Review of Alan Powers' Eric Ravilious: Artist and Designer
Eric Ravilious: Artist and Designer Alan Powers (Lund Humphries, 2013)
"Modernism
seems to have happened almost unnoticed by Ravilious, as if in another
room." So claims Alan Powers in the latest of what has been a steady
succession of books about this artist and designer over the last few
years. Indeed, Powers maintains that Eric Ravilious enjoys greater
renown in the early twenty-first century that he ever did in his own
lifetime. So what is it about this Modernism-shunning figure that has
seen him achieve growing popularity in recent times? Perhaps the answer
to that question has something to do with the charge which Power levels
at him, of studiously ignoring the major European artistic movement of
the twentieth century in order to plough his own furrow. Do we retain a
certain pride in producing home-grown artistic anomalies such as William
Blake or Stanley Spencer who, on their own terms, were every bit as
remarkable and enthralling as their continental contemporaries such as,
say, Goya or Matisse? Does it follow, then, that we admire Ravilious for
his nonaligned purity of vision, or does his seeming fidelity to all
things nice and English (or British at a stretch) tickle the latent
jingo in us? Fortunately, it isn't so cut and dried as that but, in
teasing out the various strands of such a posited dichotomy, we
encounter along the way a fascinatingly equivocal artist.
If
one associates Ravilious with a visual world steeped in bucolic
watercolours and engravings of countrified ornaments, it is perhaps
surprising to be told that he was actually born a suburbanite in deepest
Acton with a father in the small-shopkeeper-land of furniture retail.
Then again, maybe that's not so surprising given the pull of the English
countryside on so many metropolitan-born artists since at least the
eighteenth century. Ravilious, however, seems
to have early on seen the decision to flee his urban roots as also
entailing a conscious decision to distance himself from his working
class family. That, and the impression he gave his peers of being
charming but often distracted ('he always seemed to be slightly
somewhere else'), might suggest that here was someone for whom
detachment was a natural disposition - which, in turn, might go some way
to explaining Ravilious' curious gift for creating an ambiguous
demarcation of meaning around many of his images. Not that, in any
sense, he appears to have been some sort of lofty eremite tortured by
the mundane gabble of the world around him. He was, by all accounts, a
thoroughly friendly and decent cove, as his middle-class arty set in the
nineteen twenties might have put it, plus--in a shockingly bad career
move for any artist who wants to be memorialised and dissected long
after their death--he was generally quite contented.
So,
with no epic threnodies to sing of frustrated ambition and personal
desolation, it seems that the thing to focus on is Ravilious' work
itself. Luckily, Powers' book is awash with examples of the artist's
output from every stage of his career and, as if to substantiate my
claim that what Eric did is far more interesting than what Eric was
like, the volume is mainly organised into chapters which consider the
various media that he employed, rather than offering a linear
biographical account. Some of the most intriguing examples of Ravilious'
early work are the murals he painted just a few years after graduating
from the Royal College of Art (RCA). Several of these, such as the ones
that he and fellow RCA graduate Edward Bawden completed in 1928 for
Morley College in London, and those of 1933 for Morecambe's Midland
Hotel, are long gone, the former destroyed by bombing in 1940 and the
latter subsequently painted over, but what remains of such projects
either in old photographs or in preliminary studies shows a young artist
bursting with imagination and originality. Already, in an approach
which was to be characteristic of Ravilious' taste for imbuing spatial
relationships with emblematic significance, we are in a somewhat curious
world where figures appear as actors in a painstakingly formalised
landscape, of which the allegorical import is just a little out of
focus. A prime example of this, a sort of masque-like arrangement, is
found in a mural panel from 1933 entitled 'November 5th.' As that title
might suggest, it is Bonfire Night, and in a row of back gardens and
surrounding streets fireworks are exploding into light. Amidst this
dazzling display of pyrotechnics, faceless or animal-headed figures run
or dance around in perspectivally-skewed spaces; the whole scene, in
this respect, resembles some medieval tableau. There is an undoubted
vitality to this work, but also the suggestion that, in some sense, we
as viewers can never fully fathom the underlying cause of such
excitement. It is this nagging
suspicion of a cognitive gap, however slight, between image and meaning
that would animate much of Ravilious' best work.
Almost
as soon as Ravilious began to study at the RCA in 1922, William
Rothenstein, its then-Principal, recognised a striking facility for
design in the young man. Indeed, Rothenstein hoped that his protégé
would play a part in helping to counteract what he saw as a predominant
contemporary taste for "rather dreary imitations of [William] Morris
designs," and replace such creative ennui with a "more alert spirit,"
one which would take "a special interest in the application of art to
craft and industry." It was largely due to such aspirations that
Ravilious and his RCA contemporaries were encouraged to develop their
skills in artistic media beyond the study of painting. So naturally did
Ravilious take to this craft and design training that, according to
Power in his chapter on 'Books and Prints,' the artist was "a printmaker
and illustrator first and a painter afterwards". Taken as an assessment
of Ravilious' talents in order of precedence, that statement, at least
for the present reviewer, is about right. In wood engravings such as
those produced in the early 1930s for The Golden Cockerell Press and the
Kynoch Press Notebook, there is a remarkable assurance of composition,
pattern and texture, such that the viewer is immediately drawn into a
singularly detailed and engrossing world. Of these examples, Ravilious'
engravings for the Kynoch Press Notebook are some of the most
intriguing, reminiscent, in their spare but dynamic concision, of the
legendary woodcut illustrations for The Pastorals of Virgil
by William Blake, as commissioned for a school text in 1821 by Dr
Robert John Thornton. Thornton originally rejected these illustrations
on their completion, but was finally persuaded to accept them by a
coterie of Blake's admirers, albeit with the introductory caveat in the
published volume that they displayed "less of art than of genius".
Samuel Palmer, for one, channelled their influence into his early work,
describing the woodcuts as "visions of little dells, and nooks, and
corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry,"
and they have gone on to be a significant if understated lodestar in
the work of several artists who have drawn on Blake as an influence, of
whom Ravilious was one.
With
such an impressive talent for engraving and design, it is no wonder
that Ravilious soon began to receive ever more high-profile commissions
from sources such as London Transport and The Board of Trade, as well as
supplying book covers for Wisden's Cricketers' Alamanac
which are still used, and the glorious--in every respect--Everyman's
Library series. By the late thirties he was branching out into coloured
lithographs for book illustrations, posters and calendars, imbuing each
with a distinctively stylised look which infuses a taste for Victoriana
with a wittily succinct sense of structure. Interestingly, Powers makes
the point that Ravilious' recourse to Victoriana as a conceptual source
for several commissions tapped into a "mildly subversive anti-Modernist
counter-culture" which had appeared in the thirties, so that, for
instance, the critic Raymond Mortimer in the Architectural Review
could urge people to use their eyes when they looked around at the
built environment in order to "realise all the banality of so much
recent architecture and design, as compared to the warmth and
individuality of the remoter past". As much as his own views might have
approximately tallied with such attitudes, Ravilious' work never slumps
into nostalgic whimsy for this hazy 'remoter past,' being far too nimble
and self-aware to get mired in reactionary sentimentality.
If,
in his illustrations and engravings, Ravilious strikes an authentic
note of vigorous originality by managing to assimilate, but not be
overwhelmed by, the ingenuity of such predecessors as Blake, Palmer, and
that relatively unsung adept of Palmer's circle, Edward Calvert, there
is a case for arguing that his paintings present something of a
different proposition. In a significant number displayed in the book
under review, Ravilious' work seems to inhabit the same region as that
occupied by contemporaries such as Spencer and the Nash brothers (Paul
and John), without ever quite managing to clearly differentiate his
approach from theirs. (This is not such a surprise, perhaps, given that
Paul Nash, in particular, took the same classes at the RCA that
Ravilious attended, seeming in the process to absorb much of his tutor's
take on the genius loci of landscape with all its connotative symbolism.) For example, in works such as Portrait of Edward Bawden (1929-30) and Prospect from an Attic
(1932), similarities with Spencer's relentlessly capricious visual
world immediately spring to mind. Not that Ravilious' paintings aren't
captivating in their own way-- many of them are, but sometimes the
agricultural scenes can seem a little too pallid and the War Artist
depictions of air and naval activity a touch too prosaic, the latter in
particular inviting unfavourable comparison with Nash's more
imaginatively resonant productions on the same themes. It would,
however, be unjust to portray this sizeable portion of Ravilious' output
as a wholesale artistic blind spot in an otherwise exemplary, and
tragically short, career. Every so often, something of that same energy
and intrigue with which he presents seemingly mundane objects and
situations in his engravings and design work can be found in his
watercolours. Take, for example, Farmhouse Bedroom (1938) and The Bedstead (1939), both scenes featuring simple, neatly made beds in deserted bedrooms, and each managing to summon up a strangely moving pathos out of an unassuming domestic scene - or Train Landscape (1939),
one of Ravilious' better-known works, with its view from a carriage
window of the Westbury Horse carved into a Wiltshire hillside, thus
prompting a suggestion of the English countryside as a sort of
subjective palimpsest.
To
be clear, though: that the best examples of Ravilious' art in Powers'
book can be found in the chapters which deal with his design work
doesn't mean that he was an inconsiderable painter in comparison with
his peers, but neither should his greater gift for design automatically
consign him to the ranks of the subsidiary talents amongst English
artists of the twentieth century. If anything, Ravilious's work in
applied decoration raised that genre to heights of ground-breaking
ingenuity, and overshadows the oeuvres of some contemporaries who never
ventured beyond paint brush and easel. Witness, for example, the designs
he produced for mugs to commemorate the coronation of George VI, which,
in their unconstrained brio, seem so far away from the prim formality
of earlier royal memorabilia, or the delightful lithograph prints for a
series of children's handkerchiefs (of all things) during the early
1940s which, in their emblematic ingenuity, are anything but trifling
ephemera. Such examples (and there are many others, including the
captivating designs that he produced to adorn Wedgewood tableware) all
demonstrate just what an important and consistently ingenious artist
Ravilious was in this field.
So
what, then, to make of Ravilious who--aged just 39--became a casualty
of war when his air sea rescue mission over Iceland in September 1942
never returned to base? Powers, in his concluding chapter, presents a
thought-provoking summary of the artist's accomplishments under the
suitably intriguing title "English Eden with 'A Biting Edge'," the
implication being that, even if Ravilious really did make a point
throughout his career of ignoring the racket that Modernism was making
in the atelier next door, that does not mean that his own creative space
was nothing more than a misty realm of maudlin English innocence.
Before we get to the gist of that argument, however, it is important to
note Powers' speculation on what kind of artist Ravilious would have
become had he lived into the post-war era, and whether he would have
ultimately been able to resist those Modernist tendencies which
eventually claimed several of his contemporaries in one form or other.
Would he have taken an increasing interest in the merits of abstraction
(particularly given his experiments in pure form in his design
commissions) or would he have turned up the volume on the surrealist
tendencies in his work which, in the body of images left to us, are all
the more effective for being deftly underplayed? Who can say--and,
ultimately, does it matter, when in some respects one of the most
stimulating aspects of Ravilious' art is the sense that what we have is a
permanent record of a formidable creative imagination, captured for
eternity in the process of unfurling itself? In effect, with this
artist, counterfactual biography is beside the point.
To
return, however, to this idea of Ravilious invoking an 'English Eden
with teeth' : inasmuch as his work possesses a quality that sets it
apart from the sludge of country garden quaintness, it is interesting to
consider how that assertion measures up with Powers' claim that
Englishness as a framing concept of style and subject matter has,
particularly over the last ten years, largely been informed by the
proliferation of Ravilious' images. Is this true? To an extent, yes,
particularly if you go into any gift shop or browse through one of those
mail-order arts and crafts accessories brochures to find regurgitated
Ravilious designs peeping out at you from amongst the embroidered
cushions and reduced-to-clear tea trays. But does this mean that the
demographic which goes in for such knickknacks is responding to what
Powers identifies as Ravilious' more dissident tendencies, or is it more
likely that the artist's most compellingly idiomatic traits have been
appropriated (and often enervated) to meet the needs of this particular
consumer sector? Whichever it is, Powers' argument that Ravilious' art,
as it originally appeared, was suffused with a disconcertingly anarchic
innocence is an intriguing riposte to those who would relegate him to
the ranks of the endearingly dotty in English art and who would
therefore feel comfortable with the way his particular 'brand' is
currently touted in heritage retail outlets up and down the land.
Furthermore, Powers also seems to emphasise the more subversive traits
of Ravilious' art as a counter to what is termed the "long tradition of
self-belittlement" which loomed over our home-grown artistic output in
the early part of the last century. It was this so-called "long
tradition" which resulted in the likes of Roger Fry, in 1934, entreating
his audience to concede that, while English painters were worthy of
"most sympathetic and worthy appreciation," they ultimately represented
"a minor school." Fortunately that attitude didn't go completely
uncontested, with W. G. Constable, the first director of the Courtauld
Institute, harrumphing a patriotic defence of his compatriots'
underestimated qualities: "unlike, say, the Italian, the Englishman has
rarely produced art for its own sake... But in the creation of things to
serve a definite purpose he has shown an ingenuity and...imaginative
sense of the possibilities of a situation, which are remarkable." Step
forward, if you would, Mr Ravilious, and show these people your
coronation mugs
However,
although Ravilious is a prime example of an English artist whose
singular design talents served him well when it came to creating things
which were, as Constable puts it, both ingenious and imaginative, there
is more to him than that. Indeed,
if what Powers maintains is correct, this is someone whose work refutes
the suggestion that 'minor school' status was all that any artist of
his generation could aspire to if they did not avidly embrace Modernism.
Ravilious offered that
refutation--so Powers' argument seems to go--by producing paintings,
etchings, and designs that depicted aspects of an anarchic Eden which,
in its suffusion with a Romantic receptivity to locality, innocence and
the ephemeral as embedded in a shared English psyche, sloughed off the
assumed authority of the European avant-garde. Whether, in the final
analysis, Ravilious' art can bear the weight of such claims is open to
question. Perhaps his body of work is just that little bit too protean
to lend itself to such ideological appropriation, but, by the same
token, it could be that very elusiveness which makes Ravilious' art so fascinating.--Mark Jones
Review of UPROAR! The First Fifty Years of the London Group 1913-1963
Exhibition at Ben Uri, The London Museum of Jewish Art, 31st Oct 2013 - 2nd March 2014
Catalogue published by Ben Uri with Lund Humphries (Ed. Sarah MacDougall and Rachel Dickson)
UPROAR!
was the most recent exhibition in a series organised by the Ben Uri
Museum on early and mid-twentieth century English art. It followed the
excellent 'Forced Journeys,' which commemorated the art of those who had
been displaced during European conflict on the period preceding World
War 2, and this exhibition, also curated by Sarah MacDougall and Rachel
Dickson, was equally well presented, and accompanied by an excellent
catalogue.
The
curators approached their task of demonstrating the sheer range and
quality of artists who belonged to the London Group by exhibiting one
work each from a representative group of fifty artists. Such a programme
inevitably leads to issues of quality and artistic importance. The list
of artists on show here reads like a Who's Who of English
twentieth-century art - Barbara Hepworth, L.S. Lowry, Henry Moore, Mark
Gertler, Walter Sickert, David Bomberg, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant,
Roger Fry, CRW Nevinson, Wyndham Lewis, and Charles Ginner are amongst
those represented. With names like these, one would expect the show to
be stunning, but sadly, while it contained some outstanding pieces, the
overall impression was one of ordinariness, and often a kind of bizarre
celebration of the English suburban middle-class, when, in fact, many of
these artists were consciously working in the opposite direction.
While
such an appraisal may seem a little extreme or even unfair, it is not
in any way a judgment that the artists shown here were ordinary or
without high artistic ambition, but simply that the works themselves are
not of the quality for which many of them are known. However, at least
two works are truly outstanding: one expected, and one a real
revelation.
The
title of the show comes from a comment that Mark Gertler made in a
letter to Dora Carrington shortly after his painting on display here, The Creation of Eve (1914), was
displayed in the London Group exhibition in November 1915. In the
letter, Gertler remarks that he was completely unprepared for the
'uproar' that the work had created. It is a wonderful painting, easily
able to stand alongside his other acknowledged great work, now in Tate
Britain, The Merry-Go-Round (1916).
In The Creation of Eve, we
find a heavily-bearded God pulling the naked Eve out of a slumbering
Adam's side. The background Garden of Eden is wild with colour and
natural shapes. A luminous multi-coloured parrot watches behind God's
back, while a small tame deer sniffs at Eve's golden hair. To our eyes
now, it is almost impossible to understand why Gertler's contemporaries
recoiled in horror from this painting, but England, November 1915 was no
place to be championing colourful modernist European artistic trends.
The picture was branded unpatriotic, as the public and many contemporary
critics were beginning to demand that British artists turn their backs
on experimentation and produce work of an explicit nationalistic nature.
Sarah MacDougall writes in the catalogue that "Gertler discovered to
his astonishment that: 'Some people in a rage had stuck a label on the
belly of my poor little 'Eve' with 'Made in Germany' written on it!"
The
poignancy of this painting is all too clear to us now. An ideal world,
God's very own Garden of Eden, will be taken from Adam by the duplicity
of the creature that God is creating from him. It is a painting of a
doomed paradise, a world of peace and plenty which will be unattainable
by humans after the Fall. The parallels with 1915 are obvious. The
protagonists, Britain and Germany, were complicit in the destruction of
their own earthly paradise and the peaceful co-existence of their
territories.
By
November 1915, the two countries were locked in the most destructive
conflict that the world has ever seen, and the early optimism on both
sides had slowly given way to the realisation that the war had developed
into a bloody stalemate. The summer of 1915 had seen the sinking of the
Lusitania, the American passenger liner, which had cost
the lives of nearly 1, 200 passengers and crew, and ultimately led to
America joining the war. By November the mood in the country was sombre
and increasingly patriotic, if not jingoistic. Gertler, an ardent
pacifist, vehemently opposed the war and his later, above-mentioned work
The Merry-Go-Round was one of the definitive protest works of the period. The Creation of Eve was, however, Gertler's first response to the tragic events unfolding in Europe.
Another
exceptional work is by an artist who has suffered considerable neglect.
Dorothy Mead was the first female President of the London Group,
elected in 1971 and remaining in office until she died in 1975. In the
early 1940s she met David Bomberg, and became one of his many students
at the Borough between 1945 and 1951. This self-portrait, painted in
1960, shows just how much she had absorbed his ideas. The paint is
applied in thick swathes of colour. Her eyes, one black, the other
orange, stare blankly out of the canvas, while the shape of her hair and
the yellow surrounding are reminiscent of an ancient Greek warrior's
helmet. The whole effect is both unsettling and reassuring. She stares
directly at the viewer with the confidence of an assured artist who is
in complete control of her medium. It is a marvellous self-portrait
which alone would be worth the price of admission (overlooking the fact
that entry to this exhibition was free!)
In contrast with these outstanding works, there are disappointments. The Sickert Portrait of Cicely Hey (1922-23)
seems to be a hastily-constructed work which does nothing to enhance
the reputation of this wonderful artist. Vanessa Bell's Apples (1916-17) is a poor imitation of Cezanne's great still-life works, and while Duncan Grant's Window, South of France (1928)
has decorative qualities borrowed from the likes of Matisse or Dufy, it
resonates with the mores of traditional English landscape painting.
When one considers what else was going on in Europe in the late 1920s,
with Paul Klee and the others at the Bauhaus, for example, or even the
move towards abstraction by English artists such as Paul Nash, these
works seem locked into a traditional dead-end of conventional subjects
which pleased critics and dealers alike, but which did not seek to
challenge in any way. This is a continuing theme, and is probably
inevitable when putting together an exhibition of individual works by
fifty different artists.
The Lowry painting Burford Church
(1948) seems to encapsulate the problems which confront the visitor to
this exhibition. Here is an artist whom many regard highly, and whose
reputation has been greatly enhanced by the recent major retrospective
at the Tate, yet this dull work is exactly that--dull. It has nothing of
the vigour and poignancy of his imagined post-war landscapes, and is a
reminder of how uneven this artist's work could be. A cream-coloured sky
envelopes a darker cream street scene, with the unremarkable church in
the centre of the design. Scattered around the street and road are
typical Lowry figures, sketchily outlined in mostly drab colours, the
deep red of one only emphasising the mundaneness of the others. First
shown in the London Group exhibition of 1951, this is a disappointing,
bland example of work from an artist who was about to embark on the most
productive period of his career, following his retirement as a rent
collector.
The
legacy of the London Group is captured by this exhibition, although
this is almost certainly an accidental result of this recounting of the
story. Founded as a response to the seeming exclusivity and conservatism
of the Royal Academy and the New English Art Club, the Group sought to
include all the artists who wished to exhibit with them. Such an
ambition was admirable, but as so many disparate artists were grouped
together, it soon became clear--as this exhibition graphically
illustrates--that they lacked cohesion or commonality of purpose. If we
consider other groupings of artists, the Pre-Raphaelites for example, or
even the NEAC, there was at least common ground at the start, even if
the artists may later have had their differences.
The
exhibition ends at 1963, and the story of the London Group from that
point on is not a positive one. For many years it held no exhibitions at
all, and, as Wendy Baron states in her introduction, "without premises
of its own, regular open submission exhibitions have been difficult to
organise." So we are left with an uneven experience. The show was
expertly curated, and the catalogue is admirable, but such expertise
cannot cover up the fact that the London Group could never make the
claim that its members—at least on the basis of the works shown here--
were at the forefront of mid-twentieth century art in this country.--Paul Flux
