Private View: 'A particularly soft English hardback'

Private View, published in 1965, is a hefty volume put together over three years by Bryan Robertson (director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery), John Russell (art critic of the Sunday Times), and Lord Snowdon (resuming his photographic career after marriage to Princess Margaret in 1960). For its authors it was ‘a new kind of book’, a claim that rested on two main features. First, it offered something like a visual ethnography of a resurgent (chiefly London) art world. Here are the artists in their natural habitats but also the whole machinery of museums, dealers, art schools, critics and curators: ‘a kind of vast, illustrated catalogue-cum-Who’s-Who of contemporary British art’, as Anthony Powell put it. And second, with 368 of Snowdon’s photographs, beautifully printed in Switzerland with a lavish use of colour, it prioritised the image. Private View, with its grainy blow-ups and bled-off layouts was more like a magazine an inch and a quarter thick, than a standard monograph. Reyner Banham, reviewing it in New Society, called it a ‘particularly soft English hardback’ but he wasn’t being entirely negative. He thought it had the virtues of weekend journalism and the vices of straying too far from ‘the Sunday-supp ethos’. Whether it explained, as promised, ‘how the creative dynamism of British art came to dominate the international scene’ – whether that was even true – is one of many things to discuss.