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Spring 2014

Art


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

Copyright © Mark Jones 2014.



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

Copyright © Paul Flux 2014


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