posted on 25 Feb 2018

The Snail That Climbed The Eiffel Tower and other work by John Minton by Martin Salisbury

John Minton, who died at the age of just 40 in 1957, was one of the most prolific members of what has become known as the post-war English Romantic art movement but, as Martin Salisbury’s excellent essay that prefaces this book notes, he was also one of the most troubled. His natural instincts were essentially hedonistic and he struggled with his sexuality – problems that led him to the darkest of depressions that he tried to treat with alcohol.

The problem wasn’t simply down to his own personal demons because artistically too he found himself out of sympathy with the mainstream of artistic thinking which was becoming dominated by abstraction. Despite his prolific output, by the middle of the 1950s, his work was already being seen as anachronistic and this, added to his personal problems, led him to despair and suicide.

What Martin Salisbury has done here however is to steer away from his fine art work to look instead at what might be called his commercial output – primarily book jackets, book illustration, posters, magazines and even wallpaper. For a significant period Minton became one of the go-to artists for what is sometimes thought of as this 'ephemeral' artwork and he was much in demand and astonishingly successful.

This book is a suitably wonderful, sumptuous tribute to this body of work and The Mainstone Press who have published it deserve real praise for the quality of their production. This is an absolute snorter of a book and it’s the kind of thing you just have to settle down with and enjoy – but try your best, as you lick your lips in anticipation, not to dribble on the beautiful pages.

The book is usefully divided up into separate sections that give dedicated space to each specialist output. We start off with his book jacket design and includes the commissions he had with John Lehmann, Methuen, Andre Deutsch, Secker and Warburg and Rupert Hart-Davis and it’s great to see some original drafts for covers that never made it to final production. The large format book allocates full and double page spreads to the book jackets and that gives them a spectacular showcase, especially given that the colour reproduction is impeccable. Each cover gets a short but informative pen portrait explaining the relationship between the book content and the jacket design.

We then move on to look at the books Minton fully illustrated – with colour and some black and white or pen wash – and also a section on the books he partially illustrated. His distinctive style and his realist approach to the illustrations give the books a very clear period feel – it would be possible to pin down the date of their publication pretty accurately just by virtue of the drawings.

His style immediately lends itself to quite striking and powerful posters and the examples reproduced here show why is skills were in such demand. However, truthfully, I find the wallpaper designs less successful and less impactful – the Romantic style and colour pallet tend to create a rather insipid collection and I’m rather glad relatively little space is given over to it. It strikes me that this might have been Minton’s one false step.

I can’t praise this book highly enough. It’s going to be irresistible to anyone like me who loves book cover design and book illustration but I really think the audience shouldn’t be confined to bibliophiles – there’s plenty enough here for anyone interested in the art of the 20th century English Romantic tradition or the development of post-war English art more generally.

The book isn’t cheap to be fair and you’ll have to stump up about £25 at the moment but, frankly, I’d have paid double that.

 

Terry Potter

February 2018

 

Click on any of the pictures below to see them in slide-show format