From Deserted Terrains to Chaotic Vistas: Julian Trevelyan's Representations of British Interwar Urban and Industrial Decline

Abstract

Between 1937 and 1939 in particular, the British Surrealist artist Julian Trevelyan (1910–1988) produced large numbers of photographs, collages, paintings, and texts which explore as their central theme the Surrealist aesthetic category of decline. In this article, an establishment of the overarching cultural and economic factor of decline, the situation which characterized much of England during the period in question, is therefore coupled with a setting-up of Trevelyan as an artist who negotiates this typically abject territory through the amalgamation of Surrealist and documentary techniques and methods. Indeed, these three interwar years, which span Trevelyan's involvement with the anthropological research organization Mass Observation and his shift into the realms of industrial and military camouflage, see this strangely neglected figure contributing to British arts and letters a fantasmic social psychology of that contemporary crisis. Trevelyan's images of Bolton are explored here in conjunction with his photographs of Whitehaven, and issues singled out for special attention within his portrayals of these decaying urban and industrial environments include the thematics of garbage (rubbish), the outmoded, and the obsolete, with all their social and cultural significances.