Goldmark 06

goldmark

AUTUMN 2017

Price ÂŁ10

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g AUTUMN 2017 NUMBER 06

Contents 2

Gerd Winner - Screenprints

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Walter Keeler - Interview

CONTRIBUTORS

12 Académie Julian - David Wood

Ceri Levy is a filmmaker, writer, and gonzovationist who has made many music videos and documentaries and is wellknown for his 2009 film ‘Bananaz’, which documents the cartoon-band Gorillaz. Recently he has written the successful Gonzovation Trilogy of books with artist Ralph Steadman, comprising Extinct Boids, Nextinction and Critical Critters.

These deal with the subject of extinction that faces many of the world’s creatures.

14 Valerie Thornton - Etchings

Mel Gooding, is a writer, critic, and curator who has written and edited a number of books and exhibition catalogues on the work of artists including Ceri Richards, John Hoyland, Patrick Heron, Michael Upton, Bruce McLean, Mary Fedden, Gillian Ayres, sculptor F. E. McWilliam, and architect William Alsop, as well as books of general art criticism and other works. He is the son-in-law of Ceri Richards.

David Whiting is an art critic and curator who has written extensively about studio ceramics. He writes regularly for magazines such as Crafts and Ceramic Review, and contributes to the Guardian. He has been external examiner to several leading ceramics courses, and is a trustee of the Anthony Shaw Collection at York Art Gallery. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the International Association of Art Critics, and is on the editorial board of the Interpreting Ceramics electronic journal.

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20 Become a Gonzovationist - Ralph Steadman & Ceri Levy 24 Joe Tilson - Labyrinth ‘Caerdroia’ 26 Frank Brangwyn 34 Ceri Richards - Peu à Peu Sortant de la Brume 36 Lynn Chadwick - Sitting Woman in Robes 40 World War One Posters 46 Doug Fitch - Slipware Platters 48 Surrealism 54 William Nicholson - London Types 58 Lee Kang-hyo - Potter of the Four Elements

Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 21 © Ceri Levy 34 © Mel Gooding 58 © David Whiting Photographs: Jay Goldmark & Christian Soro Design: Porter/Goldmark, October 2017 ISBN 978-1-909167-47-6

gerd winner The camera has always been integral to Gerd Winner’s work. Prowling the streets with a Polaroid in hand, he looks to traffic signs, road markings, blocks of flats and articulated lorries in search of hidden instances of meaning among the criss-crossing lines of urban silhouettes. A particular configuration might jump out – zigzag shadows under a New York fire escape, or plaster peeling around an emergency exit – and is snapped by the artist, the instant photograph stashed away for subsequent experimentation. Printed large, each snapshot becomes a resonant composition, its shapes and symbols decontextualised from their setting and lent a peculiar significance all their own.

Gerd Winner is just one of a number of contemporaries for whom innovations in the realm of screenprinting in the 1950s and ‘60s opened up a new world of printmaking possibilities.

Through the use of stencils, artists could reproduce multiple images derived from diverse sources, side by side, on a monotextural plane. For proponents of the medium, from Rauschenberg in the US to Paolozzi, Kitaj, and Hamilton in the UK, the screenprint was revolutionary: it allowed disparate pop culture fragments, be they torn comic strip panels, pinup postcards, or pulp fiction book covers, to coexist within a flat, collaged image, their collocation prompting discussion on the value of the original material.

For Winner, it was not paper ephemera that held his interest but the very fabric of the city itself: crumbling edifices that become abstracted faces, their smile the patinated grill of a warehouse shutter, or the steel containers of parked lorries bedecked with lurid warning stripes. Crucially, each photographic reproduction could be broken down by shape, surface, texture, or tone into separate layers of screenprint stencils. Specific elements could then be isolated and exaggerated through enhanced colour or overlay: in one

series of prints juxtaposed lines at a junction are framed as if a giant crucifixion underfoot, an intersection stigmata in thermoplastic paint set against a backdrop of bitumen.

Many of Winner’s most popular works, from the brooding Berlin suite to views of the London docklands, were editioned with the help of master printer Chris Prater of the now legendary Kelpra Studios. A pioneer of screenprinting’s stencilling processes, Prater’s immense technical skills enabled Winner to achieve the throbbing depth of colour in his ‘Lorry’ prints, or the astonishing hyper-realist finish of his architectural suites, matching the disintegrating surfaces of apartment block walls brick for brick.

Through the frame of a camera viewfinder, Winner’s seemingly simple photographic arrangements point to a world of oblique words, signs, and symbols embedded within our everyday environment, of shapes and abstractions quietly communicating through the medium of brick wall or weathered steel. Relocated to the page via film and stencil and laid out in vivid layers of ink, their imaginative power is plain to see.

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New Exhibition in November

walter keeler

Interview What can we expect to find in your upcoming show?

Working towards an exhibition is a very strange business, because it implies that you have a vision for this space and that this collection of work is going to convey something quite specific. You've got some reason for having this show that is going to send people away different from the way they came in. What really happens is I go out into my workshop and I make pots, and the pots accumulate in their own special way.

I haven't made them to any purpose other than my need to make pots, though I've tried to include a variety of forms, big and small.

I suppose inevitably it is going to reflect me, which is kind of daunting. I haven’t reinvented myself in order to make a cohesive exhibition, so if it's not cohesive it's because I'm not cohesive. I hope above all it reflects my feelings about the business of being a potter, of making things for other people.

Where do you find inspiration for your work?

New ideas often come from old pots. It can be something very simple, like a little beading that you see. There's a little mug that I should have bought at a fair that still haunts me, made around the 1760s, a very simple cylinder with a rouletted line about a third of the way down from the rim. It was just so perfect, the choice of that pattern and placing it at that level. No doubt the person who made it didn't give it a second thought; they just put it where the proportions said it was supposed to be, but it was wonderful. I've been putting roulette lines around my mugs ever since.

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I’m fascinated by that whole period, from the middle of the 18th century on where there were so many ideas around, so many things coming into the country from foreign lands, exotic creatures, exotic fruit, all sorts of wacky objects that were entering people's lives and they were trying to make sense of it all.

Amongst all this craziness were the crabstocks, which are basically handles, spouts, and other ceramic appendages that are modelled to look like branches of trees with chopped off twigs sticking out. The idea, I think, came from the Far East.

Early teapots were originally imported with tea; they weren’t made in Britain until the end of the 17th century, and even then not very many. These things would arrive, probably buried in tea leaves, and the reaction must have been, ‘So this is a teapot? Gosh what funny handles!’

Before long the industry was infected with these outlandish designs that weren't even their own, and that idea always amuses me. I wanted to reflect their ideas of growth, but at the same time I didn’t want to copy them. So I stylised them, simplified them, made them more of my own time. Taken out of their original context, they have developed their own quirkiness, their own sort of abstraction.

Where I live in Monmouth they don't cut and lay the hedgerows very often, usually bashing them down with a big flail instead. These mutilated hedges then start to sprout and by autumn they've grown at least two feet. You get these wonderful, nobbly joints developing which give the hedge a fabulous character, and many of the dishes I've done over the last few years have referenced that; they've been much more ‘twigiferous’, with lots of stems sticking out everywhere, bashed off to a level.

Many of your pots have an observable personality. Is that something you are conscious of instilling when you’re making?

It’s an interesting aspect of pottery that the terminology is ‘bellies’, ‘necks’, ‘lips’, ‘feet’; they're almost always related to the human body in some way. Often when I'm demonstrating a particular pot that I make, I put the pieces together without adjusting the angles, and I say, ‘What do you think about this

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pot? What’s its personality?’ Usually, it looks a bit down: it’s a depressed pot, it's meek, bashful, not very proud. So you say, ‘Let’s change the angle and slope it back a bit,’ and suddenly it’s more cheerful. There is that wonderful element to making a pot that you can change its personality: you can make it more or less engaging.

My extruded jugs don't stand at any particular angle, unlike a thrown pot, which is more or less vertical. An extruded piece can be at whatever angle you happen to cut the base at, so that's a big decision to make, and a very small measurement can change the character of the pot dramatically. Knock five millimetres off the back edge, and suddenly it perks up.

That aspect of my pots is important, the fact that they do have a sort of attitude. The other beautiful thing a pot can do is invite: it can say, ‘Come on, come and see what I’m meant for.’ I like the idea that you don't need to look at the book of words to find out that it’s a jug and that you should pour from it - it should just ask you to do it.

What qualities do you look for in your own work?

One word that always comes up when I'm looking at work of any sort is authenticity: is it a genuine attempt to make something that reflects one’s intentions. Of course you can't expect to achieve what you intend precisely every time, and quite often you realise something that wasn't intended but which is probably better than what you had envisioned.

But I'm looking for something that convinces me at least that I was trying to find something, and that to an extent I found it.

Most of the time it's much less tangible than that, and often you're surprised by what you've made. For this exhibition I've produced some deeply grooved extruded jugs with particularly whacked-about handles, and they pleased me because I find it very hard to be free. I love the idea of freedom in clay because clay is so rewarding when you treat it freely.

But that freedom can't just be reckless; it's got to have purpose. So, with the handles, I extruded them and then attacked them with bits of snapped-off wood, and they became something quite communicative. As with any markmaking instrument, whether it's a brush or a twig or whatever, you mark it in a gestural way, and that not only tells whoever looks at the work how you moved your arm, it also tells them how hard or soft the clay was, what sort of clay it was. It's a very revealing way of working, and when it succeeds it's extremely satisfying.

When you do these gestural things, whether it's on the wheel or onto a piece of clay, you're provoking, but you're not actually dictating: it's a dialogue. You can do your bit with your arm and your twig, but the clay is going to respond as it pleases. You’ve got a rough idea how it will react, but it might do something totally unexpected, and then the ball's in your court again: do you accept what’s happened, or do you attack it again and change it?

That's what makes it all so worthwhile, the challenge of working with this crazy stuff. At any stage, whether it's leather hard or soggy wet, it's just so responsive and so rewarding.

And so bloody frustrating!

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acadĂŠmie julian David Wood

In a cramped, high-ceilinged room, thirty or more jostling art students vie for position as they set up their mounted boards.

On a raised wooden stage stands a naked figure, bathed in the yellow glow of suspended pendant lamps or floodlit by natural light from the skylights overhead. From the hung portraits that cover the walls to the sea of easel frames and furrowed brows darting between paper and pose, all eyes are on the life model as the sketching session begins.

To the young men and women enrolled at the famed AcadĂŠmie Julian, this was an everyday scene of student life, yet today it seems a rarefied educational atmosphere.

Established in 1867, the school quickly developed a reputation

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for its outstanding technical instruction. Less conservative than its sister institutions, it was among the first of the Parisian academies to readily accept female and foreign students, who enjoyed a balance between rigorous, disciplined practical training and comparatively free stylistic rein.

These beautifully accomplished life drawings by David Wood, one of many anonymous young British artists to emigrate to study at the Académie, illustrate just how proficient its pupils could be. Produced under the watchful guidance of alumnus

Henri Royer, an acclaimed portraitist who continued to teach at the school in the early 1900s, Wood’s studies are disarmingly direct. Positioned mere inches from his model, he realises a sumptuous blending of light and shade through the use of a ‘stump’, a traditional sketching tool made from tightly rolled paper sharpened to a tip.

By altering the angle of application, varying gradations of tone can be achieved by blurring graphite marks into one another.

The technique is deceptively simple; a cardinal sin is to over-smudge, effecting an

unnatural, shiny surface that loses all sense of line and nuance of texture.

Wood’s touch is sensitively poised between striking realism and, on closer inspection, surprising looseness. The resulting portraits, most of which would have been completed in as little as thirty minutes to offer their models some respite, capture the spirit of their subject with extraordinary candour. They offer not just a window into the remarkable world of French academic art, but into the life and soul of their sitter.

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valerie thornton Her etchings of church pillars and priories, pitted walls and crumbling friezes are a textural tour de force.

For connoisseurs of the unfashionable, it will come as no surprise that the life and art of Valerie Thornton still remains largely, and unfairly, forgotten. Though she trained in the famed Atelier 17 studios of Stanley Hayter, exhibited alongside Edward Bawden and John Piper, and had works accepted in international collections, from the Tate in London to the Metropolitan in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington and the National Gallery of Ottawa, there has been no seminal monograph published on her work; no account of her illustrious career; no comprehensive catalogue of her many wonderful etchings and oils; nor any major public retrospective to remind the world of her contributions to the legacy of architectural art, to which she dedicated most of her working life.

Born in London in 1931, Thornton’s early childhood was interrupted by the advent of the Second World War. Forced to evacuate to Montreal with her two brothers, she returned to England in 1944 as a young teenager with a burgeoning interest in the world of art. Early technical education came by way of the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting, followed by the Regent Street Polytechnic where she studied under the careful watch of Pat Millard. Millard, whose students included the multi-talented Michael Ayrton and John Minton, instilled in his pupils a profound appreciation for the works of the English Romantics, from Blake and Palmer to Stanley Spencer. Tutorial discussions were open and experimentation

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was actively encouraged, almost to a fault: fellow undergraduates recall being left to their own devices until finding themselves in a ‘helpless mess’ before Millard would intervene and point them in the right direction.

This was a critical period of discovery. Thornton’s naturally investigative temperament saw her studying the NeoRomanticism of Graham Sutherland alongside the abstract landscapes of the St Ives group. For her twenty-first birthday she was gifted an oil painting by Winifred Nicholson, a fellow Byam Shaw alumna known for her impressionistic window views that combine still life compositions with alluring panoramas. Nicholson would become a profound influence and, in later years, a close friend after inviting Thornton to visit her Cumbrian home. Perhaps most important of all, it was during these early formative years that Thornton first established her love of architecture after witnessing an exhibition of photographs of churches. In her own work she would bring this expansive mélange of influences to bear, enlivening her illustrations of cathedral galleries and church doors with an intuitive sense of texture and surface developed in these early years of study.

If London had offered new avenues of inspiration, it was in Paris, enrolled on an eight-month residency with Stanley William Hayter at the renowned Atelier 17, that Thornton received the fundamental practical experience that launched her career as an etcher. Founded some thirty years earlier,

Hayter’s workshop had gained a reputation for its extraordinary advances in the etching process, revolutionising the way that artists could manipulate colour and tone in a medium otherwise characterised by a preponderance of shades of black, brown and grey. Past collaborators included modern art’s giants, from Picasso to Miró, and amid the vapoured fumes of acid and ink the studio atmosphere was one of endless possibilities. For Thornton, the apprenticeship was ‘electrifying’: of particular interest were Hayter’s experiments with ink viscosities, which allowed multiple colours to be applied simultaneously and printed from the same plate. His use of the acid bath was equally audacious: plates were unevenly submerged and the bite of the acid manipulated to create a diverse spectrum of surface effects.

Thornton emerged from her placement a changed artist. Returning to England in 1954, she sought out her own etching equipment and quickly set up her own studio. The following two decades were filled with extensive travel, from Italy, Spain, and France to a further residency at the Pratt Institute in New York and a funded research trip to Mexico. Though the native architectural practices of each destination provided fresh examples of visual interest, 11th and 12th century Romanesque architecture was an inspirational mainstay. Typified by highvaulting ‘Roman’ arches, its curvilinear arcades, cavernous halls, massive rising columns and geometrically carved ornamentation offered a wealth of angles, lines, shadows, and surface qualities to translate into the ground of the plate.

Historically, topographical etching had been the medium of perpetuity. Artists like Giovanni-Battista Piranesi sought to record for posterity the great architectural

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achievements of civilisations with a sense of monumentalism, or in their fantastical capriccii to invent gargantuan, intertwining structures that defy all reason. In Thornton’s hands, the genre was subverted; far from presenting an authoritative record of place, she conveys a sense of the organic life of these buildings, stressing the impact of weather and the passage of time. Churches are lent mottled, marbled textures as the effects of the etcher’s acid mimic the corrosive forces of rain and frost on pockmarked walls. In ‘San Pedro de la Rua’, Thornton’s view of the arched doorway and the cascading steps beneath combines rich

surfaces with a depth of perspective that leads the eye vertically up through the composition. Abstract shapes, like the echoing, semi-circular vaults of Casserres, reinforce the often colossal scale of this period of architecture, but in her expert use of texture we are reminded always of impermanence; of the constant erosion that will eventually topple these towering constructions.

When challenged on the lack of figurative elements in her work – people and animals seldom appear in her prints – Thornton rebutted that it was the stone that was her living subject. Her etchings of church pillars

and priories, pitted walls and crumbling friezes are a textural tour de force, standing toe-to-toe with contemporary efforts by the likes of Julian Trevelyan or Norman Stevens in their technical invention and ingenuity.

As a founding member of the Printmakers’ Council and fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, she was highly regarded by her colleagues; but as a female artist specialising in an outmoded medium, her quiet, contemplative body of work has been unduly neglected. Like the mutable structures she so beautifully etched, with time, one hopes, that will change.

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become a GONZoVaTIONIsT

This set of exceptional prints by the artist Ralph Steadman are taken from Critical Critters, the third book from our Gonzovation Trilogy about extinct and endangered creatures.

Gonzovation? What exactly is gonzovation? Is it painful? And what’s it doing in the Goldmark Gallery?

Ceri Levy tells the story. . .

Six years ago, when I first approached Ralph it was with the idea of creating one piece of work for a group show about bird species that had become extinct. Ralph started to draw.

Then he drew another bird and then another and he couldn’t stop drawing them and we couldn’t stop talking and laughing together. I began to write about our process of creativity and the stories of the birds and Extinct Boids, our first book, was born. We decided the next book would be about the birds that were next in line for extinction, the nextinct. And so Nextinction came to life and appeared in the world. What to do after this was a tougher question. Creating a book about all the happy, well and un-endangered birds in the world didn’t really fit our M.O. and we thought why not do all the other creatures that were in decline. Mammals, sea creatures, amphibians, reptiles, bugs and we soon realised that a huge proportion of our planet’s inhabitants are in deep trouble.

And here we are, fighting to tell the stories of the many animals that face the biggest issues, the critical critters.

We’ve always maintained that you’ve got to make people laugh in order to engage with them. If we just tell people, ‘you’re all dreadful bastards, you’ve screwed it all up and the world is suffering,’ people go, ‘yeah, whatever.’ But if we can make them laugh, then there is a chance of engagement.

Then they may come to the table and switch on to the cause

and feel involved enough to become gonzovationists and stick up for the endangered.

Embarking on our journey, Ralph discovered a new technique for creating critters by spilling dirty, filthy, inky water onto sheets of paper and letting them dry. Looking into the mess on the splattered pages, he saw animals appear within and drew them into being and this is how the critters evolved from filth. As Picasso had his Blue Period, Ralph has his Dirty Water Period.

Once the book was complete we wanted to create a series of prints and had to work with printers who could handle the vibrancy of colours and textural feel of the images, as there were problems reproducing these for the book. I was certain Jan and Ian at the Goldmark Atelier would be the perfect people to handle the job. It was down to gallery supremo Mike Goldmark as to whether he wished to work with us. As it turned out he was a long-time admirer of Ralph’s art and all fell into place. Time was taken in correcting colour balances and perfecting the images and when I look at these prints I am thunderstruck by their beauty. Ralph, who has created more editions than most, said to me, ‘No-one has ever made better prints of my work. Never.’ This is printing alchemy.

Ralph’s animal portraits are humorous and moving. We laugh and then we think. Take the Indri, who comically chomps away

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and yet stares at us balefully from within his splatted green foliage. Have we caught him doing something or does he look at us in disbelief that we could treat his environment as we have? Appearing out of an explosion of black ink the Mountain Gorilla heads towards us in a fit of rage, angry with us for messing up his world, while Przewalski’s Horse is calmer and invites us to stroke him or walk through his herd. There is a poignant pleasure in being surrounded by Ralph’s creatures and I continually change my favourites. One minute I love the Fin Whale the most as he leaps from the confines of the page, the next I adore the Hawksbill Turtle paddling for dear life in the effervescent turquoise water. Then I see the Rat-arsed Skunk turning to look at me as if I have just witnessed him stepping into something nasty, while the Hippo unapologetically bellows and belches and the Aye-aye gives mankind his percussive finger. This is a cast of characters that could populate a movie and who knows, that may be where

gonzovation goes next. Every single one of these creations makes for a wonderful companion and I would be delighted to have any of them on my wall, making me chuckle at first then reminding me of their plight. For some critters, Ralph’s portrayals may be the only way to keep them in existence but with perseverance and help we may just be able to turn the corner and save some from extinction.

Enjoy Ralph’s art, let it entertain and amuse you but remember the message and become a gonzovationist. You could plant bee and pollinator-friendly flowers in the garden, hang up bird feeders, or discover a charity working with your favourite species and get involved. The act of doing something, anything, can change our world forever and the critters will appreciate your support. It is the reason why Ralph painted them and why they are here. Be a gonzovationist, take a picture home today and spread the word!

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Ceri Levy, 2017 filmmaker, writer and gonzovationist

In the early 1970s, Joe Tilson left the ultraurban environment of London for the stillness of Wiltshire. At the same time, he turned his artistic attention to the construction of large wooden Cretan labyrinths, of which this is one of the earliest examples. A trained carpenter, Tilson was also fascinated by the symbolism of ancient cultures, especially the Ancient Greeks, and in the labyrinth he found a symbol that

joe tilson

Labyrinth ‘Caerdroia' encapsulated the elements he had always sought in his art: formal design, a structure that transcends time, and which makes manifest the idea of secret meaning.

Caerdroia is the Welsh word for Troy, which by a linguistic parallel – ‘troeau’ translates as ‘bends’ – came to be known as the ‘Castle of Turns’. Historically, Welsh shepherds were said to have created their own ‘caerdroia’, sevenfold mazes that were associated with sacred dances and ceremonial feasts.

Tilson’s maze mimics these medieval turf versions, whose paths were delineated by raised earth rather than surrounded on either side by walls. The effect, along with

the painted arrows that lead the eye from centre to entrance, is to reiterate the paradox at the heart of the labyrinth, to which, as Michael Compton describes, there is a single, inevitable solution: ‘To follow the maze is always to arrive at the end which is already in view, but to take a rhythmically wandering path. It is a ritual picture of a journey or pilgrimage.’

Carved in elm wood, Tilson was no doubt aware of the tree’s own history as archaic symbol. The mythic elm of Greek and Roman epic was variously associated with both life and death. In Greek pastoral poetry, shepherds would laze beneath its shady boughs and sing of unrequited love; Roman viticulturists planted elms in their vineyards as supports for wandering vines, and the tree became a symbol for Dionysian leisure and sustenance. Other myths recount the planting of elm trees by nymphs on the tombs of fallen heroes, or the Stygian elm of Virgil’s Aeneid that stands amidst the shades of the Underworld and welcomes empty dreams between its branches. Are we to read Tilson’s cryptic silenced mouth, potently painted at the centre of his elm-wood maze, as a symbol of idyllic peace or the final hush of the kiss of death?

With its rich conflation of mythological resonances, Tilson’s Caerdroia offers the viewer little by way of illumination, though this is perhaps the point. Created at a time when Tilson himself had undergone his own labyrinthine journey, a retreat from the city into the shadowed corridors of the countryside, Caerdroia reads as a highly personal expression of the artist at a particular time and place - an invitation to tread the maze’s path and unravel its secrets for ourselves.

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Frank brangwyn Frank Brangwyn was a workhorse. His astounding work ethic, matched by few contemporaries, produced, by conservative estimates, in excess of ten thousand works of art across a multitude of media. He was an artistic chameleon, capable of adapting to new art forms as they were introduced to him, and held a profound belief in art as an occupation, rather than intellectual exercise, in which his own desire to create became all-consuming.

Brangwyn was a true autodidact. He received no academic education in the arts, despite demonstrating an innate talent for drawing from an early age. Though he would encounter a number of important mentors early in his career who helped shape and direct the young artist’s future, what little formal training he received in his youth came initially from his father, William. Brangwyn senior was a specialist in ecclesiastic interiors and textile design with aspirations to become an architect. Having emigrated to Belgium in 1865, he set up a workshop and embroidery studio around which his son would spend his formative years. The atelier employed a rich and eclectic fusion of styles, from Gothic and Flemish façades to Anglo-Oriental embroidered silk banners, a heady intercultural mix that would inform his son’s later work.

In 1874 William brought his family back to London in Shepherd’s Bush, a suburban area thrust into a widespread programme of urbanisation and construction. Early in his own

career he had been encouraged to draw churches and chapels from sight to gain a better understanding of their structural workings, and this was a discipline he passed on to his son in turn. London’s scenes of industrial grime seemed to the young Brangwyn a far cry from the meandering streets of Bruges where he had grown up. He lapped up this new world with excitement, sketching building sites, scaffolded frontages, and sweating labourers at work, all the while building a visual repertoire that he would draw upon in future prints and paintings.

Brangwyn’s first major breakthrough as a young artist came when his facility for drawing was discovered by Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo and Selwyn Image, the two influential designers who together had established the Century Guild of Artists in 1882. Brangwyn was among the first young men to be affiliated with the group, which employed associated craftsmen and manufacturers in the production of interiors.

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Mackmurdo was chiefly an architect, and he impressed on Brangwyn and his colleagues the importance of uniting interior design with architectural setting, advice that would prove essential in Brangwyn’s extraordinary mural commissions for which he became best known.

Mackmurdo was clearly impressed by Brangwyn, who at just fifteen years old had demonstrated both a prodigious draughtsmanship and a lively enthusiasm for the ‘decorative’ arts. He helped secure for him his second major apprenticeship in the workshops of William Morris, where he was expected to trace and enlarge designs for textiles.

Morris’ company promoted a holistic approach to design, with motifs cohesively repeated and reinterpreted in a number of different media from ceramic tiles to fabrics, carpets, wallpaper and furniture panels. Brangwyn quickly developed the transferable skills required to keep up with the work; economy, industry, and adaptability were qualities that defined much of Brangwyn’s career, and it was here on the workshop floors of Mackmurdo and Morris that they were most visibly developed.

Practical experience in a studio environment had taught Brangwyn how to work with speed and at volume, but the assignments he was given - scaling and working up designs - were artistically stifling.

Before long, he sought to broaden his horizons and spent the next decade on intercontinental sailing expeditions, initially around the British coast, and later as far afield as Venice, Cape Town, the Black Sea, and the coast of North Africa. Sailors, ships, and Thameside docks had been a mainstay of inspiration while in London; now, as a crew member, he witnessed first-hand his fellow seamen at work, contributing to a number of maritime sketches and his first oil painting to be accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1883, completed when he was just seventeen. His travels provided fresh scenes of Mediterranean and African colour, from Moroccan markets to the old Dutch towns of South Africa and the winding canals of Venice, and he drew and painted ceaselessly.

At first, Brangwyn’s earnings as an artist were

meagre as he reputedly resorted to fuelling his stove with unwanted watercolours and sketches. But by the end of the 19th century his circumstances began to improve substantially. He had by now developed an international reputation as a vibrant and robustly hard-working modern artist, though critics in Britain remained sceptical of his work. He began to provide countless illustrations for books, and magazines, through which knowledge of his work at home and abroad grew exponentially. An association with Siegfried Bing, owner of the renowned Parisian ‘Galeries l’Art Nouveau’ who had contracted Brangwyn to paint murals for the shopfront exterior, also brought further commissions and a steady source of income. Through his routine tasks under Morris and Mackmurdo, Brangwyn had learnt to efficiently transfer smaller designs to large surfaces; murals made for a natural transition, and over the next forty years he would complete a staggering twenty commissions that combine to over half an acre of canvas. With the outbreak of war in 1914, Brangwyn also turned his hand to designing posters in support of the war effort. Though never officially appointed as a War Artist, his viscerally realistic images of combat at the front remain among the best-known British examples of the period. So popular were they, despite their grim subject matter, that the Kaiser was supposedly prompted to place a bounty on his head.

Less well-known but no less extraordinary were his achievements in printmaking, and especially in etching. From the 1900s onwards Brangwyn produced vast numbers of prints, taking large-scale construction projects and architectural views as his primary subjects. Men at work remained a perennial source of interest, their backs bent double, coalcaked shirts tied round waists. In images like The Building of the Ship, these toiling labourers shrink beside the colossal scale of their structures.

Brangwyn’s use of the etching medium reveals a mastery of its techniques: in his enormous views of bridges and cathedrals, many of which measure almost a metre across, the full width of the zinc plate is used to tonal effect. Religious imagery was

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Brangwyn’s images of large churches or cathedral interiors invoke the feel of pilgrimage, of arriving at a scared destination.

a common theme too. Many of Brangwyn’s images of large churches or cathedral interiors invoke the feel of pilgrimage, of arriving at a scared destination: views of the immense buildings themselves are obscured by tumultuous crowds of people, or are seen through a sea of masts and tangled rigging. In later life, as he became increasingly infirm through rheumatism and stomach pains, the religious aspect of his work became more intimate and reflective, as in the tiny but beautifully accomplished etched illustrations for the Book of Job. Brangwyn’s own Catholicism was deeply, though privately, felt: he attended church only irregularly, preferring the miniature chapel he had assembled in an alcove in his home in Ditchling, where he lived from the early 1920s until his death there in 1956.

Public and critical opinion of Brangwyn’s work has always been divided, reflective, perhaps, of the way in which he occupied a no-man’s land between the modernist avant-garde and the academic establishment, neither of which fully embraced his work. His eventual recognition came late in his career: in 1952 he was afforded a major retrospective at the Royal Academy, the first of any living artist in history, and ten years earlier had been knighted for his services to the arts.

Yet in the half-century hence his work has been largely ignored, both by artists and commentators. To many, Brangwyn’s colonial-era subject matter and his commercial association with the British Empire have tainted his work as jingoistic and imperial; to his advocates, this is a clichéd response, and one that ignores the colloquial nature of Brangwyn’s work, which exalted the perspectives of working men regardless of colour and creed. What cannot be disputed are his polymathic talents, and the awe-inspiring breadth and depth of the legacy of work he left behind him.

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ceri richards

Peu à Peu Sortant de la Brume Mel Gooding answers our questions

What’s the story behind ‘Peu à Peu Sortant de la Brume’?

The title of this painting is taken from a score direction by Debussy to his piano prelude La Cathédrale Engloutie, ‘The Sunken Cathedral’.

The idea behind the prelude, and which inspired the series of works that Richards made on this theme, was the legend of the drowned cathedral of the mythical city of Ys, on the Brittany coast. At moments of profound calm (profondement calme is another of the directions to the score), it is said, the sound of the cathedral bells could be heard. The prelude plays with this notion of music emerging from the sea, reaching a kind of climax, and then retreating again.

Richards was fascinated by the idea of nature re-assimilating the human and the man-made.

He loved the music of Debussy and was himself a gifted pianist, and the sunken cathedral became the subject of a long series of paintings, collages, and prints.

What’s going on in this particular painting?

Peu à Peu Sortant de la Brume, ‘slowly rising from the mist’, is clearly inspired by sea vapour in the air, probably early morning or evening at a time when the sun is low and you have these strong aerial colours in the sky. At the bottom we can see motifs that recur in Richards’ paintings on this theme relating to the architecture of the cathedral, and to the notion of the building itself being reabsorbed into nature, of the stonework becoming one with

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the rocks of the sea. Richards was born on the Gower peninsula, on the South Wales coast, and much of the inspiration for these paintings came from his experiences of looking down from the cliffs on to the flat rock formations below, which have a kind of architectural feel.

How has it been painted?

The actual technique here is that he has created a painterly ground and then scored into it, perhaps with the wrong end of a paintbrush, to create what’s called a sgraffito effect. This gives the ‘stony’ sections of the painting the feel of something engraved. If you look at rocks on the shore you’ll find lines riven into them where pebbles have been forced again and again by the sea to etch into their surface, much like the engraved lines on cathedral columns or carvings. This painting invokes a memory of that experience of the both the mineral and the manmade.

What I like particularly about this painting is that you have this atmospheric, almost geometrically abstract passage at the top in sharp colour relating to the air and the insubstantial, while at the bottom you have the realisation in the paint itself of that which is mineral, and of architectural and artistic marks made by man. You have air, landscape, music, colour, time - the atmospheric and the mineral - all held together and fused imaginatively in what is really a very simple and very beautiful abstract design.

Mel Gooding, 2017 writer, critic and curator

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Sitting Woman in Robes

lynn chadwick 

When the bristling, steel-rodded works of Lynn Chadwick were first brought before the viewing public at the 1952 Venice Biennale, it was to a reaction of visceral shock. British sculpture was more accustomed to the practice of direct carving, as exemplified by the monumental curved forms of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, who just four years earlier had been celebrated at the very same festival. But Chadwick’s cohort – Reg Butler, Kenneth Armitage, Geoffrey Clarke, and Bernard Meadows – saw themselves not as carvers but as ‘constructors’. They worked and even trained as engineers, welding and grafting, using shorn metal bars and iron sheets to create forms that, beside the glorious heft of Moore and Hepworth, seemed positively anorexic.

So stark was the contrast that, when confronted with their work, the writer Herbert Read was forced to adopt a new critical language: here were ‘New images’, he wrote, belonging ‘to the iconography of despair, or of defiance…of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.’

Though Read’s slogan pithily connected the menacing qualities of this new sculpture with a post-war society coming to terms with the fresh threat of nuclear annihilation, in the case of Chadwick it was an oversimplification. Initially trained as an architectural draughtsman and designer, Chadwick had first begun to experiment with sculpture in the 1940s, producing metal mobiles and ‘stabiles’ independently of, but parallel to the work of Alexander Calder. By the early 1950s he was working exclusively as a sculptor, and over the subsequent

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Miniature Figure I

four decades would develop a prolific body of angular abstract-figurative work.

These two tremendously rare maquettes characterise a major recurring theme in Chadwick’s sculpture of the human figure combining with pure form. From the late ‘60s onwards an observable vocabulary began to emerge of caped male and female figures, the former often rendered with an outsized rectangular head, the latter a slighter triangular counterpart. Depending on the angle of placement, Chadwick found he could instil these geometric heads with human life: ‘I would call it attitude…the way that you can make something almost talk by the way the neck is bent, or the attitude of the head; you can actually make these sculptures talk, they say something according to the exact balance…’

From the crispness and clarity of their diamond heads to the austere drape of their cloaks, these two figures sit with a strong

pyramidal presence. As in the constructions of Calder or the spindly forms of Giacometti, there is a paucity to the work, a desire not for fullness of form but for sharpness and line; sculpture concerned with edge and point as much as plane. Yet, far from the apocalyptic vision ascribed by Read, these later figures balance severity with delicacy, from the melancholic dip of the larger maquette’s head to the affectionately crossed legs of its miniature twin.

Chadwick’s two spheres of influence collide in these sculptures, where the structural tensions of architecture and mechanics combine with an intimate artistic tenderness. Though mere inches in size, like his colossal outdoor versions they command an extraordinary presence, a testament to his ability to fuse these two disparate worlds: to balance the technical with the tactile, the formal with the figurative, the severe with the serene and sublime.

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D L R O W E N O R WA T E R S S O P

M. Richard-Gutz

WW1 POSTERS Georges Scott’s Marianne – the Britannia of France - stands tall and defiant, her sword in one hand and the tricolor in the other, ragged and war-torn but aloft, nonetheless. With her bared breast and golden helm she becomes an Amazonian warrioress, her battle cry penned loud and clear in the black

Scott’s poster is just one of many thousands of designs produced during the First World War as governments looked to galvanise national production, bolster morale, conscript troops, and support industry at home during a period of unparalleled uncertainty. In the hands of master poster artists, they proved an indispensable communicative medium: massproduced and easily disseminated, the poster brought colour and expressive resonance in its simplicity, allowing nations to remotely applaud and admonish citizens in equal measure.

Reappropriated by the state at a time of hardship, the modernday poster was born of excess; its journey from profitmaking to propaganda was as conflicted as it is fascinating.

Historically, posters had been a tool for commercial, rather than political or social exhortation, persuading would-be customers (with varying degrees of subtlety) to part with their hard-earned cash. Their stratospheric rise to prominence across the 19th century can be traced back to early innovations in the field of chromolithography. Jules Chéret, grandfather of the Belle Epoque poster, had trained as a lithographer in Britain before returning to Paris to establish his own enterprise.

Technological advances in printmaking equipment led Chéret to develop a brand new form of three-colour lithography, one that allowed for more faithful reproductions of colour and accurate registration between pulls of the press. Through Chéret’s invention a riot of colour flooded into poster bills and advertising pamphlets, previously dominated by blocks of black and white text. Their proliferation was extensive as landlords and local management began to realise the potential of advertising real estate. Before long, almost every stretch of public and private property, from street walls to scaffolding and even local monuments, was plastered with images of

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Georges Scott

sky above: ‘Pour le Drapeau! Pour La Victoire!’ (‘For the Flag! For Victory!’)

Frank Brangwyn

ThĂŠophile Alexandre Steinlen Jules-Abel Faivre

hedonistic pleasure and domestic bliss. Vertical space was monetised on an un-precedented scale as the avenues and alleyways of Paris, London, and New York blared out their mass of consumerist messages.

Yet by the start of the First World War, the poster was faced with its first major decline. By the mid1900s, billboards were now in competition with a host of rival communications: magazines, fashion brochures, newly distributed broadsheets and rapid developments in film and radio. Accustomed to having only to fend off fellow competitors, with billstickers regularly scuffling over their disputed territories, the poster was now living in an age of near constant verbal and visual assault, where single voices found it increasingly difficult to rise above the clamour of newspaper adverts or the excitement of the wireless.

For the wartime poster, this competition became curiously paradoxical. In the past, posters had created and been driven by a frenzy of consumption as manufacturers of alcohol, tobacco and chocolate goaded customers with images of

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SEM

lavish indulgence. But at a time of war, with countries burdened with crippling debts, scant resources, and national rationing, this was exactly the kind of consumerist behaviour governments had to repress. In a bizarre, ironic turn of events, the poster was now forced to fight and undermine the very world of urges from which it had fed and thrived. Sponsored images preyed alternately on citizens’ guilt, fear, and nationalistic duty to scrimp and save, or to turn over their purchasing power to the state through war bonds and ‘liberty loans’. Walls that once bore multifariously diverse messages demanding customer’s attentions were now replaced with posters conjuring a sense of collective conscience, reiterated through repeated calls to arms and aid: ‘Join now!’; ‘Sign up!’; ‘Your country needs YOU.’ This astonishing transformation from commercial tool to national broadcast was

accompanied by an observable change in tone. Bringing high-quality art by established artist to the streets had seen the poster both championed and challenged as a kind of class equaliser, with boulevards hailed as the ‘poor man’s picture gallery’ or ‘frescos of the crowd’. With the emergence of magazines and radio, it was often in poorer districts that the poster was at its most effective, where residents would have limited access to new and expensive forms of media. Previously, businesses had played to working class aspirations, portraying their mundane products, such as soap bars and bleaches, with a whiff of middleclass luxury. Now, in the midst of war, it was to these same people that governments looked to aid production or join the conflict, but their appeal was to a very different kind of sentiment. Illusions of extravagance are abandoned in favour

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of ordinary young soldiers, fresh-faced and square-jawed, or generically wholesome, down-to-earth scenes of families left behind to support those at the front through agricultural and manufacturing programmes. Jules-Abel Faivre’s brighteyed young conscript, unkempt and unshaven, his hand held aloft with the cry ‘on les aura!’ (‘we’ll get them!’), could be any mother’s son, any wife’s husband or girlfriend’s beau; universality was key to the wartime poster, in which depth and breadth of reach was paramount in sustaining the war effort both at home and abroad.

Unsurprisingly, though common themes recur within the many posters produced in America, Britain, Germany and France, there were notable divergences in approach too.

While German propaganda posters were characterised by a comparable sobriety,

in hand, visited by a deified soldier in the garb of his brother the war god Mars.

Though the ministry of defence was unafraid of shaming their male populace into enrolment, broader appeals sought to equate support at home with that at the front. Brangwyn’s invocation of the Roman family pantheon was just one of many designs to bring soldiers and civilians together and emphasise a collaborative sense of pride and responsibility.

Faced with the colossal task of mobilising populations in the preparations for war, it’s no surprise that nation states looked to the poster as a means of engaging the masses.

Elizabeth Guffey, writer and historian of poster art, describes how, ‘at a time when steak was hard to come by and fresh bread meant long lines...citizens were asked to give everything – their loyalty, their faith and

their money.’ The incredible explosion of poster production some fifty years earlier, followed swiftly by condemnation from hard-line critics and fetishisation by the collectors who pulled bills from walls before their paste had even dried, proved that the poster was a form of communication capable of prompting strong emotional responses in a wide and varied audience.

Those few examples that have weathered the hundred years or more since their design and display now represent a rich contextual source, images as powerful and moving to those mindful of the conflict as they were to those who eventually took part in it.

Saved from the destructive fate assigned to most, these survivors silently proclaim their message even today, relics of an extraordinary age of printmaking in times of extreme adversity.

...the poster was a form of communication capable of prompting strong emotional responses in a wide and varied audience.

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C. H. Foerster

their clean-cut designs far closer in feel to the large woodcut advertisements produced on the continent before Chéret’s lithographic innovations, French and British posters seemed to employ a far broader palette. In France, where the demands of war had been especially economically damaging, the message was clear and singular: ‘Souscrivez à l’Emprunt National!’ (‘Subscribe to the National Defence Loan’).

Though intended to encourage the sale of war debts, its emotive, patriotic language of ‘signing up’ evidently hit home, contributing to sizeable increases in the number of new recruits. Meanwhile in Britain, enlistment, fund-raising, and arms production remained primary concerns: Frank Brangwyn’s Mars Appeals to Vulcan cleverly recasts a virile munitions worker as the Roman god of ironsmiths, his hammer

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doug fitch Slipware Platters

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When Michael Cardew’s Wenford Pottery closed in 2004, some twenty years after his death, Doug Fitch went to visit the dilapidated premises. Looking round the dust-filled attic he stumbled upon a pile of moulds, ‘abandoned and covered in guano’. Purchased from the new owner and relocated to Fitch’s studio, for the first time in decades these moulds have been recommissioned – and with magnificent results.

Fitch’s fascination with the famously temperamental potter traces back to a foundation course lesson in 1983 when he was handed a copy of Cardew’s recent obituary. Unlike his mentor Bernard Leach, Cardew’s coal-fired slipware had drawn not from Oriental pottery, but from the traditional earthenware of North Devon. For Fitch, whose childhood roots lay in the furrows of Northamptonshire unearthing broken sherds, Cardew’s approach struck a chord: now, by a simple twist of fate, the work of these two potters has been serendipitously bridged.

Production of the platters is deceptively simple. Thick sheets of clay are laid flat on a table and liquid slip poured over their surface. Mistakes must be wiped clean and begun again, though as Fitch points out, it is often the ‘slipups’ – a broken line, or an errant drip – that lend a piece its peculiar character.

Far less forgiving is the moulding process. A mushroomshaped block is placed on top of the slab and the pair are flipped. The clay sheet is then draped round the mould and the excess edges cut away. Cardew’s moulds present particular difficulties: their size makes the transfer considerably more risky. Moreover, they are made not of plaster but fireclay, a highly refractory material used to make kiln bricks. If the surface of the slab fails to dry uniformly, areas are liable to stick to the mould. A little peeling is tolerable; too much, and the dish must be scrapped.

Fitch’s palette is severely restricted – red earthenware clay, with white or black slip – but therein lies the decorative challenge. Performed with an eccentric assemblage of repurposed milk carton and goose’s quill (a gift from Cardew’s first apprentice Sidney Tustin), all held together with strips of sellotape, his slip-trailing treads a delicate line between slapdash and self-restraint. The resulting compositions are delightfully personal, invoking memories of cut silage and ploughed contours crawling across a rural backdrop.

Far more than simply resurrecting the spirit of Cardew, in these dishes Fitch distills his own intimate bond with the local landscape with a touch that is fresh and modern. This is not simply reproduction; it is sumptuous reinvention.

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surrealism

Paul Wunderlich

Surrealism – perhaps the most prominent, and certainly the longest surviving of the 20th century’s innumerable avant-garde episodes – was a movement that encompassed so many forms of media that it became not a style of art but, ultimately, a state of mind. It was, after all, precisely ‘states of mind’ that Surrealist artists were concerned with, rejecting reason, logic, and rational thought and ruminating instead on the mysterious truths locked within the confines of human unconsciousness.

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Coined by Apollinaire in 1917 and ‘baptised’ by André Breton in his manifesto of 1924, Surrealism began life not in exhibitions or on gallery walls but in the written word. By the early 1930s, alongside theatre and poetry, it had embraced painting, sculpture, film, photography, fashion, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, political activism and pseudo-scientific study.

Though the term was retroactively applied to a number of ‘proto-Surrealist’ artists, from de Chirico right back to Hieronymus Bosch, Surrealism proper was born on the crest of a post-war Dada swell; for a time, the two movements coexisted, as Breton wrote, ‘like two waves overtaking one another in turn.’ An anti-authoritarian protest that fed off public unease at the butchery on the front, Dadaism emerged spontaneously amid wartime unrest in Zürich, Cologne, and New York. Its proponents denounced ideas of order and hierarchy in all spheres of life, from aesthetics to politics, seeking to rid the world of arbitrary categorisations. Their art – or rather, their anti-art – laid waste to traditional notions of craft. It was typified by collative media such as collage and the ‘readymade’, found objects thrust into gallery spaces to challenge the idea of art as the product of deliberate practice. Works like Max Ernst’s early cartoons or Duchamp’s notorious Fountain looked to shock, mock, ridicule and frustrate the very audience from which they derived their definitions as ‘artworks’.

Salvador Dali

RenĂŠ Magritte

creation, forcing artists to think along new avenues of expression. For some, like André Masson, this involved turning to drawing, where the freedom of ink or pencil subconsciously scrawled with the hand mimicked the Surrealists’ earlier experiments in automatic writing. Others imagined new approaches to the canvas that incorporated chance or devolved creative power from the hand to the material: Ernst’s techniques of frottage and grattage involved placing textured objects underneath canvas or paper and rubbing with pencil or scraping through paint to reveal an imprint of the surface beneath.

On the other side of the movement were those who sought to convey Surreal automatism not through medium or process, but purely through subject. For artists like Dalí and Magritte, the world of dreamscapes and of half-asleep hallucinations offered a rich vocabulary of images to explore. Their paintings incorporated vast landscapes of infinite distances, a visual

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André Masson

Dada’s insistence on disorder, its refutation of conventional reasoning, and its fetishisation of the unexpected were all themes Breton admired and sought to adapt in the launch of his Surrealist movement. When, with the help of fellow author Philippe Soupault, Breton published his Manifeste du Surréalisme in 1924, however, his text marked a definite departure from the anti-establishment outbursts of Dada. It also contained the first official definition of Surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express…the real functioning of thought, in the absence of any control by reason, exempt from aesthetic or moral preoccupation.’

Breton was a keen student of Freud and had employed his practices of free association as a wartime psychiatric nurse attending sufferers of shell shock. Extrapolating from Freudian psycho-sexual analysis, Breton determined that the real source of one’s creative powers lay in the subconscious, in the realm of dreams and suppressed desires, wherein one would find uninhibited images of sur-reality – of truth beyond reality.

Unlike the Dada movement, which by its very nature had renounced the idea of exclusive membership, Surrealism was a collective that contributors could join and from which they could be expelled, sometimes by committee, more often on Breton’s whim, who acted as chairman of its Parisian base.

Though the first iteration of Breton’s manifesto had made little mention of the visual arts, he soon looked to identify Surrealist sympathies in other creative fields. In 1925 he published an essay on Surrealism and Painting, introducing the idea of visual ‘marvels’ – images of truth revealed in one’s subconscious – and within a year had opened the first ‘Galerie surréaliste’. Throughout the late 1920s, numerous artists became closely associated with Breton’s new movement.

Some, such as Miró, were adopted Surrealists by name yet eventually looked to distance themselves from the term; others, such as Dalí, whom Miró first introduced to the group, would become its most prominent members. Magritte, famously, was reluctant to join, despite his associations with the Belgian branch, while artists like André Masson actively fought against Breton’s vision as the Surrealists began to divide and form independent factions.

Unlike Impressionism or Cubism, there was no definitive Surrealist mode of expression. Surrealism was ‘not a style’, wrote the playwright Antonin Artaud, but ‘the cry of a mind turning back on itself.’ For artists, however, Breton’s stress on automatism as the defining Surrealist creative act posed significant problems. Painting, with all its concomitant apparatus, did not lend itself to the immediacy of automatic

Felix Labisse

representation of the boundless space of the untapped unconscious mind. Strewn throughout these desert-like wildernesses, objects and figures cast inexplicably long shadows, architectural structures defy the laws of physics, and entities seem to metamorphose into one another or melt into the very fabric of the painting itself.

Their super-realistic style of depiction neutered any expression of painterly strokes, reinforcing the sense that the dream world represented a more truthful – and beautiful – reality than that observed by the waking eye.

Repression lies at the heart of almost all Surrealist art: repressed sexual desires, violent urges, fantasies and fetishes, and suppressed memory. Its members were encouraged to ignore their inhibitions, to bypass the restrictive clutches of the conscious mind through psychoactive substances, alcohol, forced lack of sleep, and orgiastic sexual displays and to unleash as much of this subconscious world in their art. Deep-seated erotic fixations were of particular interest, explored through the recurring theme of the naked female figure, while other behaviours deemed transgressive by the viewing public – homosexuality, cross-dressing, sadomasochism, and violent sex – were openly examined through explicit photography and film.

In its willingness to analyse even the deepest and darkest recesses of the human brain, to indulge in its strangest flights of fancy, the Surrealist mood infected almost every creative and academic corner of society. It was perhaps the only art movement to have its own department of research, the Surrealist bureau, set up by Breton to conduct voluntary surveys of people’s dreams and to contribute towards a greater picture of what exactly Surrealism meant for society. This scope of vision, in which Breton had sought not merely an art

movement but a fundamentally radical way of viewing the world, saw Surrealist practices continued well beyond his death in 1966 right up to the present era. Its artists’ works influenced graphic design and advertising; its revolutionary ideas of ‘automatic’ creation fed into the explosive paintings of

American Abstract Expressionism; and its extraordinary infiltration into modern cinema can still be felt to this day. Few rival movements of the time could lay claim to so pervasive an influence, nor to have permeated so deeply the public consciousness.

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london types william nicholson Though they were published over a century ago, there is something irrefutably modern about William Nicholson’s London Types woodcuts. In its two-tone minimalism of black and brown, enlivened by pops of Warholian colour, Nicholson’s portfolio of London characters anticipated even the boldest of contemporary graphics with an approach to design that pulled no punches. Little wonder, then, that by the turn of the century, and at the age of just twenty-six, he was touted as Britain’s greatest living printmaker.

Alongside his brother-in-law James Pryde, Nicholson had cut his teeth as one half of the poster makers J. & W. Beggarstaff. Though only active for a little under five years, the Beggarstaff duo brought upheaval to the London advertising scene with daringly simple, reductive posters in heavy black line. Drawing upon the wealth of graphic images produced by the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Cherét’s Maîtres de l’Affiche, Nicholson’s stark designs offered a vigorous new alternative to the brushed colour of his Parisian contemporaries. Unrelentingly austere, they proved too much for most firms and a lack of sales soon saw the company disbanded.

Though the Beggarstaff experiment had brought Nicholson a certain level of notoriety, it was in his own woodcuts that he found his first commercial success. A portrait of Queen Victoria, her immense imperial presence conveyed in an audaciously abstract mass of black, became hugely popular and propelled the young artist into the limelight. Before long, Nicholson was producing whole suites of prints – an illustrated alphabet, sports

almanac, and Square Book of Animals – in his now ubiquitous style.

Of these many projects, London Types was arguably his most accomplished. A collection of thirteen portraits of quintessential London locals, Nicholson’s great achievement was in capturing the personalities of each subject, only to transform their peculiarities into a paradigm of city life. Sanford Schwartz, Nicholson’s foremost biographer, explains: ‘With images such as the smouldering and fatigued Bus Driver, the insidious Hawker, the alluring, appraising, olympian Lady – clearly a prostitute – and the oddly sensual Newsboy, Nicholson takes us into an authentic modern milieu . . . we are encountering not just London then but any pulsing metropolis now, by turns sooty and gleamingly bright, threatening and exhilarating, humiliating and glamorous.’

Arrestingly direct in his interpretation, Nicholson demonstrated across his various ‘types’ an expert handling of light, shape, and space. Each muscular portrait, sparingly detailed, is set off against great swathes of black and white, a kind of extreme chiaroscuro in which an atmosphere of smog, of shadows cast by the greasy yellow light of London’s street lamps, is economically expressed in black ink on tan paper; an extraordinary feat of graphic design.

Combining photographic directness and technically masterful printmaking, Nicholson’s London comes alive in this suite. Few other artists, so early in their careers, can have described with such originality the spirit of ‘The Big Smoke’.

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Recent Exhibition

Potter of the Four Elements

lee kang-hyo Shoji Hamada, Ryoji Koie, Jun Kaneko, Peter Voulkos; all have made some very big pots, and all have treated ceramics as a performance art.

The motion, even drama of making, whether in the privacy of the studio or the public arena of workshop demonstration, has been integral to their practice. The process feeds the potter and it feeds the pots, the ‘bodily transference’ about which Michael Cardew and Patrick Heron have written. Heron has described the matter of making as an innately physical act of expression, a pent-up creative tension released from the diaphragm and through the arm and hands. Artists like Voulkos or Koie have worked rapidly, with a kind of gestural attack. As Voulkos said, ‘The quicker I work the better...if I start thinking and planning, I start contriving and designing. I work mostly from gut feeling.’

The apparently quieter, more reticent Lee Kang-Hyo has his own dance of making, almost like a ballet, a bodily freeing-up which releases his mind too. My potter father even compared sweeping his workshop floor to a kind of dance, with its own rhythms. There are particular motions involved when Lee prepares a roll of clay, when he builds or throws or decorates the surfaces of his pots, which range from small bowls, faceted bottles and caddies to his powerful ‘onggi’ jars. These jars adopt a traditional Korean earthenware shape (historically made for food storage and fermentation), ideal for his interest in ‘space and mass’ and the expressive ideas of this very modern artist.

‘Sculptural’ is a term bandied about by critics to describe a whole range of ceramics that work beyond the table (though of course the best tableware has many of its qualities). Lee’s pots are rooted in function, but they have a sculptural boldness and simplicity with their upward swelling movement, their containment which grows and expands, all

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His surfaces remind one of modern abstraction in painting, but more fundamentally they evoke aspects of nature, the surfaces of stones and pebbles, the bark of a tree, the textures of cloudscapes.

part of the feeling that is so integral to Lee when he is potting.

Like Voulkos he stresses the gut quality in what he does, the fact that it is a deeply instinctive process. Slips are poured, flicked and spattered on to his onggi jars until there is a total covering which he may spread by hand before a fresh coat is applied and perhaps the surface scored through with various marks. These coverings have considerable depth, a kind of impasto, but there is a nuanced subtlety in the fluid textures that result. This whole activity is part of the loosening up that followed conversations with the Japanese potter Ryoji Koie, who observed that Lee was ‘locked into himself’, and needed to adopt a much freer, more open philosophy.

Despite the vigour of their making, there is also a great sense of pause and stillness in what Lee does. He talks about the energy and the calm in his work being one and the same; ‘I use clay, but it all comes out of my body. . .I express myself differently, it depends on the kind of energy I have when I make each pot.’ His surfaces remind one of modern abstraction in painting, but more fundamentally they evoke aspects of nature, the surfaces of stones and pebbles, the bark of a tree, the textures of cloudscapes. As he says, ‘the everlasting theme in my work is based on mountains, fields and sky’, and his marking certainly has a soft lyrical quality akin to a range of mystical depictions of Oriental landscapes.

They possess this same sense of calm and meditation, of other-worldliness, a sort of Korean sublime.

Lee’s big moon jars also epitomise that ‘love of the fullness of form and volume’, so important to him, and ‘fullness’ is certainly how we would describe his pots. They have all the ethereality of their Korean tradition, with their varied white

slips, perhaps animated by the quietest stroke of a stiff brush, adding a horizontal ripple. Lee’s pots have their own weather and atmosphere; a flattened bottle has flecked surfaces like thickly falling snow, a lidded box is glazed like a water surface, with the blurred colours and shapes of reflection. Or we could be looking into the changing, flickering light and abstractions of a leaf canopy. Lee’s palette is earthy and beautifully wintery, full of the delicacy, the pale hues and mists of the colder Korean months. Bottles and plates are spirited by incised trees and grasses, stirring in the wind. Given his materials, his techniques and inspiration, Lee is certainly a potter of the Four Elements.

His second Goldmark exhibition is probably his strongest show to date, a rich collection of forms; small jugs wiped with hakame, others crisply faceted and mottled by the kiln. There are the quietest bottles, cylindrical or paddled, and dark plates with breezy willow decoration. There are freely made conical vases with horizontal incising and splayed bases, which show how successfully Lee can give Korean tradition a contemporary voice. Large relaxed bowls, like sagged baskets, are warped and squeezed into new states of plasticity. He has made generous runs of particular shapes; broad flat-form slab pieces with motional layers of slip spread and rubbed over, so-called ‘oval’ bottles with rapid calligraphic marking, full-bellied globular pots, and series of tactile cups, tea bowls and beakers, some swathed in hakame. All show how variously Lee Kang-Hyo journeys within an idea or theme. He says, ‘Making art is like setting off to travel to places to find peace in the mind.’ It is wonderful that we too can partake in this remarkable voyage.

David Whiting, 2017 art critic and curator

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