Poster - Habitat, 1973

So pleasing to find that 'new' prints are still turning up:

'New' in the sense that I can't recall having seen it previously. This one - in the terrific style/format of his late Sixties work - is described:

Poster promoting the opening of Habitat's store in King's Road, London, 1973.  88 x 62 cm.  Signed in the plate, original lithographic poster.  A few were hand signed and gifted to the collaborators of the poster.  Laid down on linen for museum conservation.

In Praise of Church-going

Thinking of Eduardo’s childhood, I wonder to what extent his visual ‘vocabulary’ was – perhaps sublimely – influenced by an environment that enveloped him at least once a week:

Courtesy Cruon

This is the (Roman Catholic) St Mary Star of the Sea Church, Leith.  The exterior is rather sombre, the work of Pugin and Hansom, typical of the mid-Victorian (1854) Gothic style.  But, inside, we see rich patterns and visual structures that surely echo themes and devices that figured in the 60s/70s print series:

The second of these photographs (courtesy of Barry Gordon) shows the pattern-rich nature of this interior.  With geometric themes in the tiles of the floor and the wall surfaces along with several elements of the windows, I’m sure we are looking at the basis of many of Eduardo’s images, especially where blocks of pattern were ‘assembled’ in the manner of a physical building.

Some More Exhibition Posters

Two posters I acquired last year:

Eduardo was sound on Europe

In the current Brexit context, good to see that Eduardo was a ‘Common Market’ man rather than a fan of the federal nightmare.  That’s not to say that he didn’t like Europe itself – after all, he spent a lot of time in Germany teaching and working.  But, as you see, like many others of us, he left Paris ‘with his tail between his legs.’  And, as a prophet of the Brexit global-trading philosophy, note that Eduardo was selling mostly into the U.S.  The cutting is from The Tatler, August 1962 – a publication which regularly reported on his work and exhibitions during the Sixties:

© Illustrated London News Group

Aye, Robot (apologies to Isaac Asimov)

Paolozzi, the digital artist in a still-analogue age, had a fascination with robots, especially around 1970.  Nearly 50 years on, these things are now frequently in the news as examples break through from being laboratory projects into the everyday environment, for instance as now-practicable housework ‘assistants,’ and, yikes, as functioning sexual partners.  What was science fiction to us 1950s/60s/70s-dwellers is fast becoming everyday reality.  Disappointingly, the aesthetics of realisation don’t compare well with the imaginations of Fifties artists, Eagle’s Frank Hampson for instance, whose visualisation of the dashing man in space – Dan Dare – makes Apollo moonwalker Buzz Aldrin look no more than a  lumbering, jazzed-up Michelin Man.

Likewise, the primary-coloured tin and plastic toy robots of the Fifties appear much more characterful than the rather sterile-looking models now emerging, (though in regard to the sexually active ones, being hygienically sterile may well be a very desirable attribute . . .)

 Robots amongst a sample of the collection of toys amassed over many years by Paolozzi

Sexbot as pictured in the Sun, January 2017

But, back to 1970, and it’s a bit awkward in the Artist’s studio since it looks as if Eduardo’s chat-up lines were not impressing his mechanical companion:

Courtesy of Robin Spencer (Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews)

Paolozzi said of the etchings series, Cloud Atomic Laboratory, (1971):

The schism that separates Space Age Engineering, technical photography, film making and types of street-art from fine art activities is for many people/artists unbridgeable.

Within the grand system of paradoxes, the theme of this portfolio is the Human Predicament. Content enlarged by precision. History shaded into the grey scale as in the television tube.

‘Le Robot Robert,’ is from the series:

© Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation

Below is a detail of the 'Shelves of Readymades' which was made for the 1971 Tate Paolozzi exhibition.  This has been preserved within the Krazy Kat Archive kept at the V&A.:

Courtesy of Robin Spencer (Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews)

Much convoluted theorising is valid about Paolozzi’s purpose in using robots as subject matter – analogy with issues of control/subservience in a new technological-age, for example – but he said something much more straightforward in 1960 talking to Edouard Roditi:

. . . if one of us (sculptors) chances to find a particularly nice and spooky-looking piece of junk like an old discarded boiler, he can scarcely avoid using it as the trunk or body of a figure, if only because its shape suggests a body to anyone who sets out to do this kind of assembly work.  Then one only needs to weld something smaller onto the top to suggest a head, and four limb-like bits and pieces onto the sides and the bottom to suggest arms and legs, and there you have the whole figure, which has come to life like a traditional Golem or robot . . .

This late Seventies book with its strangely engaging cover image was referenced by Paolozzi:

Paolozzi’s interest in these things as subject matter was sustained through to near the end of his career, as demonstrated by the most impressive sculpture, ‘Vulcan,’ installed in the Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art:

© (c) Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation

And, meanwhile, over at the National Museum of Scotland, some more Paolozzi robotic creations keep guard of a collection of ‘early-man’ artefacts:

© National Museums Scotland

Paolozzi had always liked to explore the juxtaposition of images and objects, contrasting the mundane with the deeply philosophical for example.  I think therefore that he'd be particularly pleased with this installation.

Cutting and Pasting - for real!

As noted in this blog a time or two previously, I often reflect on Paolozzi’s achievement in creating his complex, collage-based 60s/70s prints without the aid of the electronic/digital software we today take for granted.  His hands will have suffered the ravages of several craft processes including ‘cutting and pasting,’ in which nasty sharp blades and various ‘toxic’ adhesive substances – think of Cow Gum fumes for instance – were involved.  But not always just Paolozzi’s own fair hands . . .

In this connection I had the good fortune recently to be contacted by Keith Coates Walker, Educator and Musician, who told me that he had been an assistant to Paolozzi on the Z.E.E.P. series.  (Keith also acted in this capacity for Pop Art stars, Jim Dine and Claus Oldenburg.)

Since there have been several accounts of ‘difficult’ working relationships with Eduardo, Keith’s general comments are interesting:

I suppose he could appear a bit remote and not personable . . . he was totally focused on his work, nothing else seemed to matter to him.  However he was on the other hand a very generous human being and I got along with him very well. It was certainly an interesting time and I enjoyed the experience enormously.

Regarding working practice, Keith explains:

Eduardo gave me a range of ephemera which were a mix of bits of packaging, magazine clips etc which he wanted converting to line drawings.  These were then photographed individually; (this, of course, was before Photoshop!) The resulting images were then printed as black and white photographs. The next stage was to construct the intended print as a full size paste-up.  This itself was then photographed and an offset litho plate was made and a number of copies were run off so that I could work on the colour separations.

The next stage (see example Z.E.E.P. ‘Agile Coin Gross Decision Logic‘ image below) was to work out the colours and the general balance.  This was done in three shades of grey.

The next stage (see Z.E.E.P. example image below) saw the introduction of a couple of shades of blue.

In the next stage (again see Z.E.E.P. example image below) I added Letraset textures and decided on the final colour separations.

At every stage there were a good few number of prints done to play around with so that alterations could be made.  If I remember it correctly the whole process took about 6 months.  Doing the initial drawings was the easy part, it was the rest that was lengthy, to and fro from the photographer and the printers. This was the first time that Eduardo had used offset litho for his prints - prior to that he had always used screen printing. The printers* specialised in map printing - in fact on the back of the image above is a map, this being the first off the press having made use of a piece of ‘scrap’ paper.  I'm assuming this is now quite a rarity.

* Advanced Graphics

I am very grateful to Keith for his generosity in providing this insight into a process that has not previously been detailed elsewhere.  Keith himself is keeping the particular creative style in play with his own prints, for example, Shock Velocity 113 (upper), and Biscotti’s Dream (lower) as below:

© Keith Walker

© Keith Walker

There’s much, much more, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/16365955@N07/ - so indulge yourself!

The Third Dimension Flattened

A rarely-seen lithograph recently crossed my path.  It’s from 1963 and, as far as I know, is untitled:

The image featured in The Metallization of a Dream.  This book, created by John Munday, gathered together a selection of Paolozzi’s fifties/early sixties work.  A commentary text was contributed by Lawrence Alloway.  It was published by the Royal College of Art’s ‘Lion & Unicorn Press’ in an edition of 400.

Both graphic and sculptural work is included, with an emphasis on technological source imagery and components, often of automotive industry origin.

Although a pleasingly ‘flat’ image, the print could well be an intermediary study for a sculpture piece typical of Paolozzi’s output in the first few years of the sixties decade.  For comparison, here, below, are some example three-dimensional ‘cousins’:

The Twin Tower of the Sfinx-State II (1962)

Imperial War Museum (1962)

Tower for Mondrian (1963-4)

More, NOT Less

Quite an unpleasant critique by Otto Saumarez of Paolozzi’s oeuvre in Apollo magazine, 4^th May issue.  Saumarez highlights Eduardo’s “willingness to embrace ugliness and discordance” in a negative sense.  I would suggest that this attribute, coupled with an ability to find and use images/objects of great beauty, was vital in Paolozzi’s achievements in creating artworks with multi-dimensional relevances and interpretations.

The critique suggests that Paolozzi’s modernism is, “far removed from the elegant smoothness of Henry Moore as it is possible to imagine.”  I’d say however that endless reiterations of that elegant smoothness leave us with a very predictable and non-stimulating oeuvre, whereas Paolozzi delights with ever-changing, fresh and thought-provoking work in a range of media.

Saumarez claims in regard to Pop that Paolozzi, “has none of the panache brought to the style by its best purveyors.”  I thought it had long ago been accepted that Paolozzi was never, simplistically, a “Pop Artist” and once you’ve reviewed the scope of the print series such as Moonstrips, you certainly won’t be thinking of its creator as someone lacking panache!

In this blog, and elsewhere, I’m happy to admit that I’ve never liked Paolozzi’s sculpture as much as the graphic work.  However, I would consider the Sixties/early Seventies pieces – often with echoes of forms/ideas seen in the print series – very evocative of the spirit of experimentation/use of industrial techniques which characterises that period.  To refer to, “the vacuous slickness of his aluminium and chrome-plated sculptures of the mid to late ’60s,” has no relationship to reality in my view.  I may be being a bit thick, but I don’t detect any vacuous slickness about this 1969 ‘Study for ‘Osaka Steel:"

Courtesy N. J. Cotterell

Back to History

Almost pre-history in fact – i.e. even before As Was When!

Making collages, Paolozzi was limbering up for his fabulous Sixties graphics series in the preceding decade.  Between these and ‘As Is When’ there were a few works of special significance since they ‘practised’ that series’ very particular format, style and content.

‘The History of Nothing’ was a short (12 mins) black & white film made by Paolozzi with the help of Denis Postle.  Inspired by Dada/Surrealist ideas, it consisted of an animated series of collages.  In anticipation of concepts for a new kind of interactive fine art which would fully emerge at the end of the decade, it is likely that Paolozzi hoped that by bombarding the viewer with unrelated images a new, self-contained perception of reality would be engendered.  This would be based on the notion that the human brain when presented with images without visually- or linguistically-indicated logical relationships will by default ‘invent’ connecting links intuitively.

In 1962 Paolozzi started working at Kelpra Studio with Chris Prater.  One of their first collaborations was a screenprint, ‘Four Stills from the History of Nothing’.  This was based on a collage he had made whilst teaching in Hamburg.  The main, central elements include items of mining machinery and a strange striped cat set in a constricted, striped environment.  This is the print:

© TheTrustees of the Eduardo Paolozzi Foundation

I believe that Paolozzi intended to ramp-up stimulation of our (the viewer) creative perception by confusing us with both the print’s title and the presentation of the component images.  With the word ‘history’ it is natural to think of information conveyed in a linear, progressive format, (often a ‘chronology’ or ‘timeline’).  Paolozzi’s style in overall picture composition and the juxtaposition of component elements denies such a perception.

Here, as in so many of the Sixties graphic works, images of machinery/technology feature prominently.  At that time the range and capability of technology was expanding at an unprecedented rate of progress, especially because of the invention of electronics.  Equally some more familiar technologies – from the Industrial Revolution for instance – had, by virtue of their relative simplicity and size, become ‘quaint’ and ‘olde-worlde’, (‘historic’).  But the functionality of contemporary, more ‘hi-tech’ machines and devices would revolutionise the potential for image manipulation; I guess that Paolozzi fully foresaw how computers would enable an artist to create imagery with a freedom and sophistication that was impossible at that mid-century point for him with his meagre ‘tool kit’ of hard-copy print source material, knife, scissors and adhesives.

From a 2017 viewpoint potential referencing is intriguing.  For instance, is that Schrödinger’s cat? (age 27: not bad for a Felis catus) – you know, the one that inhabits the box in the service of quantum mechanics theory? – a discipline that will not reach general ‘popular’ awareness until the end of the 20^th century; and what of coal mining, the basis for a technology that is seen as a major contributor to global-warming, a phenomenon which threatens to spell the end of history?

The magazine wrapper fragments provide a wry comment on the value of information.  Here packaging is the visual device used, with no sign of what would have been physically within, what should surely have been the object of interest, i.e. the magazine itself, and, in a further non-apparent layer, the informational content of the magazine.  In this way Paolozzi seems to have been practising the way of thinking with ‘pictures’ as would be a concern of As Is When, as well as rehearsing that series’ characteristic visual devices and their rendering.

Purely visually, this print looks to me to be a close relative of: Artificial Sun and Reality (As Is When); Protocol Sentences (Universal Electronic Vacuum); King Kong King Kong (Moonstrips Empire News) and The ABC of Z (General Dynamic Fun).

But, whatever its antecedents and ‘offspring,’ it’s yet another great one!

Overdue Re-evaluation

Rick Poynor began his succinct post about Eduardo on http://www.eyemagazine.com/opinion/article/incisive-vision thus:

Since Eduardo Paolozzi died in 2005 after several years of illness, a reassessment of his work has been gathering momentum. It’s a welcome development. For admirers of the Scottish artist, born to Italian parents, it sometimes seemed that, despite his knighthood in 1988 – or maybe, in some way, because of the establishment’s embrace – Paolozzi had become a critically neglected figure, his many achievements as sculptor, designer and printmaker overlooked. Conceptual art and its later offshoots monopolised critical attention, while easy to appreciate painters such as David Hockney and Lucian Freud received the publicity and accolades.

Overall, it's a good, thoughtful post with two of the prints as illustrations.  Rick's comments about the accessibility of the work of, e.g., Hockney and Freud, ring true, though those are two artists whose work reflect much skill and patient craftsmanship.  But think of all the other contemporary artists who attract the attention Eduardo currently does not, and compare the thinking and graphic expertise invested in his oeuvre with that deployed in, e.g., an Emin or Perry.

Patience is a great virtue, but after years of unfulfilled expectation, I do tire of waiting to see Eduardo's supreme virtuosity in printmaking fully recognised and celebrated beyond the realms of a little old blog like this. 

Happy New Year!

Cloud Atomic Laboratory

The schism that separates Space Age Engineering, technical photography, film making and types of street art from fine art activities is for many people/artists unbridgeable.  Within the grand system of paradoxes, the theme of this portfolio is the Human Predicament.  Content enlarged by precision.  History shaded into the grey scale as in the television tube. 

Skull of Test Dummy. Proton-Synchron Electrophysical Laboratory: Vacuum Pumps to the Electromagnet.

©The Eduardo Paolozzi Foundation

Ever since I first set eyes on one of his prints in 1965, (would have been one of the As Is When series), as well as revelling in their sheer visual splendour, I have wanted to understand the meaning of Paolozzi’s imagery and texts.  This I have tried to analyse and explain throughout my writing on this blog.  During the course of the Sixties the complexity of Paolozzi’s thinking and expression progressed, peaking with Z.E.E.P. 

Then we come to Cloud Atomic Laboratory.  This is a series of eight etchings in an edition of 75.  It was commissioned by British Olivetti and was printed at Alecto Studios in 1971.  To my eye these are the least attractive images I have seen from Paolozzi.  I’m missing the usual multiple juxtapositions, the incorporation of pattern and the sheer pleasure of rich colouration. 

Paolozzi suggested that these photographic images were a top skim of the huge number he had been collecting since 1952.  Importantly, there was no modification of them beyond the rendering in a uniform, very bland photogravure-style printing.  That the printing method was etching was the only cue – apart from knowledge of who was presenting them – to their being ‘artworks’.  So really we are here concerned with the same Dada notion whereby Duchamp’s urinal became a piece of sculpture simply because it was installed in an art gallery.  An important milestone in art ‘history’, but not really worth repeating some 54 years later. 

I was prompted to write this post by the recent receipt of mailshot from GoldMark – this excellent gallery/on-line seller was offering a set of Cloud Atomic Laboratory prints at £1,200 each.

So what have we got?  It’s another cracking series title, hinting at sexy stuff like innovative, leading edge technology and space travel.  (On the downside, I do sometimes muddle this series up with the previous year’s Conditional Probability Machine.)  It is also a further example of Paolozzi’s willingness to keep trying new approaches/media, despite having found great facility and success with screenprinting and lithography. 

Otherwise, we have a set of images which I find quite depressing.  Some of this is due to their style being very similar to that of illustrations found in the outdated encyclopaedias which were prevalent in the Fifties – the very poor ‘equivalent’ then for an information-hungry kid of today’s Internet. 

I’m sorry to say that for me these prints do not achieve the ‘bridging’ function Paolozzi cited in explaining their creation in his Introduction reproduced at the top of this post.

Upper Space

A very elegant installation of Paolozzi prints is currently to be seen at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, (until 12^th June). 

An excellent preview featured in Wallpaper - http://www.wallpaper.com/art/eduardo-paolozzi-politically-charged-printed-pop-art-works-at-yorkshire-sculptural-park#150944  

See how good the six Z.E.E.P. prints look side by side:

Courtesy of the Eduardo Paolozzi Foundation

 For more information see - http://www.ysp.co.uk/exhibitions

Impossible Possibilities

This is an intriguing stand-alone screenprint from 1973.  Entitled ‘Quadrum Dax’, it was printed by Kelpra in an edition of 100.  Dimensions are 86cms x 64cms.

I see it as a very satisfying hybrid, recalling the mechanistic, painted sculptures of the early Sixties, the pattern componentry of As Is When and Universal Electronic Vacuum and looking forward to the more ethereal graphics style that would peak with Paolozzi’s prints of the late 70s.  It is an exemplar of what Paolozzi was talking about in his letter published in The Guardian, 6 March 1967:

By employing engineering methods the iconography of the sculptor can be extended far beyond the normal range of the traditionally trained and studio bound artist and the high technical standards of industrial commercial process, including screen printing, can provide a complexity and range of possibility impossible by normal art-craft printing methods¹. 

As to colour, I regard it as a halfway house between the use of high contrast, saturated hues – often of the primaries – in the Sixties’ print series and the much more muted schemes of the Kottbusserdam Pictures and Turkish Music series (1974), and Calcium Light Night series (1974-6).  The composition anticipates the four-block structure of the woodcut series of 1975, For Charles Rennie Mackintosh. 

The rendition of pattern and the geometry is much more clinical than in any other Paolozzi print I have seen. 

I suspect that Paolozzi selected the title mainly on the basis of his liking for the sound and/or look of quirky words and phrases.  It is not a notable Latin expression.  Quadrum obviously refers to ‘four’ and Dax can ‘mean’ anything from a proper name to the German Stock Exchange. 

The print does not feature in the relatively comprehensive Tate on-line catalogue and is missing from the lists in Kelpra Studio: The Rose and Chris Prater Gift. Artists’ Prints  1961-1980, unless it represents one of untitled items, DP4886 or DP4887.

______________________________________________________________

1 The full text of this letter is reproduced in Eduardo Paolozzi Writings and Interviews, edited by Robin Spencer, Oxford University Press, 2000

Abba Zaba Doo (with apologies to Fred Flintstone)

Abba-Zaba is an ‘artist’s book’ created by Eduardo Paolozzi whilst he was a guest lecturer at Watford School of Art in 1970.  The content continues themes from Moonstrips and General Dynamic F.U.N.

The production method and cost constraints limited the image content to black and white rendition.  Here is a sample page:

At one level of interpretation, given the title, Paolozzi, tongue in cheek, was perhaps presenting a compendium of texts and imagery which represented a neatly distilled A-Z of the World, (all in the course just 70 pages.)  In 1970 we were not yet nearing the brink of the new world of information technology but I believe Paolozzi had considerable foresight of this.  With this he envisaged the completely revised cultural situation in which we now live: a milieu abounding with information, images, concepts, speculation, news, junk news, soap opera, advertising, marketing, video, audio, virtual reality, noise, music, jingles, and dissonance.  This is a 24/7 world in which it is increasingly more difficult to be all-knowing/expert as there is just such a huge volume of data to be assimilated.  And it is certainly impossible to ‘sum up’ fields of information neatly in the sort of reference works/encyclopaedias we were still turning to in 1970.  With the inter-connectivity of information sources as well as the sheer volume of the stuff, any single - or body of - representation of knowledge is likely to be obsolete before you can re-transmit or print it. 

But what is Abba-Zaba?  It’s a brand of Californian confectionery manufacturer, Annabelle Candy Company.  The bar itself is chewy – like toffee – with a peanut flavour centre.  I don’t know if Paolozzi liked the taste, but I’m sure he was very attracted by the packaging, especially the chequer patterned wrapper – there is an echo here of the Cox’s gelatine packet design that he used in the As Is When series, see - http://paolozzi.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/tortured-life.html

Abba-Zaba also enjoys plenty of Paolozzi-friendly mass-media associations – name-checked in tv shows, movies and rock music; with the latter for example, Capt Beefheart’s LP, Safe as Milk was originally slated to be named Abba-Zaba.

The book was published in a limited edition of 500 and nowadays it regularly comes up for sale, recent examples being offered for an average price of £195 – so it’s a very affordable way to own a signed/numbered Paolozzi printed work.

The Subject is S.I.N.

I have always much preferred Paolozzi’s graphic work to the sculpture.  It is true, however, that it is the latter that has received the most general acclaim.  And some of the oeuvre – the Tottenham Court Road mosaics, ‘Four Towers’ and ‘Hamlet in a Japanese Manner’ for example – straddles the media.

(Part of) Hamlet in a Japanese Manner      Courtesy GoMA 

Of the sculpture, some of the Sixties works appeal to me as they relate directly to – and have the same ‘look’ as - the great prints, such as, ‘Wittgenstein at Casino’. 

Later in his career, Paolozzi became very interested in Sir Isaac Newton and William Blake’s monotype of him.  In the various versions Paolozzi succeeded in expressing the reality of human thinking, whereby apparently contradictory notions can – indeed, HAVE – to be accommodated.  Blake, from a traditional religious viewpoint disapproved of the Newtonian quest to scientifically account for the world, (in the Wittgenstein sense), and rendered him as myopic, whereas Paolozzi’s Isaac, in the version at the British Library in London, has Michelangelo’s David’s all seeing eyes. 

But I remain convinced that Eduardo should have stuck to printmaking – just look, below, at what happened when he was in the role of the sculptor - a suit (!) and . . . !

Courtesy Frank Thurston

The Portfolio and Conclusion

Just to round things off, here is the portfolio box in which the Z.E.E.P. prints were presented:

So that’s it.  In this blog I’ve covered all Paolozzi’s significant print media work of the Sixties.  I believe this has provided a view of a truly great artist at the peak of his powers – innovating, experimenting, challenging his own creative processes and the technical limits of the media. 

Paolozzi continued to create prints through the succeeding decades, but, to my mind never again with the success he achieved with his Sixties oeuvre.  Fifty years on I believe the work is as fresh and relevant as ever.

Human Fate and World Power

Last of the six prints in the Z.E.E.P. suite is Human Fate and World Power:

I find this one very forward-looking.  As the twentieth century drew to its conclusion, society radically – and quickly - changed, became fragmentary, as mass communications media and easily facilitated transportation eroded mono-cultural societies. 

And notice that in the blue background field two of the things – the car and the aeroplane - that have hastened the fragmentation of human experience are themselves rendered as fragments. 

Symbolising the ‘old’ model of the world, the Fitch vault key looks a bit pathetic – will such simple technology continue to enable the safekeeping/security of people, ideas, culture, information in the new world?  Clearly not.  Indeed by the twenty first century we will have laws forcing authorities to release information that previously was so closely guarded.

A parrot can speak and imitate human vocalisation, but – like a computer – not know why it’s doing it - discuss.

More of the day, rockets, submarines and fighter planes, (even comical ones), were reasonable images to portray the currency required for world power – how different today in the context of asymmetrical combat and the notion of ‘war on terror’. 

The Sixties and the Seventies were decades when human fate did seem to rest on the machinations of a ‘cold war’ between two world superpowers – the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.  Looking back they now appeal, ironically, as settled times – it was basically a stalemate and a related conflict, which would indeed decide the fate of the human race, was always unlikely.  How different today.