Rhythmic Metropolis

by Rebecca Wallersteiner

The arts have always influenced and inspired each other; painters seek inspiration in music and books, while musicians often visit galleries. England’s best known sculptor, the Scottish/Italian Eduardo Paolozzi, who I knew for many years, often had the radio in his studio tuned to jazz, while working. He told me that he acquired the habit of listening to jazz while sculpting during his time living in Paris in the late 1940s.

Paolozzi designed posters for various London Jazz festivals and also created the large bronze sculpture of the 1920s Parisian jazz dancer, Josephine Baker, which stands in Selfridges. He told me that the geometric patterns of the colourful mosaic mural at Tottenham Court Road were partly influenced by Italian frescoes and also the rhythms of jazz. I met Paolozzi while working for his friend, the artist Lucian Freud, who also likes jazz.

Nigel Coke, like other artists I have known, enriches his inner world by reading extensively, exchanging ideas and images with friends and listening to music. His photographs are beautifully crafted, like visual poetry or a sophisticated jazz composition.

The historian of London , Peter Akroyd, wrote about London ’s vitality and possibilities: “the congregation of people, of all races, of all talents, of all fortunes, releases a massive air of expectancy and exhilaration”.

Like a jazz composition London vibrates and hums with energy. Its buildings rise and fall, the Thames ebbs and flows as it did in Conrad’s day and the crowds of us who are London at this time, will in time be renewed ourselves.