Wanted: Good Home for John Piper Mural

John Piper, An Englishman's Home (section), 1951 (Liss Fine Art)

 

Before street art there were murals, and in 20th century Britain numerous public and corporate buildings were decorated inside and out. From Rex Whistler's wall paintings in the dining room at Tate Britain to the Gordon Cullen mural at Greenside Primary School in Hammersmith, murals were a significant feature of our everyday cultural life; there's an evocative piece by Ben Pentreath on the subject here.

At the more humdrum end of the scale we have a mural at the end of our road in Bristol, a massive picture of a balloon floating over the landscape; it's painted on the side of a pub overlooking a green and, like murals everywhere, it is gradually fading. The Twentieth Century Society is currently campaigning to preserve what it can of the thousand-plus murals painted in the decades after World War Two.

An Englishman's Home fills one wall of the gallery at 22 Old Bond St

Given our climate and the upheavals of the past century it isn't surprising that so many murals have disappeared, but some have survived. Among the stunning pictures on show at the Fine Art Society are several large works commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain and painted on panels rather than directly onto walls. There were no doubt good practical reasons for this, but one perhaps unforeseen result is that the murals have been preserved.

There are dramatic pieces by Peter Lanyon, Edward Bawden, Barbara Jones and Alan Sorrell, but the mural that really steals the show is John Piper's epic architectural painting, 'An Englishman's Home'. As you can see from my rather poor photos, this is a fabulously huge picture, painted in oils on 42 panels. Exhibited in 1951 it subsequently languished in an Essex barn for years before being displayed for the Festival of Britain anniversary in 2011.

Right hand end with Brighton-Aquatints-style rooftops, chair included for scale

As the archetypal Romantic Modern, Piper has been enjoying a resurgence in popularity in recent years. But although good paintings from the first half of his career are hard to come by and expensive, no institution has yet come forward to buy 'An Englishman's Home'. This seems rather odd to me. Given the quality of the mural, its historical significance, its beauty and the standing of the artist who made it, I'd have imagined that art museums would be desperate to get their hands on those 42 panels.

Why has nobody come running, chequebook in hand? And how, if no major institution gets behind modern British murals, are the rest of us to be persuaded that it's worth preserving those pictures that still adorn the walls of schools, hospitals, restaurants and village halls around the country?

FFI: Fine Art Society
Twentieth Century Society

Win 'Ravilious: Submarine'!

Photo of 'Ravilious: Submarine' at the Bristol City Docks by Dru Marland

Since 2006 the Mainstone Press has published ten books. 'Ravilious: Submarine' is the tenth, but can you name the other nine? If you think you can, send the list of titles to info@themainstonepress.com before Monday 25th February. The first three correct answers out of the hat will win a copy of 'Ravilious: Submarine'.

There's more information on the book below and here.

27.2.13 Congratulations to the three winners and thankyou everyone who entered - watch the Facebook page for future competitions.

A Lost World Rediscovered: 20th Century Murals at the Fine Art Society

Colin Gill, Allegro, 1921 (FAS London/Liss Fine Art)

Around 90% of the murals painted in Britain in the last century have been lost; the work of some artists, notably Eric Ravilious, has suffered so badly from neglect, bomb damage and what have you that only photographs and studies survive. The remaining murals, meanwhile, languish in obscurity. I had no idea, despite living in Bristol, that there's a fabulous painted ceiling by Thomas Monnington in our post-war Council House. Murals tend, by their very nature, to be fixed to a particular place, and if you never visit that place you're unlikely to see the painting.

So how, I wondered when I heard about the Fine Art Society's new exhibition of 20th century British Murals and Decorative Painting (in association with Liss Fine Art), do you go about putting on a mural show? In 1969 the Hayward Gallery held an exhibition of frescoes rescued from damp and crumbling buildings in Florence; these pictures were removed in ingenious ways from the walls on which Renaissance artists had painted them and transported around the world. Would something similar happen here?

Mary Adshead, An English Holiday: The Village Inn (detail), 1928 (FAS London/Liss Fine Art)

The short answer, judging from the exuberant catalogue, is no. The works on display are either studies for wall paintings - which vary from small watercolours to large-scale oil paintings - or murals painted on canvas or wooden panels. So, for example, we have two beautiful pictures painted by Mary Adshead in 1928 for Lord Beaverbrook, part of a series called 'An English Holiday'; these large-scale oils were designed to fill the walls of the press tycoon's dining room, but in the end he cancelled the commission, supposedly because a friend persuaded him that he was bound to fall out with the various grandees who had modelled for the paintings, and then be stuck with them every night at dinner.

There are some well known pieces here, including John Piper's 42-panel epic 'An Englishman's Home', which he painted for the 1951 Festival of Britain, and Edward Bawden's 'The English Pub' (1949-50), which spent a quarter century adorning the First Class Lounge of the SS Oronsay. But you'll also find plenty of delightful surprises. I'm looking forward to seeing John Armstrong's design for the Telecinema Mural (also painted for the Festival) and Barbara Jones' astonishing 3-panel picture 'Out in the Hall', which features a giant bear standing in a hallway the walls of which are bright yellow with a design of large white polka dots.

Alan Sorrell, Working Boats, 1951 (FAS London/Liss Fine Art)

This is one of the murals discussed in depth in a new book published by Sansom & Company to coincide with the exhibition: 'British Murals and Decorative Painting, 1920-1970'. I haven't seen it yet, but it sounds wonderful, with an array of experts each focusing on a particular piece: Ruth Artmonsky on Barbara Jones, David Fraser Jenkins on Piper and so on. I'm interested to read what Alan Powers has to say about Alan Sorrell's delightful mural 'Working Boats from Around the British Coast' (1951), which includes the Norfolk Wherry but not, I was sad to see, the Severn Trow. With Stanley Spencer and Rex Whistler also featured, this book sounds like a must-have.

FFI: www.faslondon.com
www.lissfineart.com
www.sansomandcompany.co.uk

'Ravilious: Submarine': First Pictures!

The traditional lo-fi photo shoot on the kitchen table... Very excited to see 'Ravilious: Submarine', which has been beautifully printed and bound in, respectively, Norwich and London.

For further information, please contact the publishers at www.themainstonepress.com.

Engraved Letters by Eric Gill

As well as being the inventor of Gill Sans and Perpetua, Eric Gill was a prolific wood engraver. The letters on this page, engraved in 1923, were intended perhaps for use in a book. View this and other wood engravings by the artist at Tate Britain, by appointment.

Or, if you're in Los Angeles between now and March, you could go along to the exhibition 'Eric Gill: Iconographer' at the Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University.

Art, Archaeology and the Modern Mind

Figure carved from mammoth ivory, 26k years old, Dolni Vestonici, Czech (BM)

I love the idea that people 40,000 years ago had modern minds, although the definition of 'modern' adopted by the British Museum for its amazing exhibition of Ice Age art is fairly broad. Writing in the latest issue of British Archaeology magazine, curator Jill Cook puts it thus:

The premise is that complex language and all forms of art require a modern brain, like our own, with a well-developed region at the front to power minds capable of externalising imaginative and abstract thoughts.

Some might argue that mind and brain are rather different, but perhaps I'm just being picky. The show sounds unmissable, bringing together as it does Ice Age artworks from umpteen European museums and displaying them alongside work by Matisse, Mondrian and Henry Moore. I've no doubt that treating cave paintings and carved objects of the distant past as pieces of art, rather than as archaeological finds, will help to break down barriers. My feeling, in the face of minimal evidence, is that we probably share more in common with our distant ancestors than we imagine. We've been conditioned by ideas of progress to assume that people in the past were less clever and more barbaric than we are; the sight of a deer beautifully drawn on the wall of a cave (an experience to be recreated within the exhibition) makes us think again, as do the kind of carvings that will be on show.

Replica of Lespugue figurine, 25k years old, France

In the same article Jill talks about the inspiration 20th century artists found in ancient artefacts, citing the example of Picasso and the curvaceous figurine popularly known as the Venus of Lespugue. Artists had always looked to the past for guidance, but the idea of looking to the distant past was a more modern phenomenon, part of a wider interest in the prehistoric that is celebrated in a second British Museum-sponsored exhibition opening this week.

You probably won't have to queue as long to get into the Quadriga Gallery, an exhibition space run by English Heritage and located, bizarrely, inside the Wellington Arch near Hyde Park Corner, but I think 'The General, the Scientist and the Banker: the Birth of Archaeology and the Battle for the Past' sounds fascinating (if a little long-winded):

In 1859 two extraordinary events changed the way people considered human existence: a flint hand axe was found in a gravel quarry level with bones of extinct animals, and Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s big idea and the discovery of the axe broke the Biblical version of history. Opening with the book and the rarely seen axe, this exhibition tells the story of what happened next - as archaeological pioneers battled to save Britain’s great prehistoric sites from destruction.

Paul Nash, Silbury Hill, c1935 (Tate)

Naturally this exhibition is also written up in British Archaeology. We learn that the initial Ancient Monuments Protection Act, passed in 1882, achieved very little, and that the business of preserving old sites and buildings really took off 30 years later, accelerating rapidly after World War One. A widespread, respectful fascination for the prehistoric seems to be a 20th and 21st century phenomenon - a feature, perhaps, of the modern mind.

Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious were both fascinated by ancient monuments, as they were by downland landscapes more generally. I've written about this here and also, more recently, for British Archaeology magazine. For this very issue (No 129), in fact. I have to say - and this is no thanks to me - it looks great, particularly the photos of Rav's impossible-to-photograph White Horse dummy. Wonderful.

Incidentally, the Wiltshire Heritage Museum is fund-raising to cover its purchase of the White Horse dummy at auction last year. Find out more here.

Now Booking! Emery Walker: Greenside Arts Lecture

Berlin, December 1981

I just found these pictures in a box. They're from a school trip to Berlin just before Christmas in 1981, when I was fifteen. My memories of the trip, which was not very long, are much more convivial than these pictures suggest; the moment I remember most vividly was meeting some girls in a cafe in East Berlin and asking them if they wanted to 'escape to the West'. The answer was an emphatic 'no', not because they were frightened (I don't think) but because they had no need to flee.

We spent one day in East Berlin, which was empty and dull, apart from the cafe with the girls, where you could spend your East German currency (you had to buy some on entry) on Irish coffee. Otherwise we were in the West, which I remember being snowy and more decadent that anywhere I'd been previously. No one seemed to care what you did or how old you were, which suited us just fine.

I wonder who got that bit of the Wall...

I went back to Berlin in 1991 and have some pictures somewhere. I stayed in a flat off Alexanderplatz, and talked to a woman about life after reunification, when the certainties of East Germany (zero unemployment, state-run careers) were replaced with the dog-eat-dog world of the free market. As a classical musician, she was brilliantly trained in everything except the art of competing for work and, understandably, she wasn't very happy...

Graves of those who died trying to cross the Berlin Wall. 'Unbekannt' means unknown.

The Iron Curtain, viewed from a train between Hamburg and Berlin

When did the Second World War end, exactly?

Spoilt for Choice: Modern British Art in 2013

Dora Carringon, Lytton Strachey, 1916 (National Portrait Gallery)

The Lowry show at Tate Britain may be the big news of the year, but there are plenty of other treats in store for lovers of those once-maligned media, painting and sculpture. International stars include Lichtenstein, Klee, George Bellows, Picasso and of course Manet, while on the home front Paul Nash is set to feature prominently.

A thorough preview of the year's entertainment was posted at the beginning of the month by the ever-vigilant people at Culture 24, and it makes mouth-watering reading. In London we have David Inshaw at the Fine Art Society (April), Laura Knight at the National Portrait Gallery (July-Oct) and Whistler (James not Rex) at the Dulwich Portrait Gallery (autumn).

Before that, Dulwich plays host to 'A Crisis of Brilliance', an exhibition based on David Haycock's wonderful group biography of five artists who studied at the Slade shortly before World War One. Alongside Nash (whose solo show at Dulwich was a sensation) the book features CRW Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Dora Carrington; the exhibition also includes work by David Bomberg.

David Inshaw, The Badminton Game - visit David's London show in April

Outside London, Nash features again in a second pithy-remark-related exhibition, namely 'An Outbreak of Talent' at the Fry Art Gallery (March-June). This was Nash's own description of the talented group of students lured to the Royal College of Art in the early 1920s by director William Rothenstein, an intake that included Ravilious and Bawden, Edward Burra, Barnett Freedman and Enid Marx. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing some of Freedman's work...

I don't think the Fry is showing work by Barbara Hepworth or Henry Moore, the two biggest stars of the RCA firmament, but you can see the latter paired with Rodin at the Henry Moore Foundation (March-Oct) and with Francis Bacon at the Ashmolean (Sept-Jan).

Elsewhere we have the centenary exhibition of William Scott at Tate St Ives (Jan-May), continuing on to the Hepworth in Wakefield and the Ulster Museum, Belfast. Other touring shows include a major exhibition of Land Art, which kicks off at Southampton City Art Gallery in May, and 'Turner and Constable: Sketching from Nature', which premiers at Compton Verney in July. Or should that be Turner vs. Constable?

William Scott at Tate St Ives, the Hepworth and Ulster Museum

Group shows include 'Pop and Abstract' at the National Museum, Cardiff (March-Sept), which explores British art in the 1960s, and 'The Ingram Collection: The Colourful Lives of Artists' at the Lightbox in Woking. As Culture 24 put it, 'With a cast list including Dora Carrington, Eric Gill, and Stanley Spencer, it should be quite an eye opener'.

FFI: Culture 24

Robert Gibbings: Wood Engravings

Clear Waters, early 1920s

Whale Leaping, 1935

Scouting for Whales, 1935

Harpooning, 1935

Cormorant, 1937

Seagull, 1934

A prolific wood engraver, author and publisher (as owner of the Golden Cockerel Press in the 1920s and early 30s), Robert Gibbings (1889-1958) was the epitome of the Romantic Modern. He published more than seventy limited edition books during his tenure at the press, commissioning Eric Gill, Eric Ravilious, John Nash and numerous other artists to illustrate them with wood engravings.

By the late 1930s he was becoming popular as an author who illustrated his own books with sometimes quirky illustrations. He had a particular penchant for rivers, and had a wartime hit with 'Sweet Thames Run Softly'; the recent reissue by Little Toller reproduces the wood engravings very well. The pictures above are from 'The Wood Engravings of Gibbings' by Thomas Balston (1949 ed).

Just for fun, here's the extraordinary harpooning picture fulfilling its purpose...

Only 275 copies of this book were printed, so it's rather expensive (sigh). I love to see commissioned wood engravings in their intended context; they work so well with text.

A Bookplate Can Change Your Life

My life changed in a small but significant way over Christmas when I became the proud owner of a bookplate, made by my mother-in-law. She is a talented artist who paints and makes painted canvas floor rugs, and on this occasion she designed a new font for my initials. It's jaunty, modern and generally fun, and I love it. I'm supposed to be doing my taxes but instead I'm going through the bookshelves, pulling out books and sticking labels in them.

Happily for someone as clumsy as me the bookplates are self-adhesive, otherwise I'd be getting covered in glue as I followed instructions like these. As it is, I can just about line up a label and stick it in the right place.

Where my life has changed (albeit in a small way) is in the way I think about books. Generally I've always had a pragmatic attitude towards them, finding what I need in libraries or second hand bookshops and worrying about the content rather than the book itself. On my desk at the moment I have a mound of battered tomes, dug out from the depths of the Bristol Central Library by the ever-helpful staff, alongside a few of my own books: 'England in Particular', 'Mrs Grieve's Modern Herbal' and Robert Harling's 'Engravings of Eric Ravilious'.

Having a bookplate is making me look again at the books I own. Some of them, I realise now, have been around a long time. My copy of 'The Shock of the New' has a label pasted inside it to remind me that I was given it as a school history prize in 1984. My choice of Robert Hughes' book was not a popular one with the authorities. They complained that it wasn't a history book, but thirty years on it does look like one...

I was always taught not to write in books, but I think this is wrong. A book is a conversation between writer and reader, not a monologue, and sometimes a particular passage demands a comment, just as it's impossible sometimes to sit quietly through films and TV shows. Who could have watched the first episode of the new Borgen without crying out 'It's the Dad from "The Killing!"' or 'Hey, isn't he the real Staatsminister?!'

Books serve as a record of our lives in a way that nothing else does. My copy of 'Ulysses' reminds me that I was for a short time an ardent post-structuralist, puritanical and not much fun. A copy of the Taschen book on 'Expressionism' has pages missing where I cut favourite pictures out to decorate my room as a student. 'The Rattle Bag' has a note on the title page:

Jamestown Rd - corner - blue/glass - opposite - white terrace - for sale - end one - 10.00 Fri - fair haired/beard

Presumably this was an important message once upon a time, but who knows what the rendez-vous with the bearded man was about? Old books - the kind that have really been used by their owners, rather than stuck on shelves - often have strange little notes in them, to go with the bookplates. We'll come back to the art of the bookplate, but for now there are some lovely examples on the Letterology blog - old and new.