Fontana Modern Masters


The Fontana Modern Masters was a series of pocket guides on writers, philosophers, and other thinkers and theorists who shaped the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. The first five titles were published on 12 January 1970 by Fontana Books, the paperback imprint of William Collins & Co, and the series editor was Frank Kermode, who was Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. The books were very popular with students, who "bought them by the handful", according to Kermode, and they were instantly recognisable by their eye-catching covers, which featured brightly coloured abstract art and sans-serif typography.

Art as book covers

The Fontana Modern Masters occupy a unique place in publishing history – not for their contents but their covers, which draw on the following developments in twentieth-century art and literature:
The cover concept was the brainchild of Fontana's art director John Constable, who had been experimenting with a cover treatment based on cut-ups of The Mud Bath, a key work of British geometric abstraction by the painter David Bomberg. However, a visit to the Grabowski Gallery in London introduced Constable to the work of Oliver Bevan, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in 1964, whose optical and geometric paintings were influenced by Vasarely's Op Art. On seeing Bevan's work, Constable commissioned him to create the covers for the first ten Fontana Modern Masters, which Bevan painted as rectilinear arrangements of tesselating blocks. Each cover was thus a piece of abstract art, but as an incentive for readers to buy all ten books the covers could be arranged to create a larger, composite artwork. The "set of ten" books appeared in 1970–71 but overran when Joyce was published with the same cover as Guevara:Camus by Conor Cruise O'Brien, 1970Chomsky by John Lyons, 1970Fanon by David Caute, 1970Guevara by Andrew Sinclair, 1970Lévi-Strauss by Edmund Leach, 1970Lukács by George Lichtheim, 1970Marcuse by Alasdair MacIntyre, 1970McLuhan by Jonathan Miller, 1971Orwell by Raymond Williams, 1971Wittgenstein by David Pears, 1971Joyce by John Gross, 1971
A second "set of ten" featuring a new Bevan cut-up was published in 1971–73 but the inclusion of Joyce in the first "set of ten" left this second set one book short:Freud by Richard Wollheim, 1971Reich by Charles Rycroft, 1971Yeats by Denis Donoghue, 1971Gandhi by George Woodcock, 1972Lenin by Robert Conquest, 1972Mailer by Richard Poirier, 1972Russell by A. J. Ayer, 1972Jung by Anthony Storr, 1973Lawrence by Frank Kermode, 1973
A third "set of ten" featuring Bevan's kinetic Pyramid painting began to appear in 1973–74 but Constable left before the set was complete and his replacement, Mike Dempsey, scrapped the set-of-ten incentive after eight books:Beckett by A Alvarez, 1973Einstein by Jeremy Bernstein, 1973Laing by Edgar Z. Friedenberg, 1973Popper by Bryan Magee, 1973Kafka by Erich Heller, 1974Le Corbusier by Stephen Gardiner, 1974Proust by Roger Shattuck, 1974Weber by Donald G. MacRae, 1974
Dempsey switched the covers to a white background and commissioned a new artist James Lowe, whose cover art for the next eight books in 1975–76 was based on triangles: Eliot by Stephen Spender, 1975Marx by David McLellan, 1975Pound by Donald Davie, 1975Sartre by Arthur C. Danto, 1975Artaud by Martin Esslin, 1976Keynes by D. E. Moggridge, 1976Saussure by Jonathan Culler, 1976Schoenberg by Charles Rosen, 1976
Nine more books appeared in 1977–79 with cover art by James Lowe based on squares:Engels by David McLellan, 1977Gramsci by James Joll, 1977Durkheim by Anthony Giddens, 1978Heidegger by George Steiner, 1978Nietzsche by J. P. Stern, 1978Trotsky by Irving Howe, 1978Klein by Hanna Segal, 1979Pavlov by Jeffrey A. Gray, 1979Piaget by Margaret A. Boden, 1979
Dempsey left Fontana Books in 1979 but continued to oversee the Modern Masters series until a new art director, Patrick Mortimer, was appointed in 1980. Four more books followed under Mortimer with cover art by James Lowe based on circles:Evans-Pritchard by Mary Douglas, 1980Darwin by Wilma George, 1982Barthes by Jonathan Culler, 1983Adorno by Martin Jay, 1984
The cover concept was dropped after this and a new design was used that featured a portrait of the Modern Master as a line drawing or later a tinted photograph, and mixed serif and sans-serif typefaces, upright and italic fonts, block capitals, lowercase letters and faux handwriting. The design was used for reprints and six new titles: Foucault by J. G. Merquior, 1985Derrida by Christopher Norris, 1987Winnicott by Adam Phillips, 1988Lacan by Malcolm Bowie, 1991Arendt by David Watson, 1992Berlin by John Gray, 1995

Book covers as art

Fontana's use of art as book covers went full circle in 2003–05 when the British conceptual artist Jamie Shovlin "reproduced" the covers of the forty-eight Fontana Modern Masters from Camus to Barthes as a series of flawed paintings in watercolour and ink on paper, each measuring 28 x 19 cm. However, Shovlin also noticed ten forthcoming titles listed on the books' front endpapers which, for reasons unknown, had not been published:Dostoyevsky by Harold RosenbergFuller by Allan TemkoJakobson by Thomas A SebeokKipling by Lionel TrillingMann by Lionel TrillingMerleau-Ponty by Hubert Dreyfus Needham by George SteinerSherrington by Jonathan MillerSteinberg by John HollanderWinnicott by Masud Khan
Shovlin then set out to paint these "lost" titles and thus "complete" the series. To do this he devised a "Fontana Colour Chart" based on the covers of the published books, and a scoring system that – like his paintings – was deliberately flawed. Given these flaws, and those in Fontana's original series, the absence of any modern masters from the visual arts is notable, since Matisse was one of four "forthcoming titles" that Shovlin had apparently overlooked:Benjamin by Samuel WeberErikson by Robert LiftonHo by David HalberstamMatisse by David Sylvester
Benjamin and Matisse have since been included in a new series of seventeen large Fontana Modern Masters that Shovlin painted in 2011-12. These use a similar scoring system to his watercolours of 2003–05 and a new "Acrylic Variations Colour Wheel". The paintings are acrylic on canvas and each measures 210 x 130 cm:Arendt by David Watson Benjamin by Samuel Weber Berlin by John Gray Derrida by Christopher Norris Dostoyevsky by Harold Rosenberg Foucault by J. G. Merquior Fuller by Allan Temko Jakobson by Krystyna Pomorska Kipling by Lionel Trilling Lacan by Malcolm Bowie Mann by Lionel Trilling Matisse by David Sylvester Merleau-Ponty by H. P. Dreyfus Needham by George Steiner Sherrington by Jonathan Miller Steinberg by John Hollander