Eric Ravilious Rediscovered: Type Tuesday at St Brides

Eric Ravilious, Alphabet design, c1937

A while ago John Walters of Eye magazine asked me if I would give a talk on the resurgence of interest in all things Ravilious. Given that the Dulwich show is about to open it's a great opportunity to explore a fascinating subject - why is Ravilious so much more popular now than he was in his lifetime? In the 1980s it was possible for a major survey of 20th century British art to leave him out completely, yet now he is viewed as an important mid-century artist. Why is this?

Some initial thoughts come to mind. Perhaps we citizens of the Facebook Age yearn for a simpler past, and find in those railway compartments and cottage rooms a suitably nostalgic escape. Perhaps - as some people believe, though I'm not one of them - Ravilious epitomises the Englishness some are so fearful of losing. More interestingly, I wonder whether there's a generational thing going on, with the 1930s now possessing some of the allure of the Edwardian or Victorian periods. But that doesn't explain why people love Ravilious and not one or other of his more famous or successful peers.

Indeed, there's no end of nostalgic English art we could all swoon over, but only one Eric Ravilious - it's something about those watercolours and designs in particular that appeals to the 21st century eye. Perhaps the real question we should be asking is why it has taken so long for the art-loving public to discover them. Was there simply a natural hiatus after the artist's premature death in 1942? Or a reaction against the 'Romantic Moderns' of the 1930s?

It's intriguing to note that Ravilious and Bawden began their careers just as several forgotten artists of the previous century were remembered. It was in the aftermath of the Great War that John Sell Cotman, Francis Towne and Samuel Palmer were taken up by a new generation, having been ignored for years. In the 1920s, as now, anxiety about the present fuelled interest in the past - in stone circles and earthworks, the buried treasure of Egypt and Sutton Hoo.

But if this helps us understand Ravilious's choice of medium and subject matter, it still doesn't bring us much closer to answering our question. Designs like the Alphabet (above) were popular enough when they first appeared, but today they have cult status. People take pilgrimages to the sites of Ravilious paintings, whether Cuckmere Haven or Great Bardfield. I meet a lot of fans when I give lectures and sign books, and they tend to be thoughtful, enthusiastic and curious to find out more. Art critics have often described the artist's work as emotionally cool or distant, but both paintings and designs seem to evoke powerful feelings in all kinds of people.

So we can think about changes in fashion, historical cycles, cultural anxieties and so on, but in the end - as with any artist - we come back to the work. There's something about those tiny engraved vignettes, those lighthouses and silent hills - something that pulls us in? But what?

Now there's a question...

I'll be doing my best to address it next Tuesday at St Brides in Fleet Street, and there will be an opportunity afterwards to have your say. Hope to see you there!

Paul Nash: Camera Man

Paul Nash, Ploughed Field and Haystacks, 1937 (copyright Tate)

Paul Nash was a very good photographer. His pictures aren't just studies for paintings, although he certainly did use them in this way. They are fully formed works of art in their own right, mesmerizing studies of objects and places that caught his eye. 

You get the feeling, looking at his canvases, that Nash used paint to say what he needed to say, rather than revelling in the medium. If anything I think he preferred the lightness and immediacy of watercolour to the weight and permanence of oil, but he was too shrewd a customer not to use the more 'serious' medium; even during periods when he was mostly painting in watercolour he would knock out an oil or two, and it is these which have ensured his reputation.

His interest lay less in particular media than in his subjects, which by the 1930s were firmly established as place and object. The mysterious power of inanimate things fascinated him as much as the peculiar qualities of certain places - like the Wittenham Clumps, to take his favourite example. To explore place and object he increasingly used a camera, partly because his poor health made it difficult for him to sketch. 

Previously he had mastered oil painting, watercolour, wood engraving, lithography and sundry other media - he was also a very good writer. In photography he found the most immediate way of communicating his ideas and feelings, and proved himself adept at using the camera's eye as an extension of his own. 

One of Nash's last peacetime projects was 'Monster Field', which grew out of his experience of encountering fallen elms in a Gloucestershire field. He took photographs, painted watercolours and oils, wrote text and eventually produced a book. It's difficult now to see why he put so much effort into this one subject, but I think he was striving to get closer and closer to the initial experience. This was conceptual art born of emotion rather than idea. (Discuss!)

Anyway, a selection of his photos is on display this week at the Art Workers' Guild, together with work by Edward Bawden, Ian Beck, Glynn Boyd Harte and Alan Powers, courtesy of Neil Jennings Fine Art. 

FFI: Art Workers Guild

Ravilious and Bawden: An Artistic Friendship

Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden Working in his Studio, tempera on board, 1930 (Royal College of Art)

In the autumn of 1922 a group of new students arrived for their first day at the Design School of the Royal College of Art, next door to the V&A. Among them were two young men from the provinces, neither yet twenty, both from chapel-going, shopkeeping families. In some ways they were very different. Famously, Edward Bawden was so shy he preferred to walk around London rather than board a bus, whereas Eric Ravilious leapt straight into the social whirl of college life. 

But as well as their background they also shared a love of the incongruous and the antique. Together with another new arrival, Douglas Percy Bliss, they became firm friends. 

A talented writer, Bliss later wrote a warm, perceptive book on Bawden, in which he described the young Edward as 'a little outside life'. He went on:

But we knew him for a genius, Eric and I. We did not laugh at him but with him. And what laughter we had! He had such odd habits. If a stranger approached him he got into reverse gear and backed away to the wall. His extraordinary innocence and ignorance of what John Bull cares about, his complete indifference to Everyman's interests, Sport, Politics, Ballet, Music, etc, all this puzzled and delighted us. It was like having a foreigner in our midst. Moreover his sense of humour transfigured every object in our daily lives.

Ravilious was also described by contemporaries throughout his life as being 'slightly somewhere else', but he shared many of 'Everyman's interests', from tennis and cricket to fancy dress parties and dances. He worked hard but had a reputation for being carefree, earning the nickname 'the Boy' for his youthful insouciance. Bawden worked constantly and didn't care who knew it. By the time they left the Royal College he was becoming established as a commercial illustrator, then came the mural commission that brought the pair to public attention for the first time.

At Morley College, across the river from Westminster, Ravilious and Bawden worked on different walls of the canteen to create an exuberant celebration of Elizabethan theatre, which was opened to widespread acclaim by Stanley Baldwin early in 1930. Not long afterwards, Bawden asked Rav to paint this portrait of him at work.

This is what I wrote about it for the Dulwich catalogue (currently at the printers):

This delightful painting is a rarity for Ravilious: a portrait painted in tempera. As a watercolourist he was just beginning to find his way at this stage in his career, and it is unclear why he abandoned a medium that he used here to such good effect. In this highly finished painting we have his close friend Edward Bawden, working on a painting of Clacton Pier in his back room in Redcliffe Road, Chelsea; the rolls of paper in the corner are studies for the Morley College murals, testament to the amount of work the artists put into the project. 

While certainly a portrait, this is a painting as much of Bawden’s aesthetic world as it is of him in person. Though excessively hard-working and painfully shy, the boy from Braintree was a trendsetter, particularly in his admiration for Victoriana – note the rococo mirror and easel, and the bust of Queen Alexandra on the mantelpiece. The guardsman’s jacket on the floor could have been carelessly dropped by a visiting Beatle; we might remember that Bawden was an influential teacher at the RCA when Peter Blake and his contemporaries studied there after World War II. 

There is something curiously animated about the jacket, and with the curtained corner and the tailor’s bust the overall picture has an understated strangeness that presages the mood of Ravilious’s later watercolours.

It was in 1930, in fact, that the two friends went in search of a weekend retreat in order to paint watercolours, discovering Brick House in the Essex village of Great Bardfield. There they worked, often literally side by side, producing during the decade that followed a startling body of paintings.
Of these, Ravilious's share is becoming well known, with many of his best watercolours about to be shown at Dulwich. Bawden's contribution is currently less visible, because the detective work needed to find work bought at exhibition in the 1930s is only now being done, but be prepared: there are some exciting paintings out there. 

No Hope for the Last Ravilious Mural?

Surviving mural by Mary Adshead at Victoria Pier, Colwyn Bay

I was alerted to a recent article by Nick Booth in The Times about the Ravilious mural on the pier at Colwyn Bay. The mural was only rediscovered a couple of years ago, and there were hopes - which I described at the time - that it might be saved. Now the situation is apparently looking rather less hopeful, though whether the mural is, as reported, 'too far gone' to be saved, or whether it just doesn't fit into the proposed redevelopment plans, I don't know.

If anyone has further news, do leave a comment below.

Made in China, Ravilious, Prud'hon, Escher... Dulwich Picture Gallery 2015

RAVILIOUS at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Eric Ravilious, The Westbury Horse, 1939, Towner

Exciting news for fans of Eric Ravilious. Following smaller exhibitions at Towner (2010), the Fry Art Gallery (2011) and RWA Bristol (2012), Dulwich Picture Gallery is hosting the first major London show since the 2003 centenary exhibition. Opening in April, the Dulwich show will be the first big museum exhibition to focus specifically on the artist's watercolours. 

As curator, I've tried to balance well-known paintings like 'Train Landscape' and 'Tea at Furlongs' with watercolours that will be new to most people. People who have read my books or heard me lecture will know that I tend to be fairly down to earth in my approach; the first aim of the Dulwich exhibition is simply to show the best selection of available paintings, giving people an opportunity to see 'in the flesh' pictures they may already know from books and prints. 

Eric Ravilious, Dangerous Work at Low Tide, 1940, MoD Art Collection

I decided early on to arrange the paintings by theme, rather than in date order. That way we can break down the barrier between Rav's peacetime work and his career as a war artist, and look at the wartime pictures not as a separate group but as an integral part of the whole. 'Dangerous Work at Low Tide' may depict a military operation in early 1940, but it is also a study of dawn's early light that fits alongside peacetime paintings of similar subjects. Ravilious was limited in his choice of subjects during the war, but he retained his enthusiasm for enigmatic interiors and unusual perspectives.

Dulwich is perfect for this exhibition, which continues the venerable museum's series of shows devoted to 20th century British artists: John Piper, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Paul Nash... not to mention David Haycock's 'A Crisis of Brilliance'.

I was there recently and had a look round the Emily Carr exhibition. Having known little about this Canadian artist I enjoyed her work very much. Her skies are really something, and I love the way she painted and drew forest trees. She reminds me a little of Georgia O'Keeffe, but her pictures seem more instinctive, more immediately expressive. I'll be going along for another look before the exhibition ends in early March

'Ravilious' opens next, on 2 April 2015. 

 

Ravilious fans - watch this space!!

Eric Ravilious, Newhaven Harbour, lithograph, 1936/7

Hello! I do hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and are looking forward to the new year. Exciting news for Ravilious fans coming up in 2015! Look out for an announcement in the middle of January, when all will be revealed...

The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden

Edward Bawden, February 2pm, 1936, private collection/estate of Edward Bawden

It seems amazing that seven years have passed since Tim Mainstone of The Mainstone Press commissioned me to track down the shops portrayed by Eric Ravilious in his remarkable 1938 book 'High Street'. I spent one memorable day racing around London, armed with a folder of pictures and an annotated A-Z, trying to visit a dozen or more sites before dark, and another with Tim exploring the Hedinghams in the pouring rain.

Writing about art and artists is always enjoyable, but there's nothing quite like a quest. Come to think of it, all of the books I've written have involved at least an element of sleuthing. Finding locations is always fun, but so is teasing out a new influence or connection. Top of the list, though, is discovering a painting. When JS Auctions sent me a photo of the Ravilious watercolour 'Aldeburgh Bathing Machines' it hardly seemed possible that such a beautiful painting had been hidden away for so long.

Although it was the Ravilious that made the money in last Saturday's auction, Tim and I were equally excited by the discovery of a second painting that had not been seen for many years, Edward Bawden's watercolour showing the back of Brick House, Great Bardfield, and entitled 'February, 2pm'.

The auctioneers kindly took the time to show me both paintings last week, and while the Ravilious was, as Anne Ullmann put it, 'an absolute corker', the Bawden was full of surprises. I knew that he liked to work on non-absorbent paper so that he could scratch into the paint, but I had never seen the results of this approach up close. It looked as though Jackson Pollock had lent a hand with a welter of scratch marks, pencil scrawl and jagged stabs of pastel.

Which makes our new Mainstone Press quest that much more exciting. The art world has rather forgotten that in the 1930s Edward Bawden was renowned not only as a talented illustrator and designer but also as a watercolourist of great skill and daring. Exhibitions at the Zwemmer Gallery in 1933 and Leicester Galleries in 1938 were well received by critics and buyers alike, and it was this commercial success that now makes the paintings so hard to find.

Many of the pictures disappeared into private collections and have rarely, if ever, been seen since. And the task of locating them is made rather more difficult by the fact that the 1933 paintings were given lines of poetry for titles - often cleverly apt lines, but too wordy for everyday use. Often the watercolours were given more straightforward titles by owners or dealers, so it is not easy to work out which is which.

However, the quest is going well, and a number of fascinating, often lovely and always inventive pictures have come to light. We'll be putting a book together in due course, so if anyone can help us find more of these pre-war Bawden watercolours, do get in touch with me or with The Mainstone Press.

MAY 2015 UPDATE I'm now working on the book. Meanwhile, new paintings continue to come to light, and my opinion of Bawden-the-watercolourist just keeps going up. His 1938 Leicester Galleries exhibition must have been one of the events of the year, judging by the twenty-something pictures that Tim has located. The paintings of Newhaven, in particular, are startlingly fresh and original.

DEC 2015 UPDATE The book is now in production!

A Pop-Up Bookshop for Art on the Hill

**NEWSFLASH** The 2014 Art on the Hill app is now available for iphone/android, which means you can wander the streets of Windmill Hill (above) and listen to artists chatting about their work. Congratulations to David Smith, who made it happen.

Our house in Windmill Hill, Bristol, will be temporarily transformed over the weekend of October 4th/5th into a pop-up bookshop and print gallery. My friend Christopher Williams will be exhibiting his rather wonderful linocuts and talking through his creative process with the help of precious sketchbooks, and I'll be selling my books about Eric Ravilious, Paul Nash, Peggy Angus and Edward Seago.

We're part of the 2014 Art on the Hill art trail, which covers Windmill Hill and Victoria Park in the southerly regions of Bristol. Have a look at the website and you'll see the diverse range of art and crafts on offer - I tried picking out some highlights but the list got too long. I'm particularly intrigued by Bedminster's smallest maze, which is advertised with the question: can you get lost in a front room? In ours yes, you probably can.

As on any art trail there are lots of fascinating houses to nose around in - because we're on a hill they tend to vary a lot in layout and views - as well as the park, city farm and community orchard. There are even musicians of one kind and another playing in the park and at venues around the trail, so it should be fun. If you do come along, pop in and say hello!

Lost Worlds: Edwin Smith & Ed Kluz

Edwin Smith, church interior, 1950s, copyright Edwin Smith/RIBA Library Photo Collection

At some point in the late 1960s my grandparents went on a bit of a book-buying spree, so that when I was very young their house seemed to be packed with tomes too massive for me to lift. There were books on the Renaissance, Myths and Legends, Rembrandt and Picasso, but none of these were as huge as 'The English House Through Seven Centuries', which loomed so large it might have contained actual houses.

But eventually I was bigger than the book and years later I opened it to find myself in a lost world of moated granges, austere halls and cottages that seemed to have emerged fully formed from the earth. Photographed in black and white and with few signs of human presence, the buildings seemed to belong not so much to the past but to another reality, one that was rather nobler and a lot less messy than ours: the world of photographer Edwin Smith.

The text, by contrast, was sprightly. I didn't think it was possible to write about architecture without being crashingly dull but Olive Cook - Smith's wife and collaborator - soon had me hooked. She was a wonderfully lucid, entertaining writer and the ideal foil to her husband, and the pair were commissioned to create numerous books about English places and buildings. After Edwin's death Olive donated his life's work - some 60,000 negatives and as third as many prints - to the Royal Institute of British Architects, and a very select selection of these pictures has just gone on show at RIBA's gallery in Portland Place.

Edwin Smith, 'Ideal' fish & chip shop, London, 1958, copyright Edwin Smith/RIBA Library Photo Collection

'Ordinary Beauty' features images of urban scenes documenting British social life, atmospheric interiors and evocative landscapes overseas, along with published books and photographic equipment. Alan Bennett even makes an appearance on film, offering a personal take on Smith's life and work.

Olive and Edwin were great pals of Peggy Angus and Tirzah Ravilious (whose son James was inspired by the photographer in his choice of career), and they included Furlongs in their haunting book of English cottages. Smith's photo of the interior, which is reproduced in 'Peggy Angus: Designer, Teacher, Painter', is almost unique in making the cottage appear neat and tidy. I wonder if it's in the exhibition... (see below)

Meanwhile, in another part of the country... actually just down the road in Kent, Mascalls Gallery is about to launch an exhibition which also relates to buildings of the past. For a number of years Sussex-based artist Ed Kluz has been making collages and prints of old houses and eccentric structures, borrowing from a tradition that stretches back through John Piper to the topographers of the 18th century to create unmistakeably 21st century artworks.

Ed Kluz, Fonthill Abbey, 2013, collage (artist's copyright)

The Mascalls exhibition is Ed's first solo museum show, and for it he has found a particularly intriguing subject. In the Lincolnshire village where I grew up there was a park in which stood a humdrum brick building known as The Butler's Pantry. This was all that remained of the Hall, a grand old place with Jacobean origins, Georgian symmetry and a tower added by a Victorian; it was knocked down the year we arrived, leaving me with a tantalising half-memory of creeper-covered brick and empty windows.

Our Hall was one of countless houses of similar size that were demolished during the 1950s and 1960s, a state of affairs highlighted by the V&A's 1974 exhibition 'The Destruction of the Country House'. Now Ed Kluz is returning to the subject, and marking the 40th anniversary of the V&A show, with 'The Lost House Revisited', in which he explores both the creation and the destruction of Britain's great country houses. A must for Romantics!

Ordinary Beauty: The Photography of Edwin Smith is at RIBA until 6 Dec.
Ed Kluz: The Lost House Revisited is at Mascalls Gallery, Paddocks Wood, Kent, from 20 Sept to 13 Dec.

PS Made it to RIBA on Friday and thoroughly enjoyed the Edwin Smith show - I thought all those black and white images together might be a bit dry, but the exhibition is beautifully curated, with imaginative use of the room and larger displays to break up the photos. Highlights? A ploughed field with a farmhouse in the distance... A funerary statue from Pompeii... Pictures of clowns (a surprise, that). There were far more people in the photos than I had expected, mostly I think from before the war. Altogether a wonderful introduction to and celebration of a great 20th century talent.

There isn't a catalogue but Merrell have reissued 'Evocations of Place: The Photography of Edwin Smith', which I think came out originally in 2007. Very good reproductions of a wide range of work, and a readable essay by the late Robert Elwall. Would have been nice to have an essay putting Smith in context of our current rediscovery of all things mid-20th century - but you can't have everything!

 

A Ravilious Rediscovered

Eric Ravilious, Aldeburgh Bathing Machines, 1938 (photo JS Auctions)

Until this year only the owner of ‘Aldeburgh Bathing Machines’ knew of its existence. This scintillating watercolour was bought from the artist’s exhibition at Tooth’s in May 1939, and since then the title has been attributed to a different painting, also of bathing huts. As far as anyone other than the owner knew, the picture featured here had never existed, so that to Ravilious’s descendants, collectors and fans ‘Aldeburgh Bathing Machines’ is not a lost painting returned, but a new and exciting discovery.

Eric Ravilious was in the middle of a prolific period when he visited Aldeburgh late in August 1938. Galvanised by the prospect of the Tooth’s exhibition he had travelled around the country, seeking out inspiring subjects. His letters are generally a good source of information about his activities, yet we know almost nothing about his visit to Aldeburgh; he left no clue as to why he was so intrigued by bathing machines.

There were, however, similar devices on the beach at Eastbourne when he was a boy. Ravilious was born in London, but at the age of eight moved to the Sussex seaside town, where his father ran an antiques shop. A scholarship took him to the Royal College of Art in 1922, and from there his career as a designer and artist blossomed alongside that of his friend and fellow student Edward Bawden. Ravilious retained a lifelong fascination for unusual and old-fashioned objects, particularly wheeled vehicles.

He also liked to work in series, so we should not be surprised that he painted three watercolours of these delightful blue-and-white-striped bathing machines. In this case the composition is centred on the parking sign and its shadow, around which the other objects (and the attendant) are carefully arranged so that the eye keeps moving from one to the next as if around a dial. The objects themselves are intriguing even by Ravilious’s high standards of oddity: the chicken appears in another painting and must have had some purpose, but we don’t yet know what it was. Having no doubt seen his friend John Piper’s illustrated essay on ‘Nautical Style’ in Architectural Review a few months earlier, Ravilious may have included the fowl as an amusing addendum.

However, the most striking feature of this beautiful painting is the quality of the light. Dawn was this artist’s preferred time for outdoor work, and in many watercolours it is the radiant early morning light that seems his true subject. The striated iridescent sky would become a feature of Ravilious’s finest wartime paintings, but this is peacetime, and the scene is set for a holiday.

'Aldeburgh Bathing Machines' is going under the hammer at JS Auctions on Sept 27. I wrote the text above for the catalogue.

In other news, Towner will be opening its Ravilious room on Sept 12. This will be a resource room for fans of the artist, with an evolving display of work, plus books, documents, etc. Obviously I haven't seen it yet, so do contact the museum if you want to know more.