Alfred Aaron Wolmark: A British Post-Impressionist

A CONCISE ACCOUNT OF ALFRED AARON WOLMARK: A BRITISH POST-IMPRESSIONIST 1878

- 1961

PETER RISDON

DATE 2023 SOURCE Courtesy of the Author

A Concise Account of Alfred Aaron Wolmark

A British Post-Impressionist 1878 - 1961

Peter Risdon

Introduction

Aaron Wolmark came to England as a child in the early 1890s, when his parents fled Russian Poland. He was one of six children, the others being a sister Sarah and brothers Sam, Adolph, Marks and Charles. He developed a skill at drawing and after studying at the Royal Academy School he became a full-time painter, adopting the English forename Alfred. His early works reflected his parents’ Jewish family and friends, but after 1910 he took inspiration from the French avant-garde Fauves and painted many works in strong, imaginative colours, in concise compositions and with less concern for exact drawing.

Wolmark was one of the pioneers of Modernist art in Britain, and exhibited with the Allied Artists Association where he encountered several other artists who wanted to break the dominance of Impressionism and Realism in British art before the First World War. He was a close friend of the French sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska (of whom he painted remarkable portraits), and of Jacob Epstein, and mixed with the members of Sickert’s London Group. Between 1910 and 1935 he achieved his full potential as a creative artist, and he was active in many fields other than painting, such as stage design for Diaghilev, ceramics, posters and sculpture. He designed in 1914 a huge abstract stained glass window for St Mary’s church at Slough, which can still be seen.

He took his subjects from the whole range of portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, and nudes both mythological and secular. Portrait sketches were a feature of his work and many important cultural figures sat for him, such as Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maugham, and Aldous Huxley, and several of these are in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Wolmark travelled widely within Britain, to Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Devon, and in Europe to Amsterdam, Madrid, Cracow, Concarneau, Paris, and Lugano in Switzerland where he painted numerous mountain scenes. Further afield, in 1919 he went to New York where he painted several skyscraper views while his works were exhibited there, and in 1927 he stayed in Tunis where he painted the North African people.

He lived in north London, except for a few years during the Second World War when he and his family sought safety in Oxfordshire. At the end of the war he moved to St Paul’s Studios at Baron’s Court in London and made his last home there until his death in 1961.

1

Too independent-minded to stay a member of a prominent artistic group, he was once a candidate for Sickert’s London Group in 1913 when Sickert deplored Wolmark’s use of thick paint, but he mixed socially with other artists with progressive views and ploughed his own furrow throughout a long working life of over 60 years. His works are held in public collections such as the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, the Ben Uri Art Gallery and the Jerwood Foundation (all in London) and at Birmingham, York, Hull, Southampton, Aberdeen and elsewhere. In his lifetime he exhibited widely in many galleries in London and elsewhere in Britain, and abroad in Berlin, Paris, Venice and New York. Notices of his work appeared in ‘Apollo’, ‘Burlington Magazine’, ‘Colour’ and other magazines in London and other newspapers.

The Highlights of his Work

Wolmark’s most important work can be divided into several aspects of his career:

1. Religious subjects in Realist style, up to c. 1910

2. Post-Impressionist works from 1911, a broadening of subjects to include still-life, figures, townscapes, landscapes, as well as religious and mythological subjects.

3. Excursions into stained-glass, pottery and sculpture.

4. Portraits of the 1920s-30s.

5. Exotic subjects inspired by his travel to Tunisia in 1927.

Early Religious Works

The religious works focus upon his Jewish context, and typically depict interiors with figures reading, e.g. East and West (1900), and The Holy Family (1903) showing a bearded man reading in a carpenter’s workshop with his child and wife standing behind. More elaborate compositions are Rabbis at Rest (1905) and The Disputation (1907), both showing groups of figures around a table; similar is The Elders (Tales from the Holy Land) (1908). A very large composition is The Last Days of Rabbi Ben Ezra (c. 1905, Fig.1) showing the Rabbi seated at a table surrounded by a large number of figures. This was one of his most important scenes of Jewish religious history. All these paintings are in muted colours, the figures well drawn, often largely in shade, and with an atmosphere of quiet contemplation, but sometimes with an arresting patch of brighter colour, such as Sabbath Afternoon (undated) where a colourful cameo of houses can be seen through an open window.

2

Post-Impressionist Works

In July 1911 Wolmark married Bessie Tapper, from another Russian-Poland émigré family, who remained his wife until his death in 1961. Their honeymoon comprised ten weeks in Concarneau, a picturesque fishing port in Brittany which was already popular with artists, which he spent painting constantly, generating about 90 works. There he found not only radically new subjects but more importantly a much more vigorous and fluid style of painting, in which colour became the dominant feature. We can see the influence of Gauguin in the areas of flat colour bounded by strong contours. This intensely concentrated period of innovative Post-Impressionist painting formed a pivotal point in his artistic life, and he never turned back. His topics included the fishing boats with coloured sails, the fishermen, and the market with its stalls and people. Major examples include The Fishmarket, Concarneau; Ice Cream Man, Concarneau, and views of fishing boats titled simply Concarneau (all these of 1911).

After his return to London he made some striking large portraits of his family, such as Decorative Arrangement: The Artist’s Wife and Sister (1911) where the figures fill the canvas and are seen close-up; a similar composition is The artist’s Wife, Concarneau (1911). The use of the term ‘decorative arrangement’ indicates his acceptance of painting as decoration rather than realistic representation as he had been painting previously, and he made a number of works titled only as Decorative Arrangement, where no indication of the subject is given. An intensely coloured picture of Two Girls (1915) shows two women wearing a bright red and a bright yellow coat; here the paint is applied more thickly, as if inspired by van Gogh, and he retained the ability to use paint thickly throughout his later career. A similar composition is Portrait of a Lady in Purple (undated) showing a lady in a long deep purple dress seated before a bright yellow-ochre background, where the colours make a strong contrast.

3

Fig.1 The Last Days of Rabbi Ben Ezra, c. 1905 (Ben Uri Collection)

A second most important change in his work is indicated by Rhythm (1911) which shows two nude women (perhaps his first nudes), one seated and one standing. It was a subject he was to use many times in the next 20 years or so. The title may well be related to J D Fergusson’s painting Rhythm (also of 1911) and the arts magazine, again of that name, which Fergusson edited. Wolmark and Fergusson may have met at the Allied Artists Association exhibitions in London, which both took part in. At that time, expressionist dance (i.e. not ballet or social dancing) was a new art medium in Europe, principally in Germany but then also in Britain. Margaret Morris ran a dance school in London, and she and Fergusson became life-long partners.

A work depicting a frieze of female nudes was An Arrangement: A Group of Nudes (c. 1912), and a more defined subject was Nudes in a Red Light: Adam and Eve (c. 1913) where the two figures are painted in green and the background is red and blue in fragmented patterns. Realist styles prevalent in British art and indicates how far Wolmark could detach himself from them. A similarly highly coloured work is Three Figures (c. 1920) showing two dark-skinned men and a white woman dressed in white, all on a bright yellow ground below an intense blue sky. Also in a Realist mode is Bathers (undated) showing two nude females, one sitting the other standing in a landscape, substantially filling the composition. A realist view of nudes is The Models (c. 1918) showing two red-haired youths against a bright red background, indicating that he had the versatility to practice in both modes. A standard posed model is Nude with Drapery (undated) showing a female nude seated with extensive curtains behind, as is Nude and Reflection (undated, 1930s) where the model sits before a mirror.

Among his mature religious works are Christ Preaching (c. 1920) showing Jesus with bare torso speaking to a mixed group of figures in Arabic dress; an unusual note is that Jesus has slightly reddish hair. A more developed composition is Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (c. 1920, aka Christ in the House of Simon) where the two main figures almost fill the canvas; the woman has long, lush reddish hair. Another strong image is The Story Teller (undated, 1920s) where an elderly man stands speaking to a group of younger men, and the colours are used to carefully define each element of the composition.

Alongside these mythological or metaphoric scenes, he made portraits done in loose brushwork and with strong colours, e.g. Young Woman in a Checkered Dress (c. 1911) and The Vase (c. 1913), the latter showing a woman’s head and shoulders together with a large ceramic pot decorated in geometric patterns. A particularly striking portrait is Gaudier-Brzeska at Work (1915), showing Henri Gaudier-Brzeska standing with bare torso with his sculptor’s tools and beside him his bust of Wolmark. Wolmark met Gaudier-Brzeska in 1912 and befriended him, visiting his studio in Fulham; Gaudier-Brzeska returned to France when World War I began and was killed in action in June 1915.

4

Versatility in Stained Glass, Pottery and Sculpture

Wolmark made only one known piece of stained glass but it is a major achievement, and can still be admired in situ at the Church of England St Mary’s in Slough, where it was installed as the West Window in 1915. He was commissioned to do it and produced what is most probably the first large scale abstract geometric church window in Britain. This was an exceptional event for a Jewish artist.

His interest in pottery was probably limited to decorating ready-made ceramics, as there is no evidence that he trained in pottery making and the quality of the surviving pots looks too high for an amateur. He had an exhibition in London of his painted pots in July 1917, where about 50 were displayed. The decorations are all abstract or stylised floral patterns around the body of the pot. Wolmark also designed the poster advertising his exhibition, showing a red-haired woman holding a multi-coloured ceramic, all set against a dark green background.

Wolmark may have been introduced to sculpture by Gaudier-Brzeska, and he made several items. Works that are known include Head of David (c. 1925, his first son, born 1912), in bronze, Memorial Tablet (c. 1923, stone bas relief), and Seated Woman (1937, patinated plaster). Gaudier-Brzeska himself made a Head of Alfred Wolmark, exhibited in 1913; bronze casts are now in Edinburgh, Liverpool, Birmingham, Southampton and York. Wolmark painted at least three portraits of Gaudier-Brzeska.

5

Fig.2 Portrait of Israel Zangwill, 1925 (Ben Uri Collection)

Portraits

As with so many British artists, portraits provided him with an important part of his income. During the post-war period he secured portraits of a surprisingly large number of people prominent in the arts, both visual and literary. An early example was Lewis Hind (1919), an art critic who was sympathetic to Wolmark. In 1926 he completed a long series of pen and ink sketches, including the prominent Jewish cultural leader Israel Zangwill (Fig.2), Sir Robert Witt, Sir John Lavery, D Y Cameron, authors Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Ford Madox Ford, and the composer Gustav Holst. As well as these important cultural sitters there are some cosmopolitan ones such as Japanese Woman in a Kimono (c. 1926) and Negress (1931), and black models sometimes feature in other types of composition. Later in the 1930s he portrayed Joseph Leftwich (1937), an important figure in Jewish culture in Britain. An entirely different type of model was Henry ‘Bunny’ Austin (1938) who famously reached the men’s singles finals of the 1938 Wimbledon Tennis Championship, a record which stood until 2012.

A portrait of a woman who was important to his development over several years from about 1896 is The Cossack Hat (c. 1911) showing Anna Wilmersdorfer, a German-Jewish woman a generation older than Wolmark, who acted as mentor and friend to him during his early years. After WWI began, as a German she was repatriated home in 1915 and died there in 1919. For a time she and Wolmark lived not far from each other in the Westbourne Grove area of west London, and it may well have been she who funded his travels to the Rembrandt exhibition in Amsterdam in 1898, to Krakow in Poland (two visits 1903-5) and to Madrid in 1906.

6

Fig.3 Self-portrait, 1902 (Ben Uri Collection)

Like many other artists, Wolmark painted several self-portraits during the whole span of his long career. Probably the most striking of this sequence is the Self Portrait (1911) in the National Portrait Gallery, London, where his head and shoulders fill the canvas and the paint is applied with unusual thickness to make an almost illegible image when seen close-up. Here, Wolmark looks straight at us as if challenging our response to his daring style of painting. Another particularly interesting one, and a more elaborate composition, is Self-Portrait (1910, Southampton) where he wears a white smock and holds a brush in his left hand and a palette in the other, with an easel and large studio windows behind. Very much of its time was Self Portrait Wearing a Helmet (1940) showing him probably as an Air Raid Warden as he was too old for military service.

New York 1920

In December 1919 Wolmark had his first exhibition in New York at the Kervorkian Gallery, showing about 60 works, and he stayed there for almost a year until October 1920, exploring the city and paintings views of it. Among them are the skyscrapers and he painted the Flat-Iron Building (300 ft high) several times. Also he painted some religious scenes, including Christ Preaching, although it is not clear what inspired this renewal of interest in the subject. Among the portraits he painted there was Lewis Hind. His letters home to Bessie expressed his amazement at the city and the American way of life, writing “Those skyscrapers are wonders, but what a rush, we in England don’t know what rush means …. One eats too much here, they seem to live to eat … they are really not a bit like Englishmen.” Although he evidently found New York an exciting place which gave him new townscapes and people to paint, the exhibition was not successful and few items sold. He did not try to organise another one in the USA.

Tunisia 1927

A further development of his subject matter took place when he went to Tunis for three months in early 1927, together with two friends; they stayed in a hotel in the French sector, quite close to the Jewish quarter. As with his stay in Brittany in 1911, this was a very productive period. The experiences of the streets and markets strongly resonated with his personal sense of history and he produced over 50 works showing figures and buildings. A group of several male figures is Figures in a Street – North Africa (1927).

His extended and concentrated exposure in Tunis to quasi-Biblical scenes added force to this imaginative strand of his subject matter, as in The Fruit Gatherers (1927-30) showing a nude male and female with a basket of apples, and The Offering (c. 1930) showing a nude black male with a white woman. A scene more derived from European mythology is Three Graces (1930) showing three nude women (but no male to choose one).

7

Other works

Still lifes are numerous among his oeuvre, and formed a major part of his later output in the 1930s-40s. Of these, flower pieces are common, but a few of the better examples show arrangements of fruit and table-ware, such as Lemons and Pottery (1944).

He also made frequent views of his locality, whether in London where he lived almost all his adult life, or when on holiday in various places such as St Ives, Wales, Ireland, or further afield in Lugano in 1924 and Chamonix.

During the First World War he was called up and rejected for myopeia, but he used this experience to paint a couple of scenes of the medical examination. That this was a significant event for him is suggested by the abnormal size of The Medical Inspection (1916), 59” x 92”. A smaller version was Medical Board No.2 showing a single male nude standing among several officials. He also painted small views of soldiers marching, most probably derived from photographs in newspapers. During the war Wolmark painted some portraits of soldiers, including Oscar and Norman Kohnstamm, sons of his most important patron, who were both killed. After the war he made a poignant watercolour sketch titled The Cockpit (1925, Fig.4) showing a dead soldier enveloped in barbed wire alongside an artillery piece.

8

Fig.4 The Cockpit, 1925 (Ben Uri Collection)

Articles inside

A Concise Account of Alfred Aaron Wolmark

14min

pages 2-11

Alfred Aaron Wolmark: A British Post-Impressionist

A CONCISE ACCOUNT OF ALFRED AARON WOLMARK: A BRITISH POST-IMPRESSIONIST 1878

- 1961

PETER RISDON

A Concise Account of Alfred Aaron Wolmark

A British Post-Impressionist 1878 - 1961

Introduction

The Highlights of his Work

Early Religious Works

Post-Impressionist Works

Versatility in Stained Glass, Pottery and Sculpture

Portraits

New York 1920

Tunisia 1927

Other works

Further Reading

Articles inside

A Concise Account of Alfred Aaron Wolmark