Pylon of the Month

Regular readers of this blog are probably looking at this month's pylon and wondering what is going on, but for the first pylon of 2014 I thought that it would be appropriate to feature the first artist to recognise the significance of the pylon.  The picture is by Tristram Hillier and was painted in 1933.  It is in the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland which has this to say about it:

'Pylons' was exhibited at the first and only exhibition of the modernist 'Unit One' group in London in 1934, where it aroused much interest. It was purchased from the exhibition by Elizabeth Watt, who bequeathed it to the Gallery more than fifty years later. In this painting the three tall pylons carry no wires and their location on the beach is deliberately enigmatic. The attention to detail and relocation of objects from their usual surroundings draw parallels with the work of Dalí and Tanguy. However, unlike those artists, Hillier does not use unlikely objects and improbable landscapes.

I was made aware of the picture when I read my copy of the Jesus College Cambridge annual report in which there was an article by a research fellow, Dr James Purdon about "how the first pylons stimulated the artistic imagination of the nation".  You can read it in the report here and so I won't attempt to summarise the article, but Stephen Spender (who has featured on Pylon of the Month before) and the poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis both feature.  I was also rather fond of another picture, Landscape with Pylons by Julian Trevelyan, mentioned in the article and shown below (image obtained from here) and the article made connections between surrealism and pylons that certainly gave me food for thought.

Having raised Pylon of the Month to a new cultural high point, I thought I would briefly mention the fact that pylons are very much in the news at the moment in Ireland.  This recent Irish Examiner article gives a pretty good overview of the latest situation:

Throughout large swathes of Munster and Leinster, opposition has been mobilised against the proposal by Eirgrid to erect 1,300 pylons on a corridor running from Little Island, in Cork, through Wexford to Kildare. The exact route for the ‘Gridlink’ project has yet to be decided, but nobody within an ass’s roar of it is taking any chances................

If you want to follow development then twitter is a good place to start.  Search for the keyword 'pylon'and (in amongst lots of tweets from the USA where pylon refers to American Football and what we in the UK call traffic cones) you can find plenty of (mainly critical) tweets abouts Eirgrid's plans.