To Chichester by Choo-choo

RB Kitaj, The Rise of Fascism, 1979-80 (Tate/Artist's Estate)

Last Thursday I went to Chichester on the train, a journey that combined beautiful scenery with various human irritations. Did the conductors (there were two on the same train) have to be quite so aggressive in their ticket-checking? Was the woman sitting behind me trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the longest monologue about the minutiae of a person's everyday life? 

The train went via Bath and Bradford-on-Avon to Warminster, Salisbury and Southampton, crossing a region that roughly equates both to old Wessex and to Southern Command during World War II. Just beyond Warminster we passed an army depot with rows of heavily armoured, desert-brown vehicles, the austere hills of Salisbury Plain rising behind. We trundled along the Wylye Valley and through Wilton, where two artistically minded generals, Auchinleck and Alexander, held the post of Commander-in-Chief, Southern Command, one after another.

Their Camouflage Officer was Edward Seago, painter, inventor of a new concealment material made from horsehair and subsequently a life-long friend of both men.  I wonder whether he was involved with the crazy scheme to camouflage chalk railway cuttings by spraying them with black ink, an experiment Eric Ravilious was invited to record but which was abandoned too soon for him to do so.

Paul Delvaux, A Siren in Full Moonlight, 1940 (Southampton City Art Gallery)

The spire of Salisbury Cathedral reminded me of two other artists, Rex and Laurence Whistler, the former killed in action in Normandy, the latter responsible for his beautiful memorial in etched glass which you can see in the cathedral. When we reached Southampton I braved a gale to visit the City Art Gallery in the fabulous 1930s Civic Centre, and found some lovely things on display. A Delvaux mermaid stole the scene in the main room, while a moody painting of a forest by Elizabeth Magill showed that the Romantic tradition in British landscape painting is alive and well.

Chichester Cathedral - peregrine falcons nest in top right turret

I also had a look at Paul Nash's painting 'The Archer', which still seems a bit contrived but has a haunting quality shared by the material on display at my final destination, the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. While Southampton seems to have been constructed by a giant armed with children's building blocks, central Chichester retains its 18th century or even Medieval scale. When Daniel Defoe visited he noted that the city's population could easily fit into the cathedral, and that may well still be true. 

'What will survive of us is love' - The Arundel Tomb

Unusually for a British church, the cathedral doubles as an art gallery, with a painting by Graham Sutherland standing on the altar in one chapel, while elsewhere a stained glass window by Chagall casts a ruby glow on the stone floor and gigantic tapestries dazzle the choir. There are glorious medieval reliefs carved in stone, Philip Larkin's favourite tomb and even a Roman mosaic; few churches can give one such a strong sense of continuous human history - something the vandals of the Reformation didn't think too much about.

Graham Sutherland, Noli me Tangere, 1960

But the cathedral was an added bonus. My real reason for coming to Chichester was to talk about Paul Nash at Pallant House, a gallery that, like Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, champions 20th century British painting and sculpture. The main collection inhabits a characterful 18th century house with small, well-proportioned rooms that might have been designed to show the kind of art on display. A couple are currently filled with Barbara Hepworth's hospital drawings, but otherwise this is a treasure trove of pictures by neglected artists.

Pallant House

Where else would you see a painting by Frances Hodgkins, the New Zealander who was one of Britain's best-known modern artists in the early 1940s? Where, outside Kettle's Yard, might you find pictures by Ben and Winifred Nicholson side by side, so that the similarity between the two is obvious? Christopher Wood is there too, and Alfred Wallis, and Ivon Hitchens, and the Nash brothers. At the end of my talk someone kindly pointed out to me that there was an Eileen Agar self-portrait in an upstairs room.

The main attraction just now is an RB Kitaj retrospective, which you can read all about here. I think I enjoyed most the more straightforward pastel drawings, which show both wonderful draughtsmanship and a disquieting sense of character and atmosphere.

Paul Nash, by Clare Neilson (Pallant)

But I was there because of Paul Nash and his patron and friend Clare Neilson. Her collection of his books, letters and photographs was recently given to Pallant House, and is currently on display. If you're a Nash fan you have to see this. This isn't a curator or critic's interpretation of Nash's career but an intimate portrait of the artist; alongside wood engravings, illustrations and books - 'Places', 'Room and Book' and others - are hand-written letters and photos, stuck to pages from faded albums, showing him playfully posing with standing stones. 

This is the artist I was looking for when I researched 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream', and it was a treat to see him brought to life in this beautifully presented exhibition.

FFI: Pallant House Gallery

An Outbreak of Talent at the Fry Art Gallery

Edward Bawden, Costume Design for The Tempest, 1933, Fry Art Gallery

If we could hitch a ride in the Tardis back to the 1930s we would return with a rather different view of the decade's art and culture. Not that too many people have much of a view at all, so brainwashed are we into believing that British art snoozed through a long period of under-achievement that began with the death of Turner and ended with the post-war success of Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and David Hockney.

It is true that interwar British art was for the most part a modest business, unsurprisingly perhaps given the economic vagaries of the time. Artists painted the artwork for posters or beavered away in other areas of industrial design. They produced murals (now mostly vanished) and wood engravings (now mostly hidden in old books and obscure archives) and worked in the under-appreciated medium of watercolour.

Edward Burra, Hop Pickers Who Have Lost Their Mothers, 1924, Fry Art Gallery

Few achieved international recognition at the time. The movers and shakers of the art world were continental Europeans, whose aggressive modernism mirrored political upheavals. In Britain, the well-meaning socialists of the Artists International instead pioneered auto-lithography as a means of sharing art with the masses, and bought ambulances for Republican soldiers in Spain.

One British artist who won international respect - Magritte named him 'master of the object' - was Paul Nash, and his influence on the period, and on British art more generally, is highlighted in an exhibition that opens at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden this weekend.

Paul Nash, Poster for British Industries Fair, 1935, London Transport Museum

'An Outbreak of Talent' was the expression used by Nash to describe the remarkable collection of artists who studied at the Royal College of Art in 1923/4, when he was employed there as a part-time tutor in the Design School. Much later, in 1935, he wrote in the magazine 'Signature':

Ten years ago I was teaching at the Royal College of Art. I was fortunate in being 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. 

Why he failed to 'remember' the two biggest stars of the RCA firmament, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, is unclear, but it may have had something to do with the battle then raging between abstract and non-abstract artists. Ravilious and co. were very much in awe of the Yorkshire contingent, whose table in the RCA refectory was - to use an expression from another time and place - where it was at.

Edward Bawden, The Three Graces, 1928, Fry Art Gallery

Anyway, what the Fry has done - and being the Fry, no doubt done with wonderful attention to detail - is to gather together paintings, drawings and other works by the artists named, all of which were created before 1935. In other words, Nash might have seen them before passing judgment, and they may have helped him form his opinion; the inclusion of his own work will perhaps enable visitors to see paths of influence or matrices of interest.

Knowing the Fry, you can expect some lovely things by Bawden and Ravilious in particular, but I'm hoping to see work by Barnett Freedman and Enid Marx, two excellent artists we should know better. As for Nash himself, I'm always on the look-out for pictures I haven't seen before. He could turn a shopping list into a thing of mystery and elegance. As far as I'm concerned, he was the grand-daddy of the YBAs, an artist way ahead of his time. But that's another story...

FFI: Fry Art Gallery - NB always check opening times before travelling!

Three Dates for April

By a strange quirk of planning I'm doing talks on three consecutive Thursdays next month, each one rather different from the rest.

I'm delighted to be speaking at Bankside Gallery in London on April 11, at the invitation of the Royal Watercolour Society, on the subject of Eric Ravilious: Travelling Artist. This is the theme of the fourth book in the Ravilious in Pictures series (which was supposed to be a trilogy) and it's great fun to talk about. Rav was a talented letter writer with a wonderful sense of humour, so there's plenty of opportunity to go behind the scenes of his pictures and find out what he was up to, and with whom.

This talk has SOLD OUT, so apologies if you've missed out this time.

All change the following week, when (on April 18) I'm travelling to Chichester to give a talk on Paul Nash at the Pallant House Gallery. I'm excited about this one too, partly because Pallant is such a fabulous institutions and partly because my lecture coincides with an exhibition of Paul Nash prints, photographs, collage and books from a collection that once belonged to his great patron and friend Clare Neilson. It sounds as though there's some fabulous stuff in the collection, which was donated by Clare's godson Jeremy Greenwood and Alan Swerdlow, through the Art Fund, and I'm looking forward to seeing it.

My talk will be based on 'Paul Nash in Pictures: Landscape and Dream', but will focus particularly on Nash's long friendship with Clare Neilson.

It's back to Ravilious, then, for the final leg, and for me an opportunity to talk about my new book, 'Ravilious: Submarine', at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (free, but you need to book). I wanted to do this partly because NMM staff were so helpful when we were putting the book together, plus I used to live in Greenwich and walk past the Museum every day, so there's a bit of nostalgia involved! I'll be talking about both the making of the Submarine Series and about life aboard a Royal Navy submarine during World War II, so it should be fun.

A Lost Ravilious Mural

Eric Ravilious, Life in a Boarding House, from 'Ravilious: Submarine'

Given the ongoing interest in 20th century British murals I thought it would be fun to post a rare image of one of the lost murals of the period. This was one of a series of pictures painted by Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden in the refectory at Morley College for Working Men and Women, a centre for adult education across the river from Westminster. The murals were designed to offer things 'interesting to look at and intriguing to unravel for people sitting scattered about the room'.

The college, which had been founded in the previous century, had close links with the the Old Vic Theatre, so the murals had for the most part a theatrical theme. Bawden painted scenes from 'King Lear', 'The Tempest', 'As You Like It' and 'Romeo and Juliet', while Ravilious contributed scenes from Marlowe's 'Tragedy of Dr Faustus', with the Seven Sins floating down from the beams. There were pictures from Miracle Plays and obscure Elizabethan drama, interspersed with figures and symbols: a quartet of winds, a group of Harlequin figures and so on. His chief model was his former student, soon-to-be wife and future collaborator, Tirzah Garwood.

Ravilious and Bawden pose for the cameras

In February 1930 (after two years' work) the murals were officially opened by former (and future) Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. He was evidently impressed, observing that 'the one thing he felt was that the works were conceived in happiness and in joy, and the execution gave real pleasure to the artists. It was only in that spirit that any creative work could be done that was going to give pleasure to other people.'

Morley College is still going strong more than 80 years later, but the murals were destroyed when the refectory was hit by a bomb during the Blitz. Bawden subsequently returned to paint a new set of pictures, and these can be seen today.

'Life in a Boarding House' is one of many rare and unusual images featured in 'Ravilious: Submarine', published by The Mainstone Press.

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