Dear Arthur,

What a day. the ideas coming faster now.

Firstly, thinking about how to write about your life and work. Montage might be important. Putting two styles side by side, a conversational vernacular style alongside a straightforwardly academic style . I'm thinking of something like the very readable Claire Bishop, who writes in a conversational style anyway.

Then there's more to think about on the 'love' topic. It started with your comment in' One Pair of Eyes' when talking about modernist architecture - "It's the opposite of 'Love thy neighbour.' there's no soul in this kind of building."

David Hulks' re-reading of Herbert Reads 'New Aspects of British Sculpture,' about Reg Butler and the 'geometry of fear' group, examines notions of love in those sculptures.
Basically, Read was into WRD Fairbairn's idea that art was all about sexual desire . Too little of the 'geometry of love' in an art work and it didn't work as art, too much and it was off putting (this was the '50s). It's that anarchist thing about sexual energy /political energy/ artistic energy-its all organic.

1950's- existentialism, the abyss of mutually assured destruction. Bertie Read was looking to art to come up with something more positive.

To get to the positive ie back to 'geometry of love' from the starting point of the 'geometry of fear' is a bit tricky but seems to go like this. It's about the interdependence of love and fear. In '40s/'50s Melanie Klein was all the rage in psychoanalysis. Her big idea was the paranoid-schizoid position. She thought that when an infant encountered the internalised  'bad object' in the form of the mother's withdrawn breast, then to cope with the fear of imminent annihilation, (the infant has not yet learned that the breast will come back), an ego coping mechanism of 'splitting' kicks in so the infant can cope with its fears by seeing itself as all good and the withdrawn breast as all bad. Later on the infant will be able to handle both good and bad feelings about the breast . So all this is normal and the splitting - sometimes they talk about splintering, can be reintegrated into a wholesome healthy personality. If the infant doesn't reintegrate then she develops schizophrenia. [Remember these are very old fashioned ideas about mental health].

Christ greets the women of Jerusalem

You can see the connection between the infants fear of annihilation and the Cold War scenario. Hulks says that when Read talks of 'images of flight' and 'psychic dispersal' in his New Aspects essay, he's recognising the 'paranoid-schizoid' position in the sculptures and in '50s British society. The 'geometry of fear' equates with the 'paranoid-schizoid' position, but also has within it the capacity for love allowing reintegration.- ie a 'positive reaction to negative conditions'. So Hulks thinks that Read saw in the 'geometry of fear' both introspective despair and something affirmative that it will all be ok . The works of Keith Armitage in particular, says Hulks,  have a kind of to-ing and fro-ing from 'sinister mutational fear' to happy scenes of family life.
Well that sounds like what's going on in the stations of the cross at Leyland.
 For a start, all those welded stands look like knackered old timbers in the dockside, under the pier, something of the ocean bottom about them, like Bernard Meadow's Black Crab (1951-52) ' scuttling across the floors of silent seas'. The way the beams look as if they might collapse under the next tide. It's not only the crucifixion that's imminent but the annihilation of the world's flimsy foundations also looms.  In spite of the threats of disintegration, Christ's nonchalant wave to the women of Jerusalem affirms that community life, neighbourly love, will endure.

What do you think?

Robert Gaunt