt (GLCL).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:02 pm Page 360
361
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:02 pm Page 361
362
Plate xxxviii Chapter-Room of 78 Queen Street, Edinburgh, for the Supreme Grand Lodge Royal Arch Chapter of Scotland, designed by Peter Lyle Henderson (1848–1912), and built 1901. This drawing (pencil and watercolour) was prepared by Robert F. Sherar in 1901. The use of Egyptian motifs extended to carpets and furniture. The Building News of 26 July 1901 (105) noted that the ‘chapter-room is in the style of an Ancient Egyptian Temple . . . It has been suggested that (the figure decoration) should represent the story of Isis and Osiris . . . or be simply reproductions from the Book of the Dead . . . The ceiling is carried on timber trusses, the details of which are Assyrian in style. The upholstery of the seats is a deep crimson, and forms a sort of dado all round . . . The capitals of the large columns and the ceiling over the dais are in brilliant colours after the style of a peacock’s tail’ (RCAHMS, EDD/846/CN).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:02 pm Page 362
363
Plate xxxix (a) W. C. Reebie & Brother, Inc., warehouse and general offices, 2325–33 N. Clark Street, Chicago, IL (Chicago Historical Society, I CHi–35525/G81:108.1).
Plate xxxix (b) Interior of the general office, 2325–33 N. Clark Street, Chicago, IL (Chicago Historical Society, I CHi–35526/G81:108.1).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:02 pm Page 363
364
Plate xl Entrance to the former Arcadia Works Building of Carreras Ltd, between Hampstead Road and Mornington Crescent, London, in 2002, showing the Carreras motifs of black cats and the Egyptianising detail (MaCh J 280702).
Colour pp.349-364 PT/gk 25/8/05 5:02 pm Page 364
Bugatti returned to a more instantly recognisable Egyptianising theme in his design for a War Memorial of c.1919: the form is Neo-Classical, recalling Desprez, Boullée, or Canova, and consists of a pyramid supporting an urn set against a rugged wall. In the centre of one face of the pyramid is a circular opening (a motif used to great effect in Lord Battersea’s room of 1903) at the back of which are ghastly figures suggesting the carnage of the battlefield and the agonies of bodies in a slaughterhouse. This is a design of the utmost power, and is deeply moving (Plate 206).6 The Egyptianising designs of Bugatti did not occur in isolation: in 1904 there was a Rationalist Congress held in Rome at which Giordano Bruno was elevated to the position of a hero of his country, in clear defiance of clerical conservatism and in direct opposition to the kind of contortions enshrined in the works of obfuscators like Cuomó and other crabbed hagiographers from the age of Pio Nono.
365
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Plate 205 Room designed for Lord Battersea at No. 7 Marble Arch, London, by Carlo Bugatti (1856–1940) in c.1903. Note the variation on the Piranesian stepped corbel motif over the mirrors on the left, and the fan-like feature between the mirrors that recalls the lotus-flower. The entire ensemble is exotic and orientalising (Collection of Mr Christopher Wood. Design Council Neg. No. C2848).
6 The Author is indebted to the late Mr Hugh G. Conway and to Miss Sylvia Katz. See also The Amazing Bugattis. A Catalogue of the Exhibition at the Royal College of Art (8 October to 18 November 1979).
Egyptianising Architecture from 1900 to 1922
Freemasonry encouraged an Egyptian Revival in its lodges. This is espe- cially true of the lodges built under the ægis of the Grand Orient of Belgium between 1870 and 1914. The ‘Temple of Perfect Union’ (La Parfaite Union) in Mons, for example, designed by Hector Puchot (1842–1920), was intended to remind all who saw it that the Mons Lodge would work for the moral and intellectual emancipation of the communi- ty. An Egyptianising style would allude to a great culture that pre-dated Christianity (which itself owed much to Ancient Egypt), and would be a badge of anti-clericalism. The Mons Lodge, in the rue Chisaire, was inau- gurated in 1890, and has numerous Egyptianising motifs: indeed the whole front is a variation on the pylon-tower theme.7
The Freemasonic Temple in the Boulevard d’Avroy in Liège houses the Lodge ‘La Parfaite Intelligence et l’Étoile Réunies’, and has a handsome Egyptianising doorcase of c.1910.8 This may have been by Arthur Snyers, who was to go on to design the scholarly Egyptianising ‘Palais du Royaume d’Égypte’ at the Exposition Internationale at Liège in 1930. At Namur, in the
366
THE EGYPTIAN REVIVAL
Plate 206 Carlo Bugatti’s design for
a war-memorial of 1919 (Collection
of the late Mr H. G. Conway. Design
Council Neg. No. C2820/1).
7 WARMENBOL (2001), 62. The Author is greatly indebted to Dr Warmenbol for much help over many years.
8 Ibid., 63.
rue Félix Wodon, is the Freemasonic Temple (inaugurated 1908), designed by Jules Malevez: it has a monumental and vigorous Egyptianising portal.9
Dr Warmenbol and others have pointed out that Belgian Freemasons often made their affiliations overt, even in death, and quote a number of Egyptianising tombs to prove the point.10 A good example is the tomb of Ferdinand Dierkens (c.1898) in the Westerbegraafplaats in Gent. One of the most handsome Freemasonic Temples in Belgium in which the Egyptian style played an important rôle was at 79 Lakenstraat, Brussels, designed by Paul Bonduelle (1877–1955). The ‘Grote Tempel’ was the largest room in the complex, and featured bud-capitals, winged uræi, Hathor-headed pilasters, and other motifs. Furthermore, Jachin and Boaz (the two columns associated with the Temple of Solomon) had bell-capitals and abaci deco- rated with pharaonic heads, complete with nemes head-dresses and rearing uræi.11
Unfortunately, the fine building that housed ‘Les Amis du Commerce et la Persévérance Réunis’ in the Meistraat, Antwerp, which had stunn- ing Egyptian interiors, was demolished in 1982. It was designed by Pierre-François Laout (1825–1903) and Jean-Laurent Hasse (1849–1925),12
with Egyptianising stucco-work by Henri Verbuecken (1848–1926).13
As Dr Eugène Warmenbol and others have shown, Freemasonic rites with Egyptian connotations multiplied during the nineteenth century, given added impetus after the Napoleonic discoveries and the superb publications that followed. Several Belgian lodges adopted Egyptianising décor and tended to reject aspects of Freemasonry inherited from the British Isles, namely specific references to Christianity, preferring, instead, to make their connections with something far older. Antiquity and Ancient Egypt in par- ticular had more attractions than the Bible, when Continental Freemasons ‘transformèrent leurs locaux de la façon la plus heureuse en reconstituant le cadre historique antique des temples véritables’.14
In parts of the Continent, notably in Belgium, and, to a lesser extent in France, Freemasonry was virulently denounced by the Roman Catholic Church, for Freemasons in those countries tended to be strongly anti- clerical, and even aggressively opposed to Roman Catholicism. The adop- tion of an Egyptianising style of architecture and interior décor would therefore differentiate Freemasonry from the Romanesque, Gothic, or Baroque of Roman Catholicism and had associations with something held to be far older, wiser, and (to many) more reasonable.
367
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
9 WARMENBOL (2001), 65. 10 Ibid., 79. The Author is also indebted to Heer Marcel Celis for showing him various such Egyptianising
tombs, etc., in Brussels and elsewhere. 11 M & L. Monumenten und Landschappen. 3 Jahrgang, No. 3 (May-June 1984), 33–35. 12 GUBEL ET AL. (1995), 33. 13 GRIETEN (Ed.) (2002), 285–306. 14 See MALLINGER (1978), 23. See also WARMENBOL (2001), 60.
And it was not just Belgium that adopted the Egyptian Revival for its buildings: Paris acquired the Temple du Droit Humaine in c.1912, a Freemasonic Lodge for women at 5 rue Jules Breton, Paris XIIIe. Over the entrance-door is inscribed Ordo ab Chao (Order out of Chaos), a Freemasonic motto, and the gallery on the first floor is set behind severe palmiform (somewhat elongated) columns, with a balustrade composed of alternate ankhs and djed-columns. The crowning gorge-cornice is embellished with stylized vertical leaves and two winged triangles (Plate 207).15 This is an unusually overt and very handsome admission of Freemasonic affiliation for either France or the United Kingdom. Belgium tended to be less inhibited, even aggressive in its Egyptianising iconography. In Scandinavia, too, Freemasonic architecture is generally reticent (apart from some symbolic devices placed discreetly on façades). An exception was the Lodge in Norrköping, Sweden (1868–9), which had an Egyptianising doorcase (with winged globe), a sphinx in a panel, and another winged globe on the attic storey.16
In architectural terms, however, it has to be recognised that in the British Isles the Nilotic style had been somewhat out of fashion since the denunciations of Pugin in the 1840s, although, as has been seen, there were occasional Freemasonic forays into the Egyptian Revival as at Boston, Lincolnshire, and Edinburgh. Nevertheless, Sir Frank Baines (1877–1933), Director of H. M. Office of Works, was bold enough to propose a National
368
THE EGYPTIAN REVIVAL
Plate 207 ‘Temple du Droit Humaine’,
5 rue Jules Breton, Paris XIIIe, of c.1912
(UGLE).
15 HUMBERT (1998), 168–9. See also CURL (1996a). 16 See P. B. EKLUND (c.1880): IX Frimurare Provinsens. Byggnader (Stockholm: Central-Tryckeriet-P. B.
Eklunds Forlag).
War Memorial in an uncompromising and massive Egyptian style for a site at London’s Hyde Park Corner (Plate 208). This proposal was not prepared officially on behalf of the Government, but was entirely conceived and carried out by Sir Frank Baines as his own idea of a War Memorial, and he thereby found very soon that he had stirred up a veritable hornets’ nest of Pugin-indoctrinated opinion.17
369
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Plate 208 Design for a National War Memorial at Hyde Park Corner, London, by Sir Frank
Baines, Director of H.M. Office of Works, of 1920, in the form of a gigantic pylon with two
flanking temples. From The Builder (JSC).
17 The Builder, cxix/4042 (23 July 1920), 93.
Sir Alfred Moritz Mond (1868–1930 – later 1st Baron Melchett), the First Commissioner of Works, gave permission for Baines’s designs to be exhibited in the tea-room of the House of Commons, where they ‘aroused considerable discussion’ and ‘excited extraordinary interest’, both under- statements, as we presently shall see.18 It was noted that the Memorial had been designed to occupy a ‘commanding position at Hyde Park Corner’, and that it was ‘in the form of a gigantic pylon with two flanking tem- ples’.19 The Times then observed that the architect had selected the Egyptian style ‘evidently feeling that the Egyptian period’ was the most suitable ‘for immense scale and grandeur’, and that his ambition clearly was to ensure that ‘the monument should be the most distinctive object in London’.20 The Builder commented that the conception seemed to ‘embody one great idea – that of sacrifice’, and that the designs made a ‘profound impression on the collective feeling of the House of Commons’. However, that journal went on to raise some cautionary points, and began to worry about the Sublime phraseology, considering it both ‘grandiose and absurd’. ‘Will the public’, The Builder continued, ‘understand that such descriptions . . . as “immense”, “cloudy forms”, “gigantic symbol of immortality”, “immense scale and grandeur”, and all the rest of it, are the merest moonshine?’.21
The trouble was that Baines was thinking in the terms of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century architects, and the blank incomprehension and hostility with which his scheme was greeted demonstrates how well Pugin and others had done their work. The Sublime, it has to be said, was definitely out of fashion. Members of Parliament questioned how such a design on such a site ‘could have been suggested by anyone who knew any- thing about the origin of the war, or its consequences’.22 Some criticisms were not concerned with style, but only with getting jobs, and protests were raised that H.M. Office of Works should design the National War Memorial at all.23
Others denounced the Egyptian style as ‘dreadful . . . Of all the styles suited to London the Egyptian is the most unfit and alien; and the bigger it might be, the more vulgar it would be. It is heavy, passive, sulky; it is the style of a caste-ridden people; it requires the sunlight and the desert; it would show the dirt; it proclaims complete indifference to the hard estate of the poor’.24 Selwyn Image (1849–1930) saw the design as ‘pure pagan swagger’, suitable for ‘Berlin under the dominance of the ex-
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18 The Builder, cxix/4041 (16 July 1920), 58. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., cxix/4042 (23 July 1920), 93. 23 Ibid., in a letter by John William Simpson (1858–1933), President of the Royal Institute of British
Architects (1919–21). 24 Ibid. The Author is indebted to Mr Ralph Hyde for these references.
Kaiser’.25 At the Annual General Meeting of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Hugh Thackeray Turner (1853–1937) declared Baines’s design to be ‘monstrous’, and Sir Thomas Graham Jackson (1835–1924) opposed the design on the grounds that its symbolism belonged to a time when people could not read, and so was ‘as little suited to modern ideas as the Pylon itself ’.26 He went on to say that the proposal was an ‘offence against reason and good taste’, and Thomas Batterbury (died 1922) called the design a ‘monstrous erection’, enquiring if the ‘architect ever saw’ Pugin’s Contrasts (sic) in which there was a ‘monstrosity in a pseudo-Egyptian style’.27 It is revealing that a lampoon by Pugin (Plate 183) of 1843 (inaccurately stated by Batterbury to be from Contrasts when it was actually from An Apology)28
was sufficient to damn a style or a building in 1920, for pro-Gothic atti- tudes, though weakening, were still well-ingrained among the older gener- ations at the time. Baines proposed that his great pylon would be set on the axes of Piccadilly and Grosvenor Crescent, and would have been visible from the east all the way down Piccadilly: there can be no question that the design would have been very impressive, and as a work of twentieth-century Egyptian Revival it is of considerable interest (Plate 208).
Can anyone seriously defend the mess that is Hyde Park Corner today? It has Decimus Burton’s (1800–81) Greek Revival screen, Constitution Arch, and other fine buildings, including Adams, Holden, & Pearson’s splendid Royal Artillery Memorial (1921–5), with sculptures by Charles Sergeant Jagger (1885–1934),29 but the space is little more than an ugly traffic-island, a disgrace to the metropolis. Baines’s scheme would at least have given it some degree of order, and the critics, had they lived to see the place in 2002, might well have changed their tune.
Egyptianisms were also well to the fore in the Peace and War Memorial scheme designed by Cass Gilbert (1859–1934) for New York City in 1919, who stated that a ‘War memorial should be so designed and executed’ that it gave an impression suggestive of Courage, Bravery, Liberty, and Victory.30 Gilbert’s proposal consisted of a massive stepped base approached from ramps, crowned by a huge stepped pyramid.
However, even before the Great War of 1914–18 the influence of such buildings as the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deïr-el-Bahari was clear in the works of several architects. Peter Behrens (1869–1940), for example, quoted those long ranges of square unornamented capital-less
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25 The Builder. Such anti-German remarks were commonplace at the time. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. He is inaccurately reported as ‘Battenbury’. 28 PUGIN (1843). It is typical of critics such as Batterbury that they were never able (or could not be
bothered) to check their ‘facts’, which were almost invariably nothing of the sort. 29 See ANN COMPTON (Ed.) (1986): Charles Sergeant Jagger War and Peace Sculpture (London: The Imperial
War Museum). 30 The American Architect (January 1921), cxix.
columns from the colonnades at the Mortuary Temple, Deïr-el-Bahari (Colour Plate III), in his design for a crematorium at Delstern bei Hagen (1906–7),31 while his Hof des Vereins Deutscher Kalkwerke,32 at the Ton,- Zement,- und Kalkindustrieausstellung,33 Berlin (1910), owed a debt to the temple of Hatshepsut and Thutmosis III at Medinet Habu of c.1479–1436 BC.34 Pyramidal compositions, with starkly stripped and stepped elements, recur, notably in Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen’s (1873–1950) project for the Parliament Building in Helsinki, Finland (1908 – not only essentially a pyra- midal composition, but one with reminiscences of Egyptianising detail in its main entrance),35 while Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (called Le Corbusier [1887–1966]), in his project for an Atelier of Arts at La Chaux-de-Fonds (1910),36 used blocky cubic forms and a crowning pyramid, clearly derived from the Mortuary Temple of Mentuhotep at Deïr-el-Bahari.37 Now Behrens, Le Corbusier, and Saarinen are not exactly obscure names, so it is very odd that their Egyptian-inspired works have been ignored by most commentators. This does seem to be another instance of facts being delib- erately suppressed because those commentators have agendas of their own that are more important to them than their so-called bogus ‘objectivity’.
Although these images are obvious and direct, less obvious is the debt Walter Gropius (1883–1969) owed to Ancient Egyptian architecture. Images of his celebrated building (designed in collaboration with Adolf Meyer [1881–1929 – who had previously worked with Behrens in 1907–8, and was a Theosophist, something usually not taken into account in dis- cussions of Gropius and his works]) at the Deutscher Werkbundausstellung,38
Köln (1914), usually show the symmetrical front flanked by curved glazed staircases. However, on either side of the entrance are windows subdivided by those Schinkel-Thomson square mullion-columns derived from Ancient Egyptian architecture, whilst above the stark repetitive façade rise two pylon-like forms. What is usually not shown is the plan of the building, which has startling resemblances to the Ptolemaïc temple of Horus at Edfu,39 and a reconstruction of that temple was shown at an exhibition in Berlin in 1896, which Gropius may have seen. Gropius also worked in the office of Behrens from 1907 to 1910 just at the time Behrens was quoting from Ancient Egyptian buildings, yet, apart from Pehnt’s perceptive com- ments, nobody seems to have noticed.
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31 Illustrated in PEHNT (1987), 153. 32 Court of the Association of German Lime-Works. 33 Clay-, Cement-, and Lime-Industry Exhibition. 34 Pointed out by PEHNT (1987), 153–4. 35 Illustrated in PEHNT (1987), 152. 36 Ibid., 155. 37 Ibid. 38 German Work Association Exhibition. 39 Illustrated in PEHNT (1987), 154–5.
Paul Michael Nikolaus Bonatz (1877–1956)40 is remembered for the Hauptbahnhof (Main Railway-Station) in Stuttgart (1911–27) – a building usually described as influenced by Saarinen’s Central Railway-Station in Helsinki (1910–14) – and for his work designing bridges and other build- ings for the Autobahn (motorway) system under Fritz Todt (1891–1942). However, Bonatz knew Egypt well, and many of his drawings of Ancient Egyptian buildings survive from his trip there in 1913. If one looks at the powerful and sturdy treatment of the Hauptbahnhofsgebäude (Main Railway- Station building) in Stuttgart by Bonatz and Friedrich Eugen Scholer (1874–1949), not only is the Hatshepsut mortuary-temple recalled, but the wall-surface treatment of the temple complex of King Zoser at Saqqara by Imhotep (c. 2600 BC)41 is quoted. Now these allusions to and quotations from Ancient Egyptian architecture are too common to be ignored (as they usually are): it should be remembered that the period immediately before the catastrophe of 1914–18 was one of intellectual ferment in which there was considerable interest in Egypt Ancient and Modern (quite apart from the interest shown in many other times and places). In Germany alone, there was much inspiration drawn from Ancient Egyptian and Biblical themes: just one example is the curious case of the Legend of Joseph (Josephslegende), a ballet based on a scenario by the German diplomat, æsthete, and littérateur, Count Harry von Kessler (1868–1934), which Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929 – who also contributed to the scenario) persuaded Serge Diaghilev (1872–1929), the impresario, to accept for the Ballets Russes: the music (completed in 1914) was by Richard Strauss (1864–1949). The première was given in Paris on 14 May 1914, with sets and costumes by José-Marie Sert and Léon Bakst (1866–1924 – an accom- plished designer in the Egyptianising style): it would be difficult to imagine anything much more exotic than that.
Tutankhamun and Art-Déco
Further impetus to the use of Egyptianisms in design was given by the dis- covery of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1922, the archæological triumph of the twentieth century, which had a tremendous effect on the decorative arts in Europe and America. The subsequent publicity was enor- mous, and the marvellous furnishings, treasures, and other objects stimulat- ed a new phase in the Nile style, for they were of superlative quality and design, and almost overnight became models, and not only for rare
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40 PAUL BONATZ (1950): Leben und Bauten (Stuttgart: Engelhornverlag Adolf Spemann). 41 These matters are discussed at length in PEHNT (1987), passim.
artefacts.42 Modern publicity ensured a widespread following for Nilotic fashions. Women wore ‘Cleopatra’ ear-rings, while designers such as Pierre Émile Legrain (1889–1929) were strongly influenced by Egyptian proto- types, and used a rich variety of materials, such as ebony, vellum, shagreen, chromium-plated metal, zebra-skin, and lacquer. Following the revival of interest in things Egyptian in 1922, Egyptianising motifs appeared in objects from ash-trays to cinemas, from jewellery to furniture, from suburban draw- ing-rooms to company board-rooms, and were essential ingredients of the style known as Art-Déco. The furniture designed by Eileen Gray (1878–1976) often incorporated Egyptianising elements, notably in the handsome table she designed for Jacques Doucet in 1924, and was adapted (1978) as a ‘lotus console’ by Vermilion of Los Angeles. One of the features of Art-Déco and of Egyptianising styles was that their popularity coincided with a democratisation of art and artefacts, for Art-Déco was not confined to highbrow tastes, and indeed the cinema, the change of mood in society after 1914–18, and the excitement of the Tutankhamun discoveries, all con- tributed to this. Egyptianising objects were produced in various cheap as well as very expensive materials, and can be found made of anything from pressed metal, ‘Bakelite’ plastic, or pottery to chrome-and-enamelled work or gold-and-silver objects set with precious stones and embellished with expensive lacquers.
In architecture, Henri Sauvage (1873–1932) designed a series of massive stepped blocks of flats not unlike the pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara in the 1920s, and Otto Kohtz (1880–1956) produced a mighty pyramidal tower of flats (Entwurf eines Hochhauses) in 1924, but neither project was realised. One of the first buildings to quote from the artefacts in the tomb of Tutankhamun was Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood by Mendel S. Meyer and Holler, begun 1922, although the proscenium also quoted a variant of the Piranesian corbelled arch. Inspired by Grauman’s Theater was the Zaring Egyptian Theater in Indianapolis (1925), by Frank B. Hunter, which also incorporated that familiar eighteenth-century ‘Egyptian’ motif, a stepped corbelled proscenium-arch.43
Yet before these spectacular American examples, and indeed before the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, Paris acquired its Egyptianising Cinéma Louxor44 in 1920–21 on the Boulevard Magenta (Plate 209). The Egyptian style had long had an association with advertisement ever since Bullock’s Museum in Piccadilly, and the advent of silent films, some of which attempted to show historical (and Ancient Egyptian) scenes, encour- aged yet another revival of the style for commercial and entertainment
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42 For a good flavour of these see HUMBERT, PANTAZZI, and ZIEGLER (Eds) (1994), 506–51. 43 Illustrated in HUMBERT (1989a), 118–19. 44 HUMBERT (1989a), 82.
buildings. It is therefore important to recognise that a new phase of the Egyptian Revival had begun before 1922.
At 2325–2333 North Clark Street, Chicago, Illinois, for example, was built one of the most astonishing (and well-preserved today) buildings in the Egyptian Revival style: this is the Reebie Storage Warehouse, built in 1921–2 to designs by George S. Kingsley (1870–1956).45 Founded by William Reebie (1859–1921) in 1880, the firm of W. C. Reebie & Brother determined to advertise itself by building an office and warehouse in a distinctive architectural style, and John Reebie (who had visited Egypt before 1921) decided on the Egyptian style, having seen another Egyptian Revival storage warehouse (that of the Dawson-Mayflower Moving Company) at Stockton, California, designed in 1918 by Glenn Allen. Clearly, foreign travel and advertising possibilities combined in a potent brew.
Kingsley, who believed that good architecture is good advertising, quoted from the temples at Dendera and Edfu, but the quality of the detail at Reebie’s goes far beyond mere advertisement. The ornament on the building was carried out by the sculptor Fritz Albert (1860–1940), who had trained in Berlin before arriving in the USA in 1893 to work on the World’s Columbian Exposition. Employed by the American Terra Cotta and Ceramic Company as the chief ‘modeler’ or sculptor, he worked on architectural commissions as well as on the design of artefacts. In 1907 he was appointed supervisor of the modelling department of the Northwestern
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Plate 209 The Louxor Cinema, No.
170 Boulevard Magenta, Paris, by
Ripey & Tibéri, of 1920–21. The
façade is decorated with multicoloured
mosaics. Photograph of 1983 (JSC).
45 Well-illustrated in HUMBERT (1989a), 84–5 and 120–1.
Terra Cotta Company, the largest manufacturer of terra-cotta in the country, and in that capacity was responsible for the design of the Reebie Building decorations from 1921. Albert was knowledgeable about Egyptian architecture, and seems to have carried out other Egyptianising works at 4017 North Sheridan Road (1920) and 3052 West Carroll Avenue (1926), both in Chicago. His most famous creation is the faïence cladding of the Wrigley Building, Chicago (1919–24), but this is not Egyptian in style, and was designed by Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White.
Albert was familiar with the mysteries of hieroglyphs, and his may have been the mind behind the hieroglyphs on the Reebie building which read ‘I have put protection upon your furniture and all sealed things’, ‘I have guarded all your property every day warding off devouring flames, likewise robbery’, and ‘Reebie Brothers’. It has been suggested that William Budge’s Hieroglyphic Dictionary (1920) might have been the source, and that James Henry Breasted (1865–1935), Professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, may also have been involved,46 but these matters deserve consideration in an extended monograph.
The Reebie warehouse and offices have a colourful front featuring five polychrome columns with papyrus and lotus capitals, two pharaonic figures guarding the entrance, a winged globe with uræi in the coved cornice, and Egyptianising architraves around the upper windows (Colour Plate XXXIX [a]). Inside the office is a wonderful array of polychrome Egyptianising details (Colour Plate XXXIX [b]),47 as splendid as any Egyptianising cinema of the following decade.
Now the question must be asked as to why the Egyptian Revival style was used at Reebie’s. As noted above, both the owner and the architect believed that advertising was an important consideration, and indeed a pharaonic sphinx’s head with nemes head-dress was adopted as the logo of the Company. It was intended that the building should stand out and be noticed, so it falls in one sense into the category of commercial architecture, but the attention to detail sets it apart from, and superior to, concoctions of about a century earlier such as Robinson’s Egyptian Museum in London, Foulston’s library in Devonport, or the house in Penzance. Kingsley himself regarded the Egyptianising columns as ‘salesmen’, but the Reebie clan believed the Ancient Egyptians were ‘the first moving and storage men’,48 a point emphasised in the decorative reliefs, one of which shows an Egyptian barge. The building was completed in 1922, the year in which King Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered, so the Reebies must have been
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46 The above is based on COMMISSION ON CHICAGO LANDMARKS (1999): Reebie Storage Warehouse 2325–33 N. Clark St Landmark Designation Report (Chicago, IL: City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development), to which the Author is indebted.
47 The Author owes these items to the Chicago Historical Society. 48 COMMISSION ON CHICAGO LANDMARKS (1999), 14 (see note 46 above).
delighted when that momentous event occurred, for the publicity was enormous, and Reebie’s benefited from it. The choice of style, therefore, had real commercial sense in it. There was one other factor: most warehouses where furniture was stored were grim and utilitarian, but Reebie’s looked colourful, smart, and secure, a fit repository for treasured possessions, which added to its attractions.
Reebie’s, therefore, was a pre-Tutankhamun phenomenon which gained from the discovery the year it was completed, but many other Egyptianising creations were at the very least prompted by Carter’s great excavation. Three packet-boats run by the Messageries Maritimes steamship company, for example, the Théophile Gautier, the Mariette Pacha, and the Champollion, were fitted out in 1924–26 with sumptuous interiors in the Egyptianising style to designs by Jean Lefeuvre.49 These ships were created for Mediterranean cruises: the décor was intended to provide Europeans with a flavour of their destination, and to make Egyptians feel at home while on board. The Mariette Pacha was scuttled in 1944, and the Champollion ran aground and was wrecked in 1952: they were great losses. The Théophile Gautier was broken up.
Preparations of potions and medicines are depicted in the polychrome mosaics of the Pharmacie Sarret at Clermont-Ferrand by L. Jarrier of c.1924,50
and the building is embellished with papyrus bud-capitals, cavetto cornices, and other motifs familiar from the vocabulary of Egyptiana available to designers. Many such Egyptianising architectural episodes may be found in various locations far too numerous to be recorded here: it is sufficient to note that the style was very common during the 1920s and 1930s.
So it should be emphasised that the Nile style in the twentieth century could still have its devotees, but the discovery of the beautiful treasures of Tutankhamun in 1922 encouraged a new enthusiasm comparable with Roman and early-nineteenth-century Egyptomania. The Egyptian Revival had a further catalyst in 1925 through the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industrials Modernes in Paris which stimulated the style known as Art-Déco.51 The last52 was influenced by certain elements found in Egyptianising design, notably the Piranesian stepped corbelled openings or pseudo-arches, canted arches, brightly-coloured geometrical ornament, and pyramidal compositions. There was also a powerful infusion of Mexican and Ancient Egyptian motifs: the Mexican influence was strong in the characteristic ‘Aztec Temple’ or stepped shape so popular at the time, yet this stepped form is found in the Saqqara pyramid and in Piranesi’s
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49 Illustrated in HUMBERT (1989a), 122–3. 50 Noted by the Author in Clermont-Ferrand in 1979, and illustrated in HUMBERT (1989a), 79. 51 HILLIER (1968) and DUNCAN (1988), and BENTON, BENTON, and WOOD (Eds) (2003). 52 HILLIER and ESCRITT (1997).
Diverse Maniere.53 After all, stage-designs for Die Zauberflöte, Bullock’s Egyptian Halls in Piccadilly, Thomas Hope’s Lararium in Duchess Street, and the Egyptian House in Penzance all exploited the characteristic post- Piranesian Egyptianising stepped-arch opening. So, although Aztec temples were set on stepped pyramidal bases (and the battered-wall form was also employed), stepped pyramids were known in Ancient Egypt and in the Hellenistic world, and the stepped shape was a staple motif in European and American Egyptianising design. Stepped forms can be found on countless designs of the 1920s and 1930s, notably in the work of Ferdinand Preiss (1882–1943), whose onyx clocks were sometimes themselves stepped, and often had stepped faces. Demêtre Chiparus (1888–1950), who exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français between 1914 and 1928, frequently favoured the stepped Egyptianising or ‘Aztec’ base, and modelled a number of nude semi-Egyptianising figures, although it has to be admitted his work verges perilously near the Kitsch on occasion.
Adelaide House, London Bridge (1921–5), by Sir John James Burnet (1857–1938), Thomas Smith Tait (1882–1954), and D. Raeside, was one of the first large post-Great-War buildings in London to be consciously modelled on a monumental Egyptianising style. As Vernon Blake pointed out in The Architectural Review when Adelaide House was nearing completion, English architects were attacking the problem of future building formulæ contemporaneously with their brethren on the Continent and the two Americas. Blake noted that modern designers had to face the problem of finding a new style at one with the æsthetic of the near future. He found the river-front ‘distinctly Egyptian’ (it is, in fact, really a pylon- form engaged with the wall behind [Plate 210]), and noted a just balance in the use of simplicity in alliance with concave elements of Egyptian architecture. The main entrance from London Bridge (Plate 210) was mausoleum-like, almost crushed by the apparent weight above, and the Order used was a kind of primitive Doric. Once again, the Egyptian starkness and the bold, simple lines of the building were regarded in the 1920s as modern and forward-looking, just as the architects of the eighteenth century, who used blocky, Egyptianising forms, were regarded at the time as very advanced. At Adelaide House there are lines of square mullion-columns that recall Schinkel’s and Thomson’s work, whilst the short stumpy piers under the curving cornice are reminiscent of some of Thomson’s motifs in Glasgow (which is hardly surprising since the distinguished Scottish firm responsible for Adelaide House had strong Glaswegian connections), and have echoes of the Chicago School.
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53 PIRANESI (1769).
Thomas S. Tait was also consultant for the Daily Telegraph building at Nos 135–41 Fleet Street, London, of 1928–31, designed by Charles Ernest Elcock (1878–1944)54 of the architectural firm of Elcock & Sutcliffe. This is another remarkable instance in which Græco-Egyptian elements fuse in a new synthesis. The much-praised Daily Express building (1929–33), almost next door at Nos 120–9, by Herbert Owen Ellis (1857–1940) and William Lee Clarke (1878–1956) in collaboration with Sir Evan Owen Williams (1890–1969 – who was mostly responsible for the job from 1930), is supposed to be a key modern building,55 but its entrance-hall (1932) was a sensational, shining Expressionist Art-Déco work, with a cascade-like motif
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Plate 210 Adelaide House, London Bridge, of 1924–5 (JSC).
54 The Belfast-born and trained Elcock had been assistant to Burnet 1901–5. 55 It is reckoned to be the first instance of a building in London clad with a curtain-wall.
in the centre of the ceiling, designed by Robert Atkinson (1883–1952), that recalls the palm-columns of the South Drawing-Room at the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, the palm-capitals of Edfu, and the ‘restoration’ (1799) of an Egyptian temple by Louis-François Cassas (1756–1827). This fine interior is always ignored by the admirers of curtain-wall claddings.
The most spectacular of all London’s Egyptian Revival architecture of the 1920s was the Carreras Building on Hampstead Road, backing on to Mornington Crescent, completed in 1928. The Builder described it as a novel essay in architectural design, constructed entirely in reinforced concrete, and decorated in brilliant colours in the Egyptian style. Those colours found a suitable background in the rendering of white cement and sand applied to the concrete surfaces, whilst the colours themselves were made of cement mixed with ground glass.56 Architects were Marcus Evelyn & O. H. Collins,57 while Arthur George Porri (c.1877–1962) prepared the plans and a Classical elevation. Collins submitted an Egyptian elevation which was accepted and adapted to suit Porri’s plans. The choice of the Egyptian style was deliberately commercial, associated with the excitement generated by the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, with the fashion for Egyptian artefacts encouraged by Hollywood spectaculars, and with the Black Cat trade-mark of the firm of Carreras: indeed, the original intention, according to drawings by A. G. Porri & Partners, was to call the building Bast House, after the cat-goddess of Bubastis, but the somewhat unfortunate possibilities suggested in English by the name ensured that the structure became known as the Arcadia Works Building (Plate 211). The Board-Room was originally painted with Egyptianising motifs in rich, glowing colours. Unfortunately, Pugin’s legacy was deadly, and Pevsner and other critics rounded on the building in due course: in 1961 (to appease vociferous critics) the columns were squared up and cased in, and the brilliant Egyptianising decorations were obliterated, but in 1998–9 a partial restoration took place (Colour Plate XL).
Porri was also involved in the design of another Egyptianising building – Museum (later Britannia) House, 231–232 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, designed by Hobden & Porri of Finsbury Square: plans are dated March, 1927 – in which year the architects applied for ‘means-of-escape’ approval.58
The building has a handsome Egyptianising façade, complete with cavetto cornices and winged globes, and was to be let in floors for offices and
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56 The Builder, cxxxv/4476 (16 November 1928), 799, and information provided by Mr T. Dimmick of the Archives Collection of Carreras Rothmans. Mr L. A. Porri, of A. G. Porri & Partners, was also most helpful regarding this building, and has the Author’s thanks.
57 M. E. Collins (1861–1944) worked briefly in Frankfurt-am-Main (1880–1), and travelled in Egypt, and elsewhere, before joining his father, Hyman Henry Collins (1833–1905), in practice in London.
58 On behalf of Museum Estates Ltd, of 6 Coptic Street.
showrooms. By June 1929 Hobden and Porri had completed the designs of the internal partitions and finishes.59
A fashion for Egyptiana ensured that countless Egyptianising objects were designed and marketed: some English furniture was faced with embossed coloured leather featuring Egyptianising figures, hieroglyphs, winged globes, and the like; Bichara produced obelisk-shaped perfume- bottles ornamented with hieroglyphs and made of acid-etched crystal, while the cardboard case in which the bottle was sold was also an obelisk ornamented with Egyptianising motifs;60 Huntley & Palmer, the biscuit manufacturers, produced decorated-metal Egyptianising tins in the shape of vases in 1924; jewel-boxes embellished with Egyptianising themes were popular c.1925; and Singer, the sewing-machine makers, had used Egyptianising transfers on some of their models since c.1912.61 Exotic coloured Egyptianising façades were erected, encouraged by Cook’s Tours
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Plate 211 Arcadia Works Building of Carreras Ltd, between Hampstead Road and Mornington
Crescent, London, by M. E. & O. H. Collins, with A. G. Porri, of A. G. Porri & Partners,
as consultant, of 1927–28, a spectacular example of the Egyptian Revival of the 1920s,
photographed shortly after it was completed (Archives Collection of Carreras Rothmans Ltd
– Photograph by Stewart Bale Ltd).
59 Information kindly provided by Mr L. A. Porri and Mr Peter Bezodis. 60 Catalogue of the Egyptomania Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1979. See also
LORING (1979), 114–21. 61 Model 15 K 71, for example.
in Egypt, Tutankhamun, and the fashion for Art-Déco, and often associated with ‘Oriental’ themes. Coffee, for example, was certainly exotic and eastern, and so can be found in Bewley’s Oriental Café at 78–79 Grafton Street, Dublin, where the colourful façade, complete with crowning cavetto cornice and winged solar globe and uræi, is indubitably Egyptianesque. Such a widespread familiarity with Egyptianising themes, and their association with exotica and luxury, would encourage Egyptianising tendencies in restaurants and hotels: one of the finest examples was in the Strand Palace Hotel foyer of 1930, designed by Oliver Percy Bernard (1881–1939), in which the stepped motif, diagonal canted forms, and Art- Déco mix in a heady brew (Plate 212).
As has been mentioned above, Egyptianising design was encouraged by theatrical performances and staging. Die Zauberflöte and Aïda are two clear and obvious examples, but Thaïs by Jules-Émile-Frédéric Massenet (1842–1912), given at the Paris Opéra in 1894, and Sarah Bernhardt’s (1844–1923) Cléopâtre (1890) undoubtedly also had their effects, as did Isis: New Egyptian Mystery at the Théâtre Robert Houdin in Paris in 1893. Theda Bara (1890–1955) and Helen Gardner (c.1885–1968) wore Egyptian costumes in films in the second decade of the twentieth century, but Cecil B. De Mille’s (1881–1959) spectacular The Ten Commandments of 1923
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Plate 212 The foyer of the Strand Palace Hotel of 1929–30 by Oliver Percy Bernard
(1881–1939). The Piranesian stepped motif recurs in the illuminated balustrade of the stair,
while the canted arch also recurs in the glazed shop-front behind (V & A No. GX1637).
actually pre-empts the Art-Déco style by mixing Egyptianising elements in a very rich visual feast. Other films, directly inspired by the Tutankhamun discoveries, appeared in the 1920s, including Die Sklavenkönigin (The Slave Queen) (1925), followed by the horror-film of 1932 (The Mummy), and then the superb Cleopatra of 1934 by Cecil B. De Mille, starring Claudette Colbert (1903–96).62
Egyptianising cinemas have already been mentioned, including the Louxor in Paris, but others followed in the wake of the Tutankhamun discoveries. One of the first in England was the Kensington Cinema, Kensington High Street, by Davis, Granger, and Leathart for Joseph T. Mears Theaters (opened 1926): the exterior had two set-back pylons, and reflected, to some extent, the style of Adelaide House. The Architectural Review considered the façade to be a ‘great block . . ., solid and arresting as the front of an Egyptian temple’, and praised its ‘strength and massiveness’ and the ‘spreading granite podium’.63 Charles Nicholas (fl.1892–1926) and John Edward Dixon-Spain (1878–1955) designed the New Gallery Kinema, Regent Street, another Egyptianising essay with painted figure- friezes by Gertrude Halsey,64 while the Carlton, Green Street, Upton Park, Essex (1929), by George Coles (1884–1963), had an Egyptianising entrance-façade in the form of a wide pylon-like front, with a cobra-frieze surmounted by a winged globe, and two columns with palm-capitals set in antis (Plate 213).65 The Carlton was built for Clavering & Rose Theatres, who seem to have favoured the Egyptianising style, for George Coles was again the architect for the same firm’s Carlton, Essex Road, Islington, of
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Plate 213 The Carlton Cinema,
Green Street, Upton Park, Essex
(1929) by George Coles (Drawing by
Richard Hamilton Gray, Cinema
Theatre Association).
62 See HUMBERT (1989a), 288–307. 63 See ATWELL (1981), 57–8. 64 The Builder, cxxix/4300 (3 July 1925), 2–5. 65 Information from Mr Richard Gray, Archivist of the Cinema Theatre Association, and Mr David Atwell.
1929–30 (Plate 214), with its handsome polychrome faïence façade.66
There were other fine faïence façades across the Atlantic, too, including the Egyptian Theater at De Kalb, Illinois (1929), by E. F. Behrens.
John Stanley Coombe Beard (1890–1970) also designed several theatres influenced by the Egyptian style, one of his best being the Luxor, Cross Deep, Twickenham,67 where the Egyptianising themes were carried within the auditorium, and the façade was a mixture of Egyptianising and Art-Déco motifs. At Sale, Cheshire, the Pyramid cinema was completed in 1930 to designs by Drury and Gomershall of Manchester,68 and had one of the more distinguished Egyptianising façades, while the interior was Egyptianising Art-Déco, with a superb organ in the Egyptian Revival style. Manchester itself could boast the Riviera cinema, with an Egyptianising front and lotus-bud capitals. Mr Atwell considers the Carlton, Essex Road, London, to be ‘a far more assured exercise in the idiom than any of its three other Egyptian rivals in England’.69
Perhaps one of the finest of the large British cinemas with an Egyptianising flavour was the Astoria at Streatham, built by Griggs & Son to designs by Edward Albert Stone (born 1880) for the Astoria Theatre Company, and opened on 30 June 1930. Interior decoration was by Marc- Henri & Laverdet. The foyer had a semi-vaulted ceiling and an elaborate plaster open frieze supported by square piers with lotus-capitals: walls were red, and the frieze was picked out in green, gold, and black. The Bioscope
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66 As note 65 above. In a letter to the Author of 14 June 1979 Mr Gray opined that the Carlton was probably the most successful of the Egyptianising cinema façades. See ATWELL (1981), 96.
67 For Rialto (Twickenham) Ltd, built by Minter & Co, and opened on 18 November 1929. 68 ATWELL (1981), 96. 69 Ibid.
Plate 214 The Carlton Cinema,
Essex Road, Islington, London, by
George Coles, 1929–30. The façade is
clad in cream faïence with vermilion,
green, blue, and yellow embellishments.
It has come down in the world.
Photograph of 1973 (GLPL No.
73/2542).
reported that in no theatre in London could there be found ‘such unique decoration as that designed for the ladies’ rest-room at the Streatham Astoria’ with its ‘coloured relief mural decoration of an Egyptian female figure, bathing in a lotus-filled pool’, forming the background of a ‘specially designed lounge-settee’. The auditorium had a ‘daring Egyptian decorative scheme in which the brilliant colourings of that country’ were introduced, including ‘pure vermilion’ with mouldings and embellishments of black and gold. Flanking walls of the balcony were divided into panels acting as the bases for two of the ‘most remarkable mural decorations ever introduced into a theatre’, and depicting a ‘distinct tableau’ from Ancient Egyptian his- tory in vivid colours.70 Indeed, the effects of the use of Egyptianising motifs seem to have been extraordinarily rich: The Bioscope described the decora- tive scheme as ‘brilliant, and bizarre’, an interesting use of the terms in the light of Piranesi’s comments in the eighteenth century. The ‘modernistic’ streamlined manner of cinema-design in the 1930s was often not guiltless of Egyptianising tendencies: at the Odeon, Woolwich, for example, the lamp- posts by the yard entrance had simplified and slender palm-shafts derived from Græco-Egyptian prototypes (Plate 215). This ‘modernistic’ stream- lined style mixed with Art-Déco and Egyptianising elements was particularly favoured for the lavish temples of popular entertainment, and for inexpensive but good-quality hotels such as the Strand Palace (Plate 212).
At the corner of Argyll Street and Great Marlborough Street, London (near Oxford Circus Underground Station), stands Palladium (formerly Ideal) House (1929), designed by the American architect Raymond Mathewson Hood (1881–1934 – who is more famous for the Chicago Tribune tower, Chicago, IL [1922–5], designed with John Mead Howells [1868–1959]), in collaboration with Stanley Gordon Jeeves (c.1888–1964). It is faced with black polished Swedish granite, with cast-bronze frames (gilded and enamelled with yellow, gold, orange, green, and red) around some of the window- and door-openings, and the crowning-cornice, frieze, and attic-cornice are of American green granite, with enamelled gilded cast-bronze enrichments coloured yellow, red, and green. Gilding, furthermore, was of twenty-two-carat English gold-leaf, so the overall effect of the building was (and is) exceedingly rich, in the manner of the lushly floral and Egyptianising motifs of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925 (Plate 216). Ideal House attracted a great deal of attention, and was reviewed by Arthur Trystan Edwards (1885–1973) as ‘The Moor of Argyll Street’ in The Architectural Review:71 he was critical of the building of unrelated structures in established streets, and
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70 The Bioscope (18 June 1930), and information kindly provided by Mr Richard Gray (see Note 65). 71 A. TRYSTAN EDWARDS (1929): ‘The Clash of Colour or the Moor of Argyll Street’, in The
Architectural Review (June), 289–99. See BENTON, BENTON, and WOOD (Eds) (2003).
mentioned the commercial flavour of the design in his review. Entrances and ground-floor openings of this interesting building have been maltreated in recent years and disfigured by inappropriate signs. However, in the gilded enamelled bronze enrichments we can find echoes of Pueblo pottery design from New Mexico; Aztec art; Art-Déco motifs; volute ornaments from Ancient Egyptian wall-paintings and from tombs and vase-painting in
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Plate 215 Detail of a lamp-standard from the
Odeon Cinema at Woolwich, London, with
Egyptianising ornament in faïence. Photograph of
1973 (GLPL No. 73/11290).
Plate 216 Ideal (later Palladium) House at the
corner of Argyle Street and Great Marlborough
Street, by Raymond Hood and Gordon Jeeves,
1929. Photograph of 1980 (JSC).
Cyprus; and Egyptian lotiform decorations. Also obvious are the stepped corbelled openings above doors which, as we have seen, are derived from Piranesi’s Diverse Maniere, and recur throughout more than two centuries where Egyptianising design was attempted. The building was one of the most sophisticated of Art-Déco-Egyptianising works of architecture in the British Isles: it is a pity it has not been much appreciated.
Factories, too, often had Egyptianising motifs mixed with Art-Déco themes: a good example is the Hoover Factory by Wallis, Gilbert, & Partners72 of 1931–32 on Western Avenue, London (Plate 217).73 In this extraordinarily fine building influences from Ancient Egypt, from the 1925 Paris Exposition, from eighteenth-century visions of underground vaulting with funereal loculi, from Piranesi’s Diverse Maniere, and from Cubist experiments can be detected in a marvellous synthesis of elements fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s. The whole main front has battered sides recalling the temples at Dendera and elsewhere, and the gate-posts were battered too, like pylons.
Wallis, Gilbert, & Partners were also responsible for the Firestone Factory, Western Avenue, London, of 1928–29, which had a fine Egyptianising-Art-Déco centrepiece embellished with decorative ceramic
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72 Thomas Wallis (1873–1953) founded the firm in 1914. The identity of ‘Gilbert’ has never been established, but later Douglas T. Wallis (1901–68) and J. W. McGregor became partners in the firm.
73 HITCHMOUGH (1992), describes and illustrates this building in detail.
Plate 217 Former Hoover Factory by Wallis, Gilbert, & Partners, on Western Avenue,
London, of 1931–32. The long front with battered sides is a version of an Egyptian temple-front,
whilst loculi-like openings are recalled in the windows of the towers (which also sport a tall
window with head composed of the chamfered or canted pseudo-arch). The Piranesian stepped
motif also recurs in the centrepiece. Photograph of 1980 (JSC).
tiles – this excellent building was hurriedly demolished in 1980 to pre-empt its long-overdue Listing. Thomas Wallis was a distinguished Neo-Classical architect who became interested in the possibilities of using Egyptianising elements in his designs to create monumental buildings: he exploited the decorative properties of faïence to make colourful façades, and his work unquestionably was in the first rank of distinguished inter-war architecture. It is tragic that recognition of his designs as part of a continuous Egyptianising Neo-Classical tradition has been so delayed, and most unfortunate that Pevsner damned his work in unequivocal terms. A growing interest in the architecture and art of the 1920s and 1930s will no doubt help to put this recurring influence of Egyptianising motifs into perspective, and not before time, for critics have far too often taken their cue from Pugin (and later from Pevsner) and have castigated Egyptianisms, looking upon them as some kind of immoral aberration. For example, the Carreras factory (Plate 211) was described as ‘abominable’,74 while work by the distinguished firm of Wallis, Gilbert, & Partners was denounced as ‘offensive’,75 quite obviously because these buildings did not help to promote the Pevsnerian Modern Movement myth. ‘Factories’, we are told in Pevsner’s volume on Middlesex, ‘are on the whole atrociously bad, Modernism at its showiest and silliest’.76 The damage done by remarks such as these, like those dished out by Pugin, can stick. Official approval, reflected in the ‘Listings’ of buildings of architectural or historical interest, has been slow in coming to those damned by critics such as Pevsner, which reflects badly on any supposed independence of æsthetic judgement among those responsible. The Carreras building was stripped of its glorious colourful Egyptianising elements between 1961 and 1998, and the Firestone Factory has been destroyed. It is odd that Pevsner, who almost worshipped Gropius, does not seem to have connected the latter’s building for the Werkbundausstellung at Köln in 1914 with the temple of Horus at Edfu, for the similarities are rather obvious.77
Thomas Wallis, Wendy Hitchmough tells us, ‘invented his own Egyptian style, borrowing a little from Owen Jones, a little from archæological records and published documentation, evolving and refining motifs in a water-colour sketch-book of patterns and mouldings’.78 Quite so, but, as the present writer has shown, other elements, from a wide variety of sources, provided precedents for this marvellously eclectic design. Not least of those sources were Neo-Classical esquisses of the late-eighteenth
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74 NIKOLAUS PEVSNER (1952): London Except the Cities of London and Westminster (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd), 371.
75 NIKOLAUS PEVSNER (1951): Middlesex (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd), 130. 76 Ibid., 21. Pevsner’s schema was accepted wholesale, almost without demur. 77 PEHNT (1987), 154. 78 HITCHMOUGH (1992), no pagination, but opposite plate 14.
century, Piranesian originals, such as some of those in the Diverse Maniere (e.g. the canted forms), Ancient Egyptian battered fronts, and the strong colouring of Ancient Egyptian work as revealed by people such as Roberts and Lepsius.
Later Developments
Many admired the ‘primitive’ vernacular architecture of Egypt as well, notably houses in Karnak, with their battered walls, flat roofs, and simplified openings. The distinguished German art-historian, Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), in his Ägyptische Kunst, Probleme ihrer Wertung (1927),79 drew attention to the resemblance of modern buildings such as grain- and cement-silos to Ancient Egyptian hypostyle halls, with their massive and closely-spaced columns, while some of the tendencies seen in architecture influenced by Cubism also had Egyptianising aspects.
In his Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie,80 he took as his starting-point the idea that a work of art can enhance human capacities for empathy, and that a perception of beauty derives from being able to identify with an object. He argued that the highly stylised and conservative character of Ancient Egyptian art did not mean its practitioners were incompetent or incapable of recording reality with any accuracy, but because it satisfied deep psychological needs. He proposed that, in periods of anxiety and uncertainty, mankind seeks to abstract objects, transforming them into permanent, absolute, transcendental forms. Thus the fear and alienation experienced in a period of rapid social change and industrialisation, the perception that individualism was being threatened by hostile collectivism, and the experience of the disaster of 1914–18, might be seen as rekindling the ancient need for abstract forms to counteract that alienation.81
Now Worringer was influenced by the writings of Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), who emphasised the notion that æsthetic pleasure is derived from empathy, and that if an empathy required by an object can be felt by an individual without opposition or reservation, then the object will be perceived as beautiful by that person. He was also affected by the ideas of Alois Riegl (1858–1905), who objected to the opinion that good design was the result of functional requirements, the properties of materials, and techniques. For example, Riegl saw the evolution of the acanthus-leaf in
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79 Egyptian Art, Problems of Evaluation, published in Munich. 80 First published as a thesis in Neuwied, 1907, it came out in book form in 1908, and has rarely been out
of print since. The title means Abstraction and Empathy: a Contribution to the Psychology of Style. 81 TURNER (Ed.) (1996), xxxiii, 384.
Antique decoration not as a progress towards naturalism but as a striving towards the perfection of formal design. Riegl took the art of Ancient Egypt as his paradigm, and this was noted and further developed by Worringer.82
Is it not precisely this feeling of empathy and familiarity that caused apologists for the Modern Movement (who desired a tabula rasa and the destruction of history) so much trouble? An exaggerated hatred of Historicism should arouse suspicions. Why, for example, did Pevsner, who unquestionably made a great contribution to the early history of the Egyptian Revival, detest those Egyptian-inspired buildings of the 1920s and 1930s about which he was so scathing, and of that fact there can be no doubt? Without wishing to be dogmatic, it could perhaps be that the uncomfortable presence of a lively and popular architectural style did not aid Pevsner’s attempts to propose a seamless and logical progression from selected architecture of the nineteenth century to the International Style of the twentieth, a style which, though almost universally adopted, has not been greatly successful in attracting devotees outside the world of architecture, has often been appallingly shoddy and unpleasant for both users and beholders, and has not even been ‘functional’ in any sense whatsoever. Most of all, it failed in that it did not inspire affection: it did not rise to the empathy test any more than did musique concrète or the more extreme forms of atonalism.
From the perspective of the early twenty-first century it does seem that there was a more-or-less uninterrupted fascination with Ancient Egyptian art and architecture from Hellenistic times, especially during the Roman Empire, the Italian and French Renaissance, the eighteenth cen- tury (especially in the Europe of the Enlightenment), virtually all the way through the nineteenth century (especially during the first three decades, and in various bursts of enthusiasm thereafter), and at times during the twentieth century, notably immediately after the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, when Egyptianisms merged with Aztec design and other trends to produce what became known as the Modernistic style (as in the Hoover Building, Western Avenue, London), especially after the celebrated Exposition International des Arts-Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1924–5. There have been subsequent Egyptianising spasms since the 1939–45 war, notably in the 1980s and 1990s, and it remains to be seen if the huge exhibition of 2002–3 at the Royal Academy83 in London deal- ing with the Aztecs will have any effect on subsequent revivals.
Pevsner’s detestation of an inter-war Egyptianising style begins to look like wilful myopia, for there were commentators who spotted that
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82 See WILHELM WORRINGER (1927): Ägyptische Kunst. Probleme ihrer Wertung, published in Munich. 83 16 November 2002–11 April 2003.
Egyptianisms were certainly alive and well, even when the International Modern Movement was supposed to be sweeping all before it. Werner Manfred Maria Ellis Hegemann (1881–1936), for example, saw Egyp- tianisms emerging in the Bauhaus in Weimar in the period 1919–23.84 Frank Lloyd Wright’s hypostyle office-hall for the Johnson Wax Company in Racine, Wisconsin (1936–39), certainly suggests a thinner kind of Egyptianesque column and capital, but the Egyptian roots are there. Overt Egyptianisms, such as battered walls and the Schinkel-Hatshepsut-Thrasyllus mullion-columns, were found in early work by Wilhelm Kreis (1873–1955), but the latter’s series of projects for massive memorials to the success of German arms also drew on Ancient Egypt, on Neo-Classical France (notably the work of Boullée and Ledoux), on Piranesi, on Gilly, and on stereomet- rically pure forms.85 Elements from Schinkel with an Egyptian ancestry were quoted by Albert Speer (1905–81) in many of his projects of the 1940s, and Marcel Breuer (1902–81), in his project for the church of St Francis de Sales, Muskegon, Michigan (1961–67), used stark, battered, Egyptianising forms.86
Spain also remained faithful to Egyptiana during the twentieth century. Dr Saguar Quer87 has chronicled numerous nineteenth-century designs for the theatre; for tombs and monuments; for the exotic Pastelería, ‘La Flor de Almíbar’ in Zaragoza (1888–1900), designed by Ricardo Magdalena (it included a splendid Egyptianising room); and much else, including a motor-car of 1908 decorated with Egyptianising motifs designed by José Vilaseca y Casanovas for D. José Carreras,88 which veers dangerously close to what might be described as High Camp.
However, Spain is relatively rich in Egyptian Revival material, both realised and unrealised. There is some vigorous Egyptianising detail on the Palacio de Comunicaciones in Madrid (1904–17),89 and much else to delight the eye in the Spanish capital. Luis Moya Blanco designed a spooky Cestius-proportioned pyramid (on a gigantic monumental scale), the faces of which were perforated with semi-circular headed loculi, for his unrealised Sueño arquitectónico para una exaltación nacional (1937). However, at the celebrated Valle de los Caídos, the realised entrance to the monastery (1940) consisted of a blocky mass with coved cornice flanked by two unperforated pylon-towers between which is a somewhat incongruous semi-circular headed entrance. Designed by Pedro Muguruza Otaño, it is a powerful work of the Egyptian Revival designed and built in the early Franco period.
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84 WERNER HEGEMANN (1924): ‘Weimarer Bauhaus und ägyptische Baukunst’, in Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, Jg. 8/3–4, 86.
85 PEHNT (1987), 159. 86 Ibid. 87 SAGUAR QUER (1997). 88 Ibid., 406. 89 Ibid., 405.
A taste for monumental hugeness in which Egyptianisms were given free rein can be found in projects for a Temple of Sorrow (1912) by Teodoro Anasagasti y Algán and in the Monument to Civilisation (or the Victory of the Idea over Nature) of 1919 by Casto Fernández-Shaw e Iturralde (1896–1978).90 More recently, the Egyptian Revival recurs in a zoological context with the Aquarium of Madrid Zoo, a massive square battered building surmounted by a pyramid, the whole inaugurated in 1995 and designed by Carlos Baldrich Boxó and José Luis Domínguez Blas.
Of course popular entertainment helped to keep Egyptianising artefacts and forms before the public. Vivien Leigh (1913–67) played Cleopatra in 1945, and there were sundry films, including the spectacular Ten Commandments (Cecil B. De Mille again, this time in 1956), the Curse of the Pharaohs (Terence Fisher, 1959), several horror-films featuring tombs, mummies, and so on, and the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963).91 There were other films featuring ‘artists’ as diverse as Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Astérix coming into contact with sphinxes, mummies, and Cleopatra, whilst films such as Cleopatra Queen of Sex (1972) doubtless helped the image of the Egyptianising style as exotic, erotic, and luxurious to remain firmly established in the mind of the public. Some films made for television in the 1980s returned to Tutankhamun’s Curse and other well-trodden paths.92
Now the Cleopatra films with Colbert and Taylor ensured further survival and revival of aspects of the Nile style, while the huge success of the exhibition of treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamun that came to London and New York in the 1970s caused its own revival of interest in things Egyptian. Not only were there catalogues and books illustrating and describing the ‘unearthed royal treasure’, but manufacturers once more rose to the occasion and produced Egyptianising objects in much the same way as they did in the 1920s. The Boehm Studio made a collection of the treasures in porcelain, and Wedgwood (which had been in the forefront of making attractive Egyptianising pieces from the eighteenth century) brought out a replica of the mask of the pharaoh in gilt porcelain. Trinkets, items of clothing, ties, diaries, ear-rings, brooches, rings, and books decorated with the motifs from Tutankhamun’s tomb were produced in large quantities. Even a ‘pop’-song called Tutankhamun was released in the 1970s, and the present writer recalls seeing a juke-box in a bar in Germany called the ‘Tutankhamun’ model. Camel-, pyramid-, and Tutankhamun- mask-stickers appeared on the backs of cars. Egyptomania was certainly not
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90 SAGUAR QUER (1997), 402–3. 91 HUMBERT (1989a), 286–307. 92 See, for example, LUC DELVAUX: ‘Les “Aventures de Papyrus” de Lucien De Gieter: approche
égyptologique d’une bande dessinée’, in HUMBERT (Ed.) (1996), 609–24.
dead even then. Richard Knapple produced an Egyptian Room, with furniture of hand-carved and painted wood for Bloomingdale’s in 1977: columns had painted bell-capitals with lotus-flower decoration, and the cavetto cornice was embellished with lotus and papyrus. Ptolemy Designs of New York advertised (1978) a magnificent Egyptian throne-chair of hand-carved wood, gilded and painted, based on Tutankhamun’s throne, and in the same year Boehm Studio, New Jersey, brought out a pair of falcon emblems of painted porcelain, while Wedgwood issued a limited edition of their Canopic vase from a mould of 1800, of terracotta on black Jasper-ware, and marketed a smaller edition of a sphinx couchant also in terracotta on black Jasper-ware. Philip Graf Wallpapers of New York marketed a wallpaper called ‘Nile Odyssey’ to designs by Bob Mazzini on which lotus-flowers and other Nilotic motifs flourish.
There were other Egyptianisms too: Charles de Beistegui erected a Ledouxesque pyramid of brick with stone dressings on his estate at Groussay in 1960–70, and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera produced Die Zauberflöte in 1978 with designs by David Hockney (Plate 218). In 1977–84 James Stirling, Michael Wilford, and Associates built the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart
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Plate 218 Design by David Hockney (born 1937) for the 1978 production of Die
Zauberflöte for the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Glyndebourne, Lewes, Sussex. The form of
the chamfered or canted arch, a favourite Art-Déco motif, derives from the Piranesian
interpretation of the Egyptian style (GG, No. 0968.15).
which employs a spectacular Egyptian coved cornice,93 whilst in the circular court in the centre is a primitivist interpretation of a Greek Doric distyle arrangement supporting a tough ornamented lintel, reminiscent of Ehrensvärd’s Karlskrona Dockyard. At Wadsworth, Illinois, Jim Onan built himself a dwelling in the form of a gilded pyramid set on an artificial lake, begun in 1977, complete with an alley of seventy-five sphinxes, and a lavishly Egyptianising interior.94 Onan seems to have been inspired by the décor of such spectacular films as The Ten Commandments, but the attractions of the purity of form, strong colours, and the easily recognisable character of Ancient Egyptian architecture played their parts in his choice of style. Certainly his house was conceived on the grandest scale. Ieoh Ming Pei (born 1917) created his metal-and-glass Pyramide in front of the Louvre in Paris (1984–89), and Gérard Chamaillou designed (1985) a floating ‘Hâpitrône’ consisting of a pyramid of open metalwork with a solid white pyramid inside the structure.95 Also in Paris Gai Aulenti (b. 1927) incorporated elements reminiscent of Egyptianising forms in the Musée d’Orsay, while Charles Alexander Jencks (b. 1939) has experimented with Egyptianisms in London.
It is interesting that the Egyptian Revival has survived in the United States of America to a degree unknown elsewhere. Mention has been made of the wondrous Reebie offices and warehouse in Chicago, but there were other manifestations of the style in the twentieth century. Among these may be mentioned the house at Wesley Hills in the State of New York of 1915 by Walter Robb Wilder, with a wide glazed front set behind a colonnade with bud-capitals and held between two pylon-towers. Mercifully, this astonishing but little-known house was rescued and restored in 1984.96
California has its fair share of Egyptianising architecture including the scholarly, stark, and severe Rosicrucian Temple at San José; a much- mutilated electric sub-station and tramway station at San Diego (by E. M. Hoffmann, of 1923–4),97 now a garage;98 the Egyptian Court Apartments also in San Diego (1926) at Park Boulevard; Pharaoh’s Court Apartments (which incorporate details similar to those of Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood), again in San Diego; and an Egyptianising house (1926) which incorporates the stepped corbelled opening that derives from Piranesian images.99
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93 PEHNT (1987), 159, also picks this up. 94 See HUMBERT (1989a), passim. 95 Ibid., 89. 96 RICHARD A. FAZZINI: ‘L’Égyptomanie dans l’architecture américaine’, in HUMBERT (Ed.) (1996),
229–78. 97 The Evening Tribune of San Diego, CA (1 July 1924). 98 FAZZINI (1996), 268. See note 96 above. 99 Ibid., 271.
Thomas White Lamb (1871–1942), best-known as a designer of theatrical sets, conceived a superb Egyptianising architectural ensemble for the Pythian Temple, New York (1927), and the Detroit, MI, Zoo acquired bucolic Egyptianising details for its hippopotamus and giraffe houses (c.1932), possibly for the associations with the Nile. More recently, the Memphis, TN, Zoo and Aquarium (1990–1), gained an entrance in the Egyptian style. Curiously, unlike its European predecessors at Antwerp and Berlin Zoos, the Detroit examples revert to pseudo-hieroglyphs, proving, as Fazzini has noted, that exact archaeological attention to detail is not necessarily a fundamental preoccupation of Egyptomania.100
Memphis now possesses the Great American Pyramid, 88 metres high, inaugurated in 1991, and Las Vegas obtained another huge pyramid, the Luxor Hotel-Casino, which opened in 1993: at the entrance is a huge sphinx and obelisk, and inside the décor is Egyptianising (in the Casino there is even a reproduction of a painting by David Roberts on the wall).
Now of course there is quite a lot of Professor Carrott’s ‘Commercial Picturesque’ about these ventures, but, unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, the Memphis and Las Vegas pyramids are vast, so they probably lurch towards what might be described as a ‘Commercial Sublime’ category. It is interesting that the Mellon Bank Center, Philadelphia, PA (1990),101 has a curved cornice atop battered pylon-forms, and the entire skyscraper is surmounted by a pyramid. It was designed by KPF (the New York architectural partnership of A. Eugene Kohn [b. 1930], William Pederson [b. 1938], and Sheldon Fox [b. 1930]).
Epilogue
At the very end of the twentieth century was completed at Canary Wharf, Isle of Dogs, London, the extraordinary Four Seasons hotel. It is Egyptianising with battered white walls and a huge gorge-cornice, and was completed in 2000 under the direction of the British architects RHWL (Renton Howard Wood & Levin). However, the original design emanated from the French architect, Philippe Starck (b. 1949).102
Now that Post-Modernism, especially Post-Modern Classicism, is no longer fashionable, and many designers (especially in America) are adopting a more discriminating approach to eclecticism, historical references might
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100 FAZZINI (!996), 248. See note 96 above. 101 In Philadelphia also stands John Haviland’s Egyptianising Pennsylvania Fire Insurance Company’s façade of
1838, sympathetically enlarged in 1901. See CARROTT (1961). Professor Carrott suggested that the Egyptian style suggested ‘a feeling of solid, enduring, dependability’ suitable for the offices of an insurance company.
102 Information kindly provided by RHWL of London and the RIBA.
seem to offer a wide range from which to select motifs that can be freely interpreted. Cornices of the Egyptian type, massive colonnades of the Hatshepsut kind at Deïr-el-Bahari, and battered walls and doorcases are motifs in designs of the 1980s and 1990s that recur. Revivals of Egyptian forms have enjoyed a remarkably long life: in 1981, for example, the Nile Valley style in dress was promoted by leading fashion designers; while at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in London there was even exhibited a pencil drawing for a new obelisk for Harlow, Essex by the Modernist firm of Sir Frederick Gibberd & Partners.103 Cotton-squares for sale in a shop in Fiesole in 1980 had Egyptianising motifs in the border- friezes coloured brown, white, red, blue, and green. The graphic-designer, Theodore Menten, produced a number of stencil-patterns based on Ancient Egyptian painted decorations for use in interior décor, and many artists and craftsmen incorporated Egyptianisms in fashion, jewellery, fabrics, needle-work, wallpapers, and objets d’art during the 1980s and early 1990s. The inspiration lies in Antiquity, in the great richness of late- eighteenth-century and Napoleonic design, in the examples of Ancient Egyptian artefacts found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, in a growing appreciation of the Art-Déco styles of the 1920s,104 and in a realisation of the wide palette of Egyptian-inspired objects produced from the 1930s.
It is also quite clear that the potency of Ancient Egyptian design as an inspiration for the following centuries remains undiminished as the twenty- first century moves through its first decade.105
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103 No. 1363 in the Catalogue. The firm was founded by (Sir) Frederick Ernest Gibberd (1908–84), who spent his last years embellishing the garden of his house at Harlow. Gibberd was appointed in 1946 as chief architect and planner of the new town there, and remained in charge until 1972.
104 In 2003, a major exhibition of this style was held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. See BENTON, BENTON and WOOD (Eds) (2003).
105 See PEHNT(1987) for a wider discussion of twentieth-century Egyptianising influences in architecture, notably on Bonatz, Gropius, and Breuer. His paper is a welcome antidote for those who have imbibed too many toxic apologies for the ‘purity’ of the International Modern Movement. The Author records here his gratitude to Herr Dr Pehnt for corresponding with him and sharing ideas.
