My great-grandfather, the novelist Anthony Powell (1905-2000), had a predilection for mammoth projects. His best-known work, the 12-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time, is famously (perhaps infamously) long, published from 1951 to 1975. And the sprawling, 360-degree collage that he created at the Chantry, his Somerset home, engulfing the walls, the ceiling and even the pipes of a basement boiler room, took some 15 years to complete.
Tony Powell was a keen artist from boyhood. His fascination with art was a running thread throughout his life – the title for Dance came from a Poussin painting. This year marks the 25th anniversary of his death, and 50 years since the completion of Dance. And 60 years ago he embarked on the most ambitious visual art project of his lifetime.
My great-grandmother Violet Powell, a writer and editor herself, was a significant influence on Tony’s work, providing sound literary judgement and emotional support.
She was also a collaborator on his first large-scale collage, created soon after the couple were married. Tony’s biographer, Hilary Spurling, describes a ‘folding scrap-screen’ the newly-weds decorated, ‘collecting, cutting out and pasting’ together.
What originated as a ‘companionable pastime’ would later become a solitary passion for Tony. Prone to bouts of depression, he seemed to find comfort in the methodical labour of cutting and sticking.
‘It was a relaxation from sitting typing,’ my great-uncle John Powell, Tony’s younger son, tells me.
Tony and Violet moved from London to Somerset in 1952, with their two sons: film director Tristram Powell (1940- 2024), my late grandfather, and John.
I was two years old in 2000, when Tony died, and can’t claim to have any first-hand memories of him. I can recall Violet (1912-2002), who died two years later, through only the vaguest sensations. The softness of her jumper. Her floral, powdery scent. Her steady patience with a fidgeting toddler, as I sat on her lap to be read to.
But visits to the Chantry, where John lives to this day, were a cornerstone of my early years, its treasures and oddities providing endless stimulation for a curious child.
Slipping away after pudding (tinned peaches and cream), my brother and I would go exploring. The house was filled with relics of a bygone age: a carved angel looming above the hallway; a defunct dumb waiter on an upstairs landing; a Venetian puppet theatre in one of the bedrooms, with funny little threadbare figures on wires.
But the real delights were to be found in the basement, which housed a laundry room, a billiards room and the boiler room.
Tony had long harboured ambitions to collage an entire room. It wasn’t until the 1960s, however, that this work began in earnest – by which time he had access to a rich array of material, thanks to the wider proliferation of colour magazines. The Sunday Times was the first colour supplement, published in 1962.
‘He stored illustrations of every sort from years before, in two tea chests,’ says John.
Tony started assembling the collage in around 1965, by then firmly in the midst of his work on Dance, escaping to the quiet depths of ‘the warm boiler room’ for a reprieve from writing.
He laid the foundations using French posters, and then gradually stuck scraps around them, adding sections little by little.
‘Over the years, one saw it grow,’ remembers John.
And grow it did. At first glance, one is stunned by the sheer scale, unable to digest its intricacy and detail amid the overwhelming whole. The initial impression can be unnerving. Spurling dubs it ‘a monstrous collage’ – ‘horrifying’ in its ‘surrealistic disturbance’.
While it certainly has a whiff of the deranged about it, closer inspection also brings to light its spirit of playfulness.
The breadth of subject matter runs the gamut of history and culture, from the high- to the not-so-highbrow. Disparate worlds collide, as classical artefacts, Old Master paintings, politicians and literary legends jostle among cartoons, film stars, Playboy bunnies and the occasional cat.
John notes that his father chose his compositions with deliberate irreverence: ‘He liked rearranging photographs or pictures, putting different people in strange situations.’
There are orchestrated meetings between W B Yeats and Elizabeth Taylor; Dylan Thomas and a young Prince Charles; Abraham Lincoln, Harold Acton and Robert Hardy; Brigitte Bardot, the Brontë sisters and Somerset Maugham.
Family members also feature among the fray: Tony deposited his niece, Antonia Fraser, beside W H Auden and Robert Graves; while his nephew, Ferdinand Mount, peeks out beside Jilly Cooper, her face sadly obscured by a copper pipe for the new boiler.
Three of those collage faces – Jilly Cooper, Antonia Fraser and Ferdinand Mount – will be at a lunch in June at the National Liberal Club. It salutes the 25th anniversary of Tony’s death, the 25th anniversary of the Anthony Powell Society and the 50th anniversary of the completion of Dance.
Tony was well into his 70s by the time he finished the boiler-room collage. For all its eclectic absurdity, it manifests many of his most admired traits as a writer, reflecting his satirical wit and keen observational eye.
On childhood visits to the Chantry, and still today, it’s in the boiler room that I feel closest to my great-grandfather.
And I am drawn to the spirit of mischief in a man who glued Lord Byron into position – his moody gaze levelled straight at the chest of a model in a bikini.
