Boutiques! Boutiques! Boutiques!

'Gramophones', from Boutiques, illustrated by Lucien Boucher

Exciting news for lovers of astonishing books: Tim Mainstone has just published the third in his remarkable trilogy of books celebrating both a golden age of illustration and a glorious epoch in the history of shopping. Details of the Boutiques trilogy are available on the Mainstone Press website, but if you want to get a real sense of what these three beautiful volumes are like, why not come along to our special launch event on 12 October? It's at Maggs Bros, the antiquarian bookseller, on London's Bedford Square, and starts at 6pm.

Each book takes as its starting point an innovative illustrated book of shops published in Paris in the 1920s: Boutiques (1925) and Boutiques de la Foire (1926), with colour lithographs by Lucien Boucher, and Boutiques Litteraires, with illustrations by Henri Guilac (1925). Each Mainstone edition features captions by Andrew Stewart and an array of historical photos, archive materials and artworks brought together in typically elegant, witty style by designers Webb & Webb. Literary flaneuse Lauren Elkin wrote an accompanying essay for the Guilac book, while fairground historian Pascal Jacob did the same for Boutiques de la Foire and I wrote on the first Boucher book. Print aficionado Neil Philip provided for each volume a succinct print and production history.

To me, these books are primarily guides for the time-travelling armchair flaneur: books to marvel at and dream in. It's important to note, however, just how little has been written about the supremely talented Boucher before now, in any language. Most of the material I drew on in my essay (with help from my A-level French) was unearthed by Tim Mainstone, who made it is his mission to discover every known fact, story or piece of gossip about this brilliant precursor to Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. In fact Tim spent years trawling obscure databases and publications for information not only about Boucher but also about publisher Marcel Seheur and - last, but definitely not least - the brilliant author Pierre Mac Orlan, whose waspish prose poems add a strange, dark mystery to the original book. They are included in the new edition, alongside translations by Shaun Whiteside.

Tim has published some wonderful books over the past two decades, but I'm not sure anything compares in scope, ambition and sheer wonderment to the Boutiques trilogy. If you'd like to see this work of art for yourself and hear a bit more about how it was created, come along on the 12th. You're in for a treat.

 

Easy Listening! The Improbable Adventures of Edward Bawden

Welcome to my second podcast, made despite the sonic difficulties caused by sharing a house with a lively dog (woofing) and various humans aged 17 to... never mind (laughter, shrieks, sounds of conflict), and by living in the middle of a city. It's a lot quieter than normal, but not as quiet as a recording studio. Obviously. Anyway, if you would like to have a listen to 'The Improbable Adventures of Edward Bawden', here are some images to go with it...

Edward Bawden, Sahara wallpaper, c1928-30

Judith Schalansky, Atlas of the Remote Islands, 2009

Edward Bawden, Brochure for Imperial Airways, 1934

Edward Bawden, jacket design, 1928

Edward Bawden, Cairo - the Citadel, 1940 (Tate)

Edward Bawden, Mahammed Khalafalla, Omdurman, 1940 (IWM)

Edward Bawden, Scium Basci, Tesfalidet Ghidai: Polizia Africana Italianna, Asmara, 1941 (IWM)

Edward Bawden, The Artist's Tent, Mersah Matruh, 1942 (IWM)

Edward Bawden, Tobruk Harbour, 1942 (IWM)

Survivors from the RMS Laconia, 1942

Edward Bawden, Private Dunning, 1943, (IWM)

Edward Bawden, Palace & Govt Buildings, Hail, Arabia, 1944 (IWM)

Edward Bawden, View of the Tigris, Baghdad, 1943-44 (IWM)

Edward Bawden, A Priest, Yusef, & an Assyrian Officer, 1943-44 (IWM

Edward Bawden, Interior of Shaikh Muzhir al-Gassid's Mudhif, 1944 (IWM)

Edward Bawden, Shaikh Muzhir al-Gassid, 1944 (IWM)

Edward Bawden, Refugees at Udine, Italy, 1945 (IWM)

Edward Bawden, design for Gulliver's Travels, 1965

Edward Bawden, The Baghdad Showboat, 1944 (Govt Art Collection)

Symposium - An Outbreak of Talent

Paul Nash photographed by Lance Sieveking, 1924

“Ten years ago I was teaching at the Royal College of Art. I was fortunate to be there during an outbreak of talent, and can remember at least eight men and women who have made names for themselves since then in a variety of different directions; in Painting, Edward Burra; Applied Design, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, and Eric Ravilious; Textiles, Enid Marx; Pottery, Bradon (sic), also William Chappel in Stage Design and Barbara Ker-Seymer in Photography.” 

Paul Nash writing in Signature magazine, November 1935 

Paul Nash only taught part-time at the Royal College of Art during the academic year 1924/25, but he greatly influenced the careers of some of those whom he mentored. In this Symposium we hope to find out what it was that Nash found in these young artists which caused him him to single them out ten years later.

I'll be talking about Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden... The Symposium is being run by the Fry Art Gallery, but it will be held at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge on 6 July 2019 - info and booking form on the Fry website.

Ravilious & Bawden at the Art Workers' Guild

Neil Jennings has gathered together an intriguing group of pictures for his next exhibition at the Art Workers' Guild in deepest Bloomsbury. Alongside drawings, engravings and lithos by Ravilious and Bawden he's showing more recent work by two artists whose shared skills and interests make them almost the heirs of Eric and Edward.

Edward Bawden, The Economy Committee, 1930 (copyright artist's estate)

Ian Beck and Glynn Boyd Harte were close friends until the latter's death in 2003, and both worked on either side of the (unnecessary) line between fine art and commercial design, as Ian continues to do.

Eric Ravilious, Introductory Lithograph, Submarine Series, 1941

For people who don't know the Art Workers' Guild I recommend a visit anyway. It's one of London's hidden delights. Besides Neil's exhibitions always seem to offer a good balance of the familiar and the less familiar - and they're always fun.

Ian Beck, Communication, 1981 (artist's copyright)

Glynn Boyd Harte painted the watercolour below shortly before his death. If I remember rightly, in fact, he had already survived one scare, and took the opportunity provided by his reprieve to produce a whole series of still life pictures like this - nobody else saw the world quite like he did.

Glynn Boyd Harte, Etrilles, 2003

Edward Bawden's Greenhouse

Edward Bawden, My vegetable love (aka The Greenhouse), 1932, Manchester Art Gallery (artist estate)

Cucumber plants fill a greenhouse, pressing so close together there is barely room to squeeze between them. Darkly veined, variegated and disorderly, they seem more alive than they ought to be, an impression enhanced by the contrast between the twisting plants and the pale, angular timbers of the greenhouse roof. Whereas the plants in Eric Ravilious’s later paintings of greenhouses seem to be trapped for ever in a particular moment, these cucumber plants appear to be growing before our eyes; at any moment they might burst out of the picture. Ravilious was, by his own admission, no gardener. Bawden, on the other hand, cared so passionately about horticulture that he rushed home from the Private View of his Zwemmer exhibition to unpack a parcel of plants sent to him by his old friend Cecilia Dunbar Kilburn. It was perhaps through his love for all things vegetable that he met Mr Clapson, the local market gardener who owned this greenhouse and tended these vigorous cucumber plants.

This is an extract from 'The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden', coming soon from The Mainstone Press.

Coming Soon! The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden

Edward Bawden, My heart, untravel'd, fondly turns to thee (aka Derelict Cab), 1933, Kettering Museum & Art Gallery (© artist estate)

Widely admired today as an illustrator and printmaker, Edward Bawden (1903-89) is hardly a ‘forgotten artist’. Yet one aspect of his career has been neglected until now: his role in the 1930s as a critically-acclaimed modern painter.

The purpose of The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden is to set the record straight by bringing together the largest collection of the artist’s pre-war watercolours ever assembled. Most were originally exhibited at one or other of Bawden’s major solo shows – at the Zwemmer Gallery in 1933 and the Leicester Galleries five years later – exhibitions that impressed critics and delighted collectors.

It has taken three years to assemble this remarkable collection of pictures, many of which were, as the title of the book suggests, lost. Privately-owned artworks can be hard to find after eighty years, but in this case even paintings in public collections were sometimes hidden thanks to Bawden’s choice of obscure fragments of verse or concise descriptions of time and place as titles for his work. These were often replaced by descriptive names. Thus (for example) ‘My heart, untravel’d, fondly turns to thee’ became ‘Derelict Cab’, making the researcher’s task rather tricky.

The remarkable quest to find and identify Bawden’s pre-war watercolours is described by publisher Tim Mainstone in an amusing, informative essay, which forms the third part of this richly illustrated volume. The Mainstone Press has once again teamed up with James Russell, author of the popular series ‘Ravilious in Pictures’ (and curator of the 2015 blockbuster ‘Ravilious’), who sets the ball rolling with an introductory essay exploring Bawden’s life and career in the 1930s. Scholarship is leavened with humour here, as it is in the wide-ranging captions accompanying the most important element of the book: the watercolours themselves.

These are grouped by exhibition, with additional sections of works from the mid-30s and from the decade’s end. Having photographed many of the watercolours in high resolution specifically for the book, we have chosen a format that allows us to maximise the size of the images. There’s a good reason for this. As one critic observed in the 1930s, these are paintings that deserve more than to be looked at. They deserve to be looked into.

The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden will be available soon from The Mainstone Press. For further information, please contact the publisher.