The fascination of the banal

Norman Lebrecht

THE POSTCARD CENTURY by Tom Phillips

Thames & Hudson, £29.95, £19.95, pp. 452

The time has come to confess to a dirty little habit, before the tabloids get hold of it and I am totally ruined. Deep breath: I collect postcards. Not coins or stamps or Old Masters or fine wines, all of which are perfectly admissible in polite society, but 6x4 scraps of primal e-mails with pic- tures on one side and banalities on the rear, often indecipherably scrawled.

Why postcards? Because there is no more vivid or cheaper form of ephemera by which an author can tap into the way peo- ple lived at any time in the past 120 years. Everybody used to write postcards, kings and concert pianists, cads and spinsters. So nice of you to have us for tea; sorry to hear Ethel's poorly again; can't get you out of my mind; did you ever see one like this?

The images range from everyday street scenes, frozen in time, to dimpled young dancers, poised on the pointe of success. You will find tat art, kitsch cats and soppy souvenirs crammed in old shoe-boxes among paparazzi shots of historic personal- ities and natural disasters, not to mention seaside comics, that peculiarly British aber- ration. And on the blank side, ordinary lives running along amid extraordinary events.

I treasure a gloomy-coloured portrait of Gustav Mahler, sent home by a German frontline soldier and disfigured by heavy stamps of a military censor. Somehow, in the thick of the first world war, a homesick Corporal found time to reflect on symphon- ic masters.

What are such objects worth? Everything to the historian, and next to nothing to the collector, if you know where to find them. Postcards are mostly traded at fairs, a term loaded with lascivious mediaeval connota- tions but actually as dull and proper as a family outing to the Festival of Britain. The postcard world is almost self-parodic in its sedateness. Many dealers and collectors (often one and the same) resemble train- spotters on librium. They tend to look askance on extraterrestrial visitors from the lively arts.

So when I spotted Tom Phillips one morning at the biggest monthly fair, it was With a sense of relief bordering on brother- hood. Phillips, who is not only an artist of international renown but an accomplished composer, has collected postcards for as long as he can remember and has used them as a source for various of his works — 'Benches', at the Tate, for instance. Where my collecting interests are specifi- cally cultural and socio-political, his are omnivorous. Phillips, I noticed, buys a card not so much for the quality or novelty of its frontal image as for a combination of fac- tors which may include its postal date (if historic), its message, its addressee and some imperceptible irregularity of angle.

What I did not appreciate until his book turned up was the chronological method behind his collecting madness, or perhaps the chronological madness. Tom Phillips was; all along, planning a history of the 20th century as reflected in the humble postcard — not just in visual images, which any competent picture researcher could compile in a week, but in a subtle colloquy of both sides of the card, public and semi- private. The result is an engagingly catholic and frequently touching portrait of an epoch, more valuable as a record of human experience than any of those mega- histories that came thumping down last Christmas on the eve of that never-to-be- forgiven Domesday.

Phillips has assembled in his book sever- al pages of postcards for each calendar year of the century, their only connecting theme being one card per year of Piccadilly Circus and another of the New York sky- line. The obsessive lengths he must have gone to to find Piccadilly in, say, 1923 does not bear rational contemplation, but his device is an ingenious one, laying down a progressively shifting ground-bass for events that changed the world.

Juxtaposition is the sorcerer's art. Where 1911 blazons a Shell advert for the new dawn of aviation, the following year opens with the sinking of the Titanic. In between is a photo of a man in an electric chair, the sender helpfully telling a Miss Hammond in East Moseley that this is what

they use in the Prison here instead of hanging people . . I hope you had a good time in Brighton.

`We are going to march to Oxford 30 miles away,' reports a keen new conscript, two weeks after the outbreak of the Great War. `God send you back to me,' was a popular postcard message in the years ahead.

Adolf Hitler pops up with hypnotic monotony after 1933, as he does at most postcard fairs (at around £8 a card). Phillips notes that most of Hitler's photos were taken by his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, who once had a shop on the Uxbridge Road. After the Anschluss with Austria, Josef Vieshofer of Linz writes in Esperanto to a London friend, sending him a 'farewell souvenir' of the Fiihrer's head superimposed over Greater Germany. Another postcard of Hitler, this time chat- ting with Mussolini and Franco, is sent in 1947 from Cuba to the US secretary-gener- al Trygve Lie, imploring him to debar fas- cist Spain from the world organisation.

`This Festival is a wonderful effort,' reports a London visitor in 1951 — such a difference from the Dome. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, is pictured with a dove, symbolising peace, in the very week the Wall is erected in Berlin.

Phillips reproduces what appear to be the first public images of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, as well as pleasingly similar photos of Richard Nixon playing the piano with his family and standing on display in a waxwork gallery. Throughout, the simple messages of daily life and the learned commentary that Phillips appends provide a sobering undercurrent.

Bare bottoms abound in recent times, the Berlin Wall comes down CI actually had to buy a piece for the Church raffle,' complains BJM, on a card to Weymouth) and Diana's death yields confusing gush. No receptacle other than the postcard could continuously blend tragedy and banality without causing sender or recipi- ent to blush.

There are omissions: no Bolshevik or Maoist revolutions, no football so far as I could see, more music hall than television, Sent by Bobby in Marseilles to red in Hammersmith in July 1930.

Both Picasso and Matisse collected postcards for use in their work and Matisse in particular fell for this type of odalisque in Morocco and dressed his models in the style. nothing on our latterday fixation with health and public services. But this is not a history textbook, nor does it pretend to be. It is, rather, an era seen by an artist through the most mundane of media. Its capacity to intrigue and astonish is limit- less. No one who reads it will ever view a postcard again with glancing inattention.