The Fontana Modern Masters was a series of pocket guides on writers, philosophers, and other thinkers and theorists who shaped the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. The first five titles were published on 12 January 1970 by Fontana Books, the paperback imprint of William Collins & Co, and the series editor was Frank Kermode, who was Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. The books were very popular with students, who "bought them by the handful", according to Kermode,Frank Kermode. Not Entitled: A Memoir. London: HarperCollins, 1996, p. 224. and they were instantly recognisable by their eye-catching covers, which featured brightly coloured abstract art and sans-serif typography.
Art as book covers
The Fontana Modern Masters occupy a unique place in publishing history – not for their contents but their covers, which draw on the following developments in twentieth-century art and literature:James Pardey. "The Shape of the Century". Eye Magazine, Winter 2009, pp. 6–8.James Pardey. "Oliver Bevan: In Search of Utopia". RWA Magazine, Autumn 2012, pp. 26–27.
Twentieth-century geometric abstraction, colour-field painting and hard-edge painting. Op Art, and in particular the work of Victor Vasarely. The English beatnik Brion Gysin's cut-up technique as popularized by William Burroughs.
The cover concept was the brainchild of Fontana's art director John Constable, who had been experimenting with a cover treatment based on cut-ups of The Mud Bath, a key work of British geometric abstraction by the painter David Bomberg. However, a visit to the Grabowski Gallery in London introduced Constable to the work of Oliver Bevan, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in 1964, whose optical and geometric paintings were influenced by Vasarely's Op Art. On seeing Bevan's work, Constable commissioned him to create the covers for the first ten Fontana Modern Masters, which Bevan painted as rectilinear arrangements of tesselating blocks. Each cover was thus a piece of abstract art, but as an incentive for readers to buy all ten books the covers could be arranged to create a larger, composite artwork. The "set of ten" books appeared in 1970–71 but overran when Joyce was published with the same cover as Guevara:
Camus by Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1970 Chomsky by John Lyons, 1970 Fanon by David Caute, 1970 Guevara by Andrew Sinclair, 1970 Lévi-Strauss by Edmund Leach, 1970 Lukács by George Lichtheim, 1970 Marcuse by Alasdair MacIntyre, 1970 McLuhan by Jonathan Miller, 1971 Orwell by Raymond Williams, 1971 Wittgenstein by David Pears, 1971 Joyce by John Gross, 1971
A second "set of ten" featuring a new Bevan cut-up was published in 1971–73 but the inclusion of Joyce in the first "set of ten" left this second set one book short: Freud by Richard Wollheim, 1971 Reich by Charles Rycroft, 1971 Yeats by Denis Donoghue, 1971 Gandhi by George Woodcock, 1972 Lenin by Robert Conquest, 1972 Mailer by Richard Poirier, 1972 Russell by A. J. Ayer, 1972 Jung by Anthony Storr, 1973 Lawrence by Frank Kermode, 1973
A third "set of ten" featuring Bevan's kinetic Pyramid painting began to appear in 1973–74 but Constable left before the set was complete and his replacement, Mike Dempsey, scrapped the set-of-ten incentive after eight books: Beckett by A Alvarez, 1973 Einstein by Jeremy Bernstein, 1973 Laing by Edgar Z. Friedenberg, 1973 Popper by Bryan Magee, 1973 Kafka by Erich Heller, 1974 Le Corbusier by Stephen Gardiner, 1974 Proust by Roger Shattuck, 1974 Weber by Donald G. MacRae, 1974
Dempsey switched the covers to a white background and commissioned a new artist James Lowe, whose cover art for the next eight books in 1975–76 was based on triangles: Eliot by Stephen Spender, 1975 Marx by David McLellan, 1975 Pound by Donald Davie, 1975 Sartre by Arthur C. Danto, 1975 Artaud by Martin Esslin, 1976 Keynes by D. E. Moggridge, 1976 Saussure by Jonathan Culler, 1976 Schoenberg by Charles Rosen, 1976
Nine more books appeared in 1977–79 with cover art by James Lowe based on squares: Engels by David McLellan, 1977 Gramsci by James Joll, 1977 Durkheim by Anthony Giddens, 1978 Heidegger by George Steiner, 1978 Nietzsche by J. P. Stern, 1978 Trotsky by Irving Howe, 1978 Klein by Hanna Segal, 1979 Pavlov by Jeffrey A. Gray, 1979 Piaget by Margaret A. Boden, 1979
Dempsey left Fontana Books in 1979 but continued to oversee the Modern Masters series until a new art director, Patrick Mortimer, was appointed in 1980. Four more books followed under Mortimer with cover art by James Lowe based on circles: Evans-Pritchard by Mary Douglas, 1980 Darwin by Wilma George, 1982 Barthes by Jonathan Culler, 1983 Adorno by Martin Jay, 1984
The cover concept was dropped after this and a new design was used that featured a portrait of the Modern Master as a line drawing or later a tinted photograph, and mixed serif and sans-serif typefaces, upright and italic fonts, block capitals, lowercase letters and faux handwriting. The design was used for reprints and six new titles: Foucault by J. G. Merquior, 1985 Derrida by Christopher Norris, 1987 Winnicott by Adam Phillips, 1988 Lacan by Malcolm Bowie, 1991 Arendt by David Watson, 1992 Berlin by John Gray, 1995
Book covers as art Fontana's use of art as book covers went full circle in 2003–05 when the British conceptual artist Jamie Shovlin "reproduced" the covers of the forty-eight Fontana Modern Masters from Camus to Barthes as a series of flawed paintings (the titles are missing and the colours have run) in watercolour and ink on paper, each measuring 28 x 19 cm. However, Shovlin also noticed ten forthcoming titles listed on the books' front endpapers which, for reasons unknown, had not been published:
Dostoyevsky by Harold Rosenberg Fuller by Allan Temko Jakobson by Thomas A Sebeok Kipling by Lionel Trilling Mann by Lionel Trilling Merleau-Ponty by Hubert Dreyfus Needham by George Steiner Sherrington by Jonathan Miller Steinberg by John Hollander Winnicott by Masud Khan (this was published with a different author, as listed in the previous section)
Shovlin then set out to paint these "lost" titles and thus "complete" the series. To do this he devised a "Fontana Colour Chart" based on the covers of the published books, and a scoring system that – like his paintings – was deliberately flawed. Given these flaws, and those in Fontana's original series, the absence of any modern masters from the visual arts is notable,Jamie Shovlin. Fontana Modern Masters. Riflemaker, London, 14 April – 28 May 2005. since Matisse was one of four "forthcoming titles" that Shovlin had apparently overlooked:
Benjamin by Samuel Weber Erikson by Robert Lifton Ho by David Halberstam Matisse by David Sylvester
Benjamin and Matisse have since been included in a new series of seventeen large Fontana Modern Masters that Shovlin painted in 2011-12. These use a similar scoring system to his watercolours of 2003–05 and a new "Acrylic Variations Colour Wheel".Jamie Shovlin. Various Arrangements. Haunch of Venison, London, 18 April – 26 May 2012. The paintings are acrylic on canvas and each measures 210 x 130 cm:
Arendt by David Watson (Variation 1) Benjamin by Samuel Weber (Variation 3) Berlin by John Gray (Variation 1) Derrida by Christopher Norris (Variation 3) Dostoyevsky by Harold Rosenberg (Variation 1) Foucault by J. G. Merquior (Variation 1B) Fuller by Allan Temko (Variation 3) Jakobson by Krystyna Pomorska (Variation 2) Kipling by Lionel Trilling (Variation 2) Lacan by Malcolm Bowie (Variation 1) Mann by Lionel Trilling (Variation 1A) Matisse by David Sylvester (Variation 1A) Merleau-Ponty by H. P. Dreyfus (Variation 1) Needham by George Steiner (Variation 3A) Sherrington by Jonathan Miller (Variation 3) Steinberg by John Hollander (Variation 3B) Winnicott by Adam Phillips (Variation 3)
See also Foucault - one of the books in the series Past Masters
References
External links Fontana Modern Masters or books, art, and books as art: a cover story