Goldmark 10

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AUTUMN 2018

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g AUTUMN 2018 NUMBER 10

Contents 3

Roderic Barrett

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Kenneth Armitage - Table E

10 Marc Chagall - Bible 18 Mike Dodd - The Glow of Life 24 Kelpra Studios 32 Edwin La Dell - The Shambles, York

Collaboration seems to be the unexpected theme this month: two veterans of British printmaking, Ron King of Circle Press and Chris Prater of Kelpra Studios, were geniuses at coaxing the very best from their co-workers, while neither Picasso’s Diurnes nor Schmidt-Rottluff’s Der Rote Hahn woodcuts could have existed without their creative partners. So in the collective spirit, we’ve brought them together for you to enjoy alongside a host of new articles in this latest autumnal issue.

34 Pablo Picasso - Diurnes 40 Ron King - Studio Visit 46 Christopher P Wood - Painted Pots 48 Elyse Lord - Master of the Colour Print 54 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - Der Rote Hahn 58 Francis Davison - A Satisfactory Balance

Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 5 © David Buckman 19 © Mike Dodd 46 © Christopher P Wood Photographs: Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro Justine Brooks (p 47) Design: Porter/Goldmark, October 2018 ISBN 978-1-909167-56-8

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CONTRIBUTORS David Buckman A frequent contributor to The Independent and Galleries magazine, David Buckman has been a journalist for over 40 years, travelling across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. He has written dozens of publications, including an undowithoutable dictionary of ‘Artists in Britain Since 1945’, and made several hundred radio and television broadcasts.

Mike Dodd is one of Britain’s top working potters. A fervent supporter of animal welfare, conservation, and environmental causes, he has held international workshops in Germany and India and worked extensively with potting communities around the world. Dodd’s work is now held in collections at the V&A, the British Crafts Council, and the Ulster Museum, Belfast.

Christopher P Wood is a painter and printmaker of enigmatic imagery whose work is held in numerous public and private collections, including Harrogate Art Gallery, Leeds City Council, and the Unilever Collection. Featuring magical, symbolic figures and signs, Wood’s work covers an astonishing breadth of media, his most recent experiments involving painted ceramics.

Roderic Barrett

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Roderic Barrett was one of the most powerful British painters of the last century, whose paintings and engravings are only now gaining a more just appreciation. His output was not great – sometimes only a few pictures in a year – but his images are distinctive and often unforgettable.

Unusually for an English artist, he rarely painted the landscape, additionally odd for one who was brought up in the Essex countryside and chose to live there. His was a landscape of the mind, one in which he preoccupied himself with anonymous figures and groups of objects that appear and reappear throughout a lifetime’s work.

Barrett was not given to explaining his pictures in words, and his visual enigmas do not lend themselves to ready solutions, but a few facts about his life do help, I think, towards an understanding of them.

Born in 1920, this artistic nonconformist came from a background steeped in nonconformity. His great-grandfather was a radical and Chartist, his grandfather a Liberal and Congregationalist, and his father a Congregationalist and then a Quaker, a propagandist for the Labour Party, a pacifist, and an imprisoned conscientious objector during the First World War (Roderic, a lifelong pacifist and committed socialist, also objected to military service during the Second World War).

By contrast, Barrett’s studies from 1936-40 at the Central School of Arts and Crafts were strikingly conventional. Among teachers who left an impression on his work were those fine draughtsmen William Roberts and Bernard Meninsky, and in printmaking John Farleigh. Farleigh judged Barrett the best engraver he had ever known, according to Barrett’s farmer brother Hugh.

After his tribunal exemption as a conscientious objector, Barrett helped Hugh on the land, saw the effects of bombing in East London working with the Friends’ War Relief Committee, and taught at a private school. Then with his wife Lorna he spent three years back in Essex as members of an idealistic farming community at Frating before settling in Colchester. Part-time teaching at Colchester School of Art led in 1947 to an appointment to teach several days a week

at the Central School, where he was to stay for 21 years. This, combined with Lorna’s careful housekeeping and gradual sales of his own work, supplied enough income for a frugal existence. Though an enthusiastic tutor, Barrett found the classroom drained his energy. He was a demanding teacher, who loved discussion with his students: ‘We’ve got no-one who teaches one-to-one like he does,’ they would tell Lorna.

From 1939-40 Barrett began showing with the Society of Wood Engravers, from 1946 with the Colchester Art Society, and through the 1950s became a regular exhibitor. He earned his first solo show at The Hilton Gallery, Cambridge, in 1948, the paintings, drawings and engravings exploring the Quixotic theme which became a mainstay in Barrett’s early oeuvre.

It was not surprising that the rather dour realism of Barrett’s oils should appeal to the Beaux Arts Gallery, where in the early 1950s Helen Lessore showed the ‘Kitchen Sink’ quartet to great critical acclaim, among them John Bratby. He and Barrett held shows together at the Beaux Arts in 1954, followed by a second solo exhibition in 1956. Though the paintings did not sell, they were afforded good exposure at a prominent London venue, and the Beaux Arts exhibitions were followed swiftly by unexpected American one-man shows in 1957 and 1958, the second at the Shore Studio Galleries, Boston, the first at The Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. It was here that the Barrett family emigrated for a year while Roderic replaced the resident art master on a year’s sabbatical. Barrett enjoyed the escape from post-war English austerity, but he was a reluctant traveller: on long journeys, he pined, ‘it will take so long for my soul to catch up.’

Over the remaining four decades, Barrett’s pictures would be included in many dozens of mixed exhibitions, punctuated by a string of solo shows. His first retrospective, at The Minories, Colchester, in 1973, would be one of a series, and

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he became the long-serving president of the Colchester Art Society in 1982. Barrett’s pictures from the 1970s were a frequent feature of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, where two years earlier he had begun to teach part-time, disenchanted with the Central School. He treasured time spent with the Academy School’s post-graduate students and they quickly appreciated his honesty. Though seldom rude or unhelpful, he had uncompromisingly high standards and his criticisms were often frank: ‘You couldn’t sell me that

bit of painting,’ he would say of a poorly worked section of canvas – ‘not even on a very dark night!’

Many, including colleagues and mentees, believed Barrett should have been elected a Royal Academician. He was for a time a candidate with strong backers, but his disdain for pomp and pageantry and his wry remembrance of a particularly posh official dinner confirmed that this lifelong rebel was unsuited for the role. Barrett remained as a teacher

at the RA Schools until 1996, four years before he died.

At heart, he was a perfectionist, restlessly unsatisfied with the images he created, even if he had worked on them for years. Owners of his pictures and dealers in them were on occasion asked by Barrett to borrow back work so that they could be amended. If permission was granted, when they were returned any changes to the canvas were near undetectable, though not to the man wielding the brush. ‘I see my paintings in different surroundings and they seem quite different,’ Barrett told an interviewer in 1967. He was then in mid-career, when he might have been expected to be assured, at the height of his powers. ‘I am continually trying to alter and improve things. I can’t stand still.’

What is the meaning of these assemblages of clowns, skulls and grotesques, bicycles and umbrellas, scissors, jugs, bowls, dustbin lids and hoops, butterflies and coats, wheelbarrows and drums, pails and playing cards? The picture titles, of jampot label simplicity, give little away.

Candles symbolise life; a half-candle a life cut short. Chairs suggest people, and upturned chairs an argument.

These are just two interpretations that have been made of Barrett’s melancholic images with an obvious emotional charge. Any reading is undoubtedly speculative, and as we stand puzzling, we should not neglect to enjoy the image for its own sake.

Whatever the significance of the people and objects in these paintings – the scattered vignette in ‘Street Scene with Cyclist’, or the trio of vessels laid out in ‘Table with Bowls’ – always evident is Barrett’s concern for compositional strength achieved through abstract design, his impeccable eye for underlying structure.

Roderic was not much help in explaining his paintings. His wife Lorna remembers him after completing a picture saying, ‘I still don’t know what it’s about.’ But then, as Picasso said: ‘Everyone wants to ‘understand’ art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?’

David Buckman

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kenneth armitage table e Six months into his voluntary stint in the artillery in World War Two, Kenneth Armitage received his first report from his battery commander. It read simply: ‘Eccentric, untidy and should be curbed.’

He was evidently a good judge of character. When, in the early 1950s, Herbert Read championed Armitage alongside Lynn Chadwick, Reg Butler and Bernard Meadows as members of the new sculptural school of the ‘Geometry of Fear’, it was probably the former who conformed least to the categorisation. Armitage’s early bronzes of figures caught in the wind or in flattened, standing groups were a far cry from the harsh, apocalyptic angularity Read ascribed to them. Their teasing wit was undoubtedly part of their charm, helping establish Armitage as one of the preeminent exhibiting sculptors in the country.

Then, as the rebellious 1960s rounded on the decade previous, Armitage found himself out of favour: ‘The idea began to crystallize with people that I was wrong on two counts. I was wrong for being figurative – this was a phase of abstract art in England – and I was wrong for using bronze casting.

This, I think, they felt was a very ancient technique, and it irritated people: they expected one to use new materials.’

When asked by the German Academic

One of the largest of Armitage’s domesticscale sculptures, Table E represents a critical period in the sculptor’s life: a contextually important ‘in-between’ work, produced in a time and place of limbo, bridging the divide between two very different halves of an extraordinary sculptural career.

Exchange if he would like to go to Berlin to work as part of its progressive Künstlerprogramm, Armitage took the opportunity for a period away from home, where he might reflect, re-evaluate, and trial new ideas. He had visited the city before, working alongside the renowned Hermann Noack, proprietor of one of Berlin’s oldest working foundries, but this was before the wall. Berlin was now a different city, abuzz with counter-cultural excitement. His departure for Germany in late 1967 was thus both literal and symbolic – a traversal of both geographic and aesthetic boundaries: ‘I set off in my long Citroen car, a Safari, stuffed with models, armed with ideas to carry out.’

It was here that Table E, an unusual unique work in aluminium, was produced with Noack’s help, one of two very early experiments with new forms, materials, and processes. As with many large-scale sculptures, Armitage first produced a maquette, just under a foot high, in brass enamelled with stone, before committing to the magnificent, affronting 72-inch model illustrated here.

Aluminium was, as Armitage recalled in a later interview, a particularly difficult metal to work with: though light, it was ‘filthy’ to cast – ‘you get black all over your face’ –

and more porous than bronze, to the extent that it could not be properly galvanised, requiring painting and sealing to become weather resistant. Anticipating the need to enamel the sculpture’s surface, Armitage decided to turn the material’s shortcoming to his advantage, using the white paint enamel as a blank surface onto which he could screenprint black figural details.

A number of sculptures produced in this short period in Berlin would further explore the idea, an attempt to merge flat, static, industrial sculptural form with the whimsy of hand-drawn details: ‘Sculpture takes up space, and is heavy, and by its very corporeal reality occupies the mind as opposed to drawings on paper which can be stacked away in drawers and not be seen, with no physical presence. And so this is an attempt at a combination of the two.’ The result was a fascinating amalgamation of artistic practices, and one which preoccupied him for the duration of his stay.

Three years after he returned to England, having been appointed CBE, he made the momentous decision to quit the Marlborough gallery and work at his own pace. The freedom of Berlin, the space to explore new ideas, had evidently made its impact: he would never work exclusively with another British gallery again.

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Marc Chagall Bible Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.

Marc Chagall

After Gogol’s Dead Souls and the Fables of La Fontaine, The Bible was the third and final suite of etchings by Chagall to be commissioned by the publisher Ambroise Vollard. Begun in 1930, as he completed the last of the plates for the Fables, Chagall embarked upon the project at a time of great uncertainty in Europe. His own economic situation was as precipitously poised as that of the rest of the world following the Wall Street crash, having just bought a new house with his wife Bella on the avenue des Sycomores, in the 16th arrondissement in Paris – a large, pavilioned building, with a sprawling, overgrown garden, and in need of extensive restoration. As they looked to build this new chapter of their lives together, they were faced with the unenviable reality of depending solely upon Vollard’s contract for a reliable source of income.

Chagall’s Jewish identity, conflicting as it did with his artistic profession, had always informed his work; at times suppressed during the years of cultural assimilation in Paris in the early 1910s and ‘20s, in this major suite it was to take centre stage once more.

The Bible, Chagall’s chosen subject, was a work of great personal resonance. For the European Jewish diaspora of the early 20th century, the Torah was not just a sacred document, but a living history; a lived reality. Its themes of exile and wandering were not, for its people, abstract parables: they were actual experiences, and in the Bible they had a spiritual home from home, a conduit for private worship shared among the scattered Jewish nation. This synchronicity Chagall had felt as a child at Pesach, with the empty place laid as if the Prophet Elijah might return at a moment’s notice, and a vision imagined in the Red Sea wine of ‘Papa’s glass, reflected deep purple, royal, [of] the ghetto marked out for the Jewish people and the burning heat of the Arabian desert, crossed with so much suffering.’

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The task he had set himself was daunting. The subject matter of the New Testament, for centuries the major source for Western religious art, centred around one man and his transcendence; but the Old Testament, by contrast, dealt with the very foundations of a civilisation, the forging of laws and the building of cities, a colossal, edifying epic of plagues and prophets and kingdoms that rise and fall. To distil its great breadth to a single, coherent series of images, and to maintain within them the human touch, rendering individual tragedies and triumphs with intimacy and sensitivity, would be an extraordinary feat.

As with the Fables, Chagall preceded the Bible etchings with an exploratory set of pencil drawings and gouaches, painting with the brush what he planned to achieve with the etcher’s mordant. But the Bible was still, to him, predominantly a source of poetry – a text of myth and mysticism divorced from any known and experienced place or people: ‘I did not see the Bible,’ he wrote, ‘I dreamed it.’ His vision for the project needed grounding in reality – so when the chance to visit Palestine presented itself in early 1931, he leapt at the opportunity.

With Bella and his daughter they travelled by ship from Marseilles to Alexandria, Cairo, and Beirut, and from thereon to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He was immediately overcome by the landscape, taking easel and oils with him out into the nearby countryside to paint the hills of Galilee and sketching the local Hasidim going about their daily business. He had come to Palestine seeking geographic realism; what he got, was a profound affirmation of the task at hand, one delivered, as Franz Meyer describes, in ‘a new world, a new sky, a new overwhelming light. Before starting out he had feared that he might be put off by the picturesqueness of the “Orient.” But the impact of the Holy Land was so strong that it put everything else in the shade. It was, he said later, the most vivid impression he had ever received.’

On his return, Chagall continued to work on the plates throughout the 1930s, the project consuming his every spare moment even as anti-Semitic violence – already at boiling point – bubbled over and spread like a wave through Europe. In dedicating himself so fully to his artistic imagining of the Bible, he risked swimming against virtually every cultural current: against the grim political climate; against the trends of modern art, to whom religious moralising was unfashionable anathema; and against the fundamental contradictions of his faith. To be a Jewish artist depicting the Torah – not just a symbolic embodiment, but the very word of God himself, the most precious vessel of his divine immanence – and to be focused so particularly, as Chagall was, on the human element of the stories of the Old Testament, broke the most basic tenets of Jewish orthodoxy, all the while engaging in direct

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opposition to a thousand-year canon of Western art built upon religious iconography.

He achieved the latter by being almost entirely innovative in his compositions – Rembrandt remains among the few prior models, whose house he visited in Amsterdam 1932 in the midst of the old Jewish Quarter, but the vast majority make use of Chagall’s own peculiar sense of compositional structure. Progress was good. Then in January 1934, weathering the prolonged effects of the Depression, Vollard announced that he was suspending the commission. Chagall had produced some 40 etchings already, and was too personally invested to abandon the work. He continued unabated while seeking potential benefactors, unsuccessfully lobbying the likes of Peggy Guggenheim for financial support to publish the series. By 1939 he had completed the first 66 of 105 plates, with the latter 39 already begun; but after Vollard’s untimely death in a car crash and the advent of World War Two, the venture was reluctantly postponed.

Had the project aborted then, he would still have left us a masterpiece of modern printmaking: etchings characterised by an exquisite interweaving of lines hatched, scratched, and scored. Chagall had tirelessly reworked many of plates, some in as many as twelve different states, building nested sections of cross hatching, layering them and blocking out areas with lacquer, then re-etching them with burin to create haloed patchworks of sun and shade. This was the light, Franz Meyer wrote, that Chagall had discovered in Jerusalem and which illuminates every scene in the suite: ‘The light that rests on the furrowed faces and heavy hands, and floods the scene like quicksilver, is different…stronger, brighter, and also “more spiritual”, as if its rays signified for the beings on whom they fall a rousing summons to “higher things”…’

In 1952, over a decade later, Chagall returned to ventures interrupted by the wartime chaos. Finding a new publisher in Editions Tériade, he returned to the 39 unfinished plates, finalising them over the next four years. Published as complete sets in 1956, for the first time the suite could be appreciated as a whole. Across every image, Chagall taps into the very heart of the Old Testament: the unique bond between God and the people of Israel, their sacred covenant, signified more visually, perhaps, than any other quality in the prints in the dynamic between earth and sky. Every print in the series, bar two landscapes, is profile, and in each Chagall exploits formal structure to reiterate the two-way bridge between man and God, human and the divine, from Anne reaching up to the vaults in invocation or Isaiah hunched in prayer to the hand of God conveying to Moses the tablets of the law.

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‘Everywhere,’ writes Jackie Wullschlager, Chagall’s biographer, ‘the drama is intensified by a sense of the intimacy of human and divine, merging as fantasy and reality blend in Chagall’s secular work…’

The result is not work that is timeless, but rather rooted deeply in two concurrent times: in the very ancient past and the present. The figures of the Bible suite are at once the people of Palestine whom Chagall had drawn from life, those unmistakable faces, their figures clothed in misshapen shawls and cloth; and yet they conjure kings and prophets, angels and shepherds, fathers and sons of the Jewish faith.

Some months after the suite had been published, Meyer Schapiro, the great Lithuanian-Jewish art historian and a close friend of Chagall’s, wrote his own critical reception of the prints, a paean to this most personal and affecting of all Chagall’s printed works. His conclusion summarises their achievements here: ‘After the grandeur of early Christian and medieval art, after Rembrandt, the illustration of the Bible seemed a finished task. It is remarkable that in an age like ours an artist should risk this enterprise again.

Chagall is the chosen master for this task. The result owes much to the happy conjunction of his Jewish culture – to which painting was alien – and modern art – to which the Bible has been a closed book.

Chagall was prepared for this achievement by his permanent receptivity of mind. He is a rare modern painter whose art has been accessible to the full range of his emotions and thoughts…In almost every image we experience the precise note of his emotion, his awe or sadness or joy, which is voiced in the melody of shapes and the tonal scale peculiar to each conception…

Chagall’s engraved marks are a loving ornament of the page. In their minuteness they reveal the artist even more than the nature of the objects they combine to represent, as if the ultimate particles of this imagined world were a personal substance secreted by the artist’s hand. The needle weaves an inifinitely fine web of tiny points, hatchings, lines, grains of black – a shimmering veil, dense and soft, created with joy, filled with light and movement, often playful, sometimes grave, always captivating through its textures and tones…

The resulting range of the pictures is amazingly rich. I do not have to itemize what is clear enough in the plates – Chagall’s capacity to create the sorrowful and gay, the grave and the charming, scenes of the most ingratiating lightness and the awesome apparitions of God. If we had nothing of Chagall but his Bible, he would be for us a great modern artist.’

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New Exhibition in November

mike dodd

The Glow of Life I’ve always had an interest in words: where they come from, how they are used and so on. So, back in the ‘80s, whilst driving into Carlisle to start my day’s teaching at the Art College, I was thinking about how to inspire, excite, or enthuse a particularly unresponsive bunch of students. I knew that the word inspiration originally derived from breathing, literally ‘to draw in breath’. All of us, I’m sure, can recall moments when, on seeing a range of mountains for the first time or a stunning sunset or a birth (or a pot even), we, involuntarily, drew in breath. We inspired: we were inspired.

While I was mulling this over, I drove past a municipal building designed in the ‘60s, now used as part of the local council offices – an ugly, ill-conceived piece of architecture. I became aware that my chest visibly subsided as I passed. I had expired – not in the usual sense of the word – my breath had been expelled. Why was there not a word in the English language that expressed this opposite of inspiration, since clearly the body had understood?

(There is the word ‘expiration’, but which relates more often to dying, or coming to an end). Expiration, that which devitalises, that which literally depresses, that which subtly, imperceptibly, and insidiously deflates the spirit. Particularly in urban environments, we are surrounded by much that is ugly, much that is neutral, much that is expirational. Where in a modern shopping centre is there much to be found that can rouse or enrich?

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Where then do we look for uplifting experiences – nourishment for the heart and mind? In Nature, certainly, and in the Arts: theatre, music, painting, architecture, pottery, sculpture, literature, and so on. Given that each one of us is open to some of these arts, the communication we receive, at least at first, tends to be felt in the gut, bypassing the intellect. It is real, it is felt, it is experienced. The heart is engaged, not the mind. I am moved, I feel. Later, maybe, the intellect describes or explains.

In the introduction to my book An Autobiography of Sorts, I wrote, ‘I want qualities which pierce deep into feeling and evoke a sense of interconnectedness and love telling the same story in many different ways. Pots are not just functional or non-functional. That’s too simplistic. For me, at any rate, their function is firstly to enrich, to keep alive a sense of beauty, to touch feeling as a counter or balance to reason. Secondly, as probably the most tactile of all the crafts, not to be usable would deny the intimacy necessary for ‘presence’ to emerge in everyday use.’ And if not use, then at the very least close acquaintance.

The problem for education is how does it awaken, enthuse, get through to and sensitise when the overwhelming bias is towards the factual and the descriptive? It is heavily weighted to that which can be measured, marked, and recorded. In our insistence on measurement, are we not missing the ‘spiritual’ aspects of our being? I use the word spiritual not in its religious sense, not barnacled with moral considerations, but more in the sense of our natural spirit, our love of someone or something, our enthusiasm for, our excitement in A, B, or C.

Salvador Dali

Paul Wunderlich

subtitle

I was sufficiently moved to make the radical change from the worthy study of medicine to the making of pots.

The word education derives from the Latin ‘educare’: literally to lead or draw out, as with nurturing a seed from the ground.

Notwithstanding the need to teach language, mathematics, and culture, the prime aim was to discover that which was already within each individual to find. Modern education is more akin to inducation – to cram in, to coerce, to inculcate, not for the betterment of a consciousness, not for the purposes of nurturing a young mind to be kind, to be sensitive, to question and to think, but for the acquisition of a job. Gradually quantifications are taking the place of qualifications. And the consequences? Perhaps it is no wonder that there is progressive disconnection from the real world of how to relate, how to respond, and how to feel in ways which would seed a healthier society.

Of course we know that none of this elusive, right-brained, educationally side-lined, intuitive ‘feeling’ stuff is recordable, measurable, or rationally verifiable. Why? Because it’s us in relationship. It’s us being profoundly communicated to through many forms of art, through Nature and through people.

In relation to pots, Michael Cardew in Pioneer Pottery expressed this beautifully. ‘When a potter not only knows his job but delights in it, when technique and inspiration become identified, the glow of life will begin to appear in his pots.

Nobody can say in rational terms exactly what this glowing consists of, or how the inanimate can be capable of transmitting life from the maker to the user, but it is a fact of common experience.’ As a young man, I was fortunate to be open to this ‘glow of life’ in the work of Shoji Hamada, Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew, Richard Batterham, and Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie. I was sufficiently moved to make the radical change from the worthy study of medicine to the making of pots. A passion had been awakened that could not be ignored.

It became my life’s work.

My understanding of the creative process became clearer

when I began to think about how we learn. Is there a distinction between intellectual understanding and looking? The former we have already touched on: that is, it is knowledge that is factual, measurable and recordable. An additive and cumulative process which is retrievable through time. It has a focus; it is goal-orientated.

Learning through looking, however, turns out to be the complete opposite. We all do it, but it is much less obvious and it is not taught (except perhaps in some forms of meditation) and I’ve never come across any literature that describes it.

I’m on the potter’s wheel – I’m throwing a bowl. It’s a new form and I’m uncertain how to finish the rim. So I watch, I look. I keep making small changes and I wait for the moment when something inside says ‘stop, that’s close’. So, I stop: it’s the best I can do in that moment. The process is not additive, it’s subtractive. Not this, not that. It is goal-orientated in the wider sense of wanting to communicate the love of what one does to others, but in the actual process of looking the mind is unfocused and relaxed because it doesn’t know where it is going – it doesn’t know the way until that inner voice says ‘stop, that’s close’. The choice that arises is in the immediacy of now, not time-based, not measurable. In that looking, aliveness takes over and, to the extent that one can step aside, it chooses that which is most alive, echoing Thomas Merton when he said that ‘to the extent that we get out of the way, do we know truth’, or Cézanne, who exclaimed one day whilst painting outside ‘I wish I wasn’t here’, or Shoji Hamada, who wished ‘to lose his tail’, a peculiarly Japanese way of saying the same thing. It is this aliveness, encapsulated in form, that communicates to the onlooker. Form is all we know. And it is through form that we can pass onto one another something of that immense, mysterious, immeasurable, and complex vitality of which we are ourselves an expression – Life.

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Joe Tilson

KELPRA Collaboration was built into the very name of Kelpra, a compound of the surnames of husband-and-wife partnership Chris Prater and Rose Kelly. Together they made Kentish Town a veritable screenprinter’s Mecca, working with some of the biggest names in British printmaking – from Patrick Heron to Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi to Victor Pasmore – and were responsible for suites of prints that were every bit as era-defining as contemporary painting and sculpture. In an instance of fortuitous determinism, Prater’s own evolution from amateur enthusiast to master printmaker mapped onto the development of screenprinting itself: from creative beginnings to commercial industry and ascent to the heights of fine art.

Serigraphy, or silkscreen printing, as it has been interchangeably known in its brief history, differs from almost any other method of printmaking, the chief difference being that ink is not deposited from a block or plate but pushed through a stencil over a fabric mesh. This apparently simple distinction was revolutionary: it made the process of editioning extremely quick – particularly compared to a medium like etching, for example, where the preparation of the plate and the taking of an impression is so fundamentally interruptive. The efficiency of the pull in screenprinting, in both time and labour, meant that it was perfect for industrial printing, hence its early history as the preferred method of production in advertising and sign-writing firms; but it also meant that, provided one was skilled enough to manipulate the matrix of the stencil, it was also the most controlled of any printing method – and with control comes flexibility. With the silkscreen, the greatest spectrum of colours and tones, opacities and transparencies, the thinnest, most fragile paper types and overlarge sizes of sheet are available right at one’s fingertips.

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John Piper

Since its inception, the medium has changed almost unrecognisably – some of that change happening during Prater’s earlier career. Screens which were once made from organdie or silk are now more commonly a gauze of artificial nylon or polyester, with gauges of varying threads per inch for more or less refined deposits of ink. At one time, the stencils were entirely hand-cut with a knife – a skill in which Prater was considered nonpareil – from film that was adhered to the screen, which could otherwise be blocked out by hand using special solution. The development of new films, which could be drawn on directly or processed as if a photographic negative, expanded the limitations of the medium exponentially. Eventually, all the stencils used at Kelpra were produced on photographic film, ensuring a consistency of materials and printing results while also making alterations easier. With such changes in method and materials came innovations in technique – and the team at Kelpra was nothing if not innovative.

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Prater’s own history as a printmaker is a fascinating story in itself – one remarkably similar, in fact, to that of the artist Patrick Caulfield, with whom he would end up printing on multiple occasions. Born to a family with no history in the arts, as a child Prater was an incessant drawer. Though his father worked, he had severe physically disabilities, so at 15 Prater was forced to find a job to help support his family, settling on a sign-writers where, as a lowly teaboy, he experienced first-hand a primitive form of screenprinting using tusche ink and oil-sticks. Drafted in the war as a carrier pilot, on demobilisation he successfully applied for an art school scholarship, but was persuaded by his first wife the grant could not cover them. Prater continued to attend evening classes, however, and, unable to shake the addiction, decided in 1951 to enrol on a government training scheme with courses in screenprinting and stencil cutting.

For the next six years he flitted between London’s print workshops, eventually managing his own team. But client understanding of the processes was still limited, and their expectations often impossible. After months of rush jobs and seven-day weeks, Chris and his second wife Rose, who he had married the year before, decided enough was enough and opened their own silkscreen workshop.

Initially, Prater continued as a commercial printer, though he now found himself printing exhibition posters for many of the artists with whom he woudl work on future projects. The pivotal moment came when, having worked with Gordon House to produce posters for an upcoming show, House asked Prater if he would edition a set of prints. He recalled, in later years, his first visit to the Kelpra premises, then a narrow, cramped space where the heady fug of ink and thinner fumes formed a kind of haze around the printing beds: ‘From the street, entry was through a shop door at the side into a narrow room with two hand-built printing benches, drying racks right up against them, with just enough space left over to pull an inked squeegee [straight-edged rubber or polyurethane blade] across a screen. With so small a room, work had on occasion to be put out in the street or the yard to dry, with a close watch on the weather should it rain.’

So impressed was House with the outfit and the results that he introduced fellow artists to commission prints. By 1963, House, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, all of whom had produced screenprints before and who shared intimate knowledge of the medium, proclaimed Kelpra the place to print, organising a major portfolio of prints for the Institute

Gordon House

of Contemporary Art with some 24 artists including a young Hockney, Kitaj, and Bridget Riley contributing to the project.

As the name of Kelpra grew, becoming synonymous with such influential works as Hamilton’s ‘Adonis in Y Fronts’ and Paolozzi’s ‘As is When’ suite, industry-wide recognition seemed to meet with resistance at every step. When, at the 1965 Paris Biennale, Kelpra submitted 6 prints from the ICA portfolio for consideration, the incensed curators refused to consider them ‘handmade’ and sought to have them segregated from the other original prints, but the writing was on the wall: that year’s Prix des Jeunes Artistes was won by Patrick Caulfield with his first ever screenprint, ‘Ruins’, printed

by Prater and published in the very same portfolio.

So inventive was their new use of the medium that traditional divisions between mechanised and handmade production, reproduction and origination, had to be redefined almost overnight. Kelpra’s intensely involved focus when designing and layering stencils proved that the word ‘photo-mechanical’ need not imply ‘mass produced’; nor did it engender any less critical decision making, nor any greater devolvement of control, on the part of artist and printer – quite the opposite, in fact, particularly from the late 1960s onwards, when the hiring of Dennis Francis as Kelpra’s first dedicated photographic technician opened up new worlds of visual complexity to contracted artists.

Nonetheless, the problem of ‘originality’ still dogged them

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Peter Phillips, Pneumatics, set of 8 screenprints, each print signed by Phillips ‘for Chris & Rose’ [Prater]

Peter Blake

– one which, though to a lesser extent, still persists to this day in the relatively little regard modern art historians accord screenprinting, and printmaking in general, besides more ‘autographic’ methods of making art. Many objected to the handing over of key processes at Kelpra to its technicians, particularly the preparation of stencils, arguing that, as with etching and lithography, for an ‘original print’ the artist alone had to be responsible for the print’s matrix – completely forgetting that this was, historically, how the world of artists’ prints had begun, with the likes of Dürer and van Dyck, both

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masters of printmaking, delegating much of the preparatory work and even the execution of plates and blocks to their pupils.

Screenprinting’s particular strength came in its capacity for visual assembly, and many artists like Paolozzi – ‘anxious that my works should have a permanent quality’ – sought to reproduce or reclaim elements of collage in their prints.

Accusations of unoriginality hence became double-headed: these prints were unoriginal by design, merely uniting as they did disparate, pre-existing material; and they were unoriginal in production, with much of the translation of these designs being undertaken by Kelpra’s printers. Like any artist worth his salt, Paolozzi did not take the slight to his and Prater’s efforts lying down, writing embittered defences of their way of working in national papers: ‘For me, the day of the artist struggling with his bare hands is finished,’ he declared: ‘Nobody would expect an aerodynamicist to build his own wind tunnel.’ With the likes of Paolozzi and Joe Tilson, Kelpra defied their critics in works that dissolved the boundaries between print and original, or that made a mockery of the idea of the print as ‘copy’ or ‘reproduction’, exploiting socalled ‘mechanical’ processes to make suites in which virtually every image in the edition was unique.

As with any print studio, the dynamic between artist and printer at Kelpra was an unusual one, depending greatly on what each party could bring to the table. At times, there was a great disparity of experience, where newcomers to the medium had to be held by the hand; with others, like House or Hamilton, they were working with artists every bit as invested in screenprinting’s possibilities as they were. What all clients depended on, and what ensured Kelpra’s continued success, was Prater’s continual research into new techniques.

For this research to be of use to the commissioning artist, it had to be done with a creative mind, an experimental touch, a necessarily artistic vision of the opportunities presented by the medium – something Prater had in spades. ‘Collaboration,’ wrote Gerd Winner, a Kelpra ally in the early 1970s, ‘should not be left until the artist has planned the print, but should begin at the earliest stage, the first preparatory stage of the creative process. In a case of symbiosis of this kind, the artist should ideally be a printer himself, and the printer an artist.’

These relationships were also built up over time, recurrent visits allowing Prater and his team to better understand the needs of artist or project.

Certain prints reveal these tight relationships in the making:

Eduardo Paolozzi

Jim Dine’s extraordinary ‘Tool Box’ suite, for example, or Joe Tilson’s series of poster portraits of cultural heroes (including one of Prater himself). These made use of photomechanical translations of images into ‘halftone’ dots, processed by overlaying a photograph with a lined grid and dividing the image into separate squares. Using unusually large grids, Tilson and Prater played off negative and positive films to create images of psychedelic distortion and colour. ‘This is a very typical example,’ wrote Tilson years later, ‘of what happens when you’ve got the right relationship between the photographer, a printer, and what the artist wants, because that’s a [series] which is inconceivable without those three people . . . screenprinting at its technically most integrated.’

When they set up Kelpra in 1957, Prater and Kelly had just £30 to their name in a Post Office account; by the last decade of the studio’s existence, they had produced over 1500 prints, proofs of each stashed in bundles under the bed. These they bequeathed to the Tate to help set up the museum’s first Print Archive, an extraordinary record of their commitment to their craft over four decades.

In Kelpra’s final years, Rose, under whose stalwart directorship the studio had made it through financial thick and thin, was dying from a protracted and painful illness.

Production slowed to a steady pace – the ‘Pasmore-ing and Piper-ing’ years, as they called them, after the two artists who continued to print with them through the late 1980s to the very end. In these last prints, as in those that saw them first established, the Kelpra stamp remains a sign of indisputable quality and integrity, and a record of an achievement in print matched by few other practitioners of the last fifty years.

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There are – broadly speaking – two camps into which artist legacies fall. On the one hand are the monoliths, those prodigious figures who seem to transcend the movements that define their age; and on the other, those who dedicate their time not to self-promotion but the devolution of skills and preservation of craft: teachers, tutors, assistants and technicians. If it is the former who enjoy the limelight, it is typically the latter who have built the stage on which they stand, and who lay the foundations for their successors.

The Shambles York

EDWIN LA DELL

Edwin La Dell was one such artist: an educationalist with a profound social conscience. Born in Coventry in 1914, as a student at the Royal College of Art in the mid-1930s he found himself drawn to the democratic nature of printmaking. The exclusivity of painting, he felt, should be balanced by more accessible forms of art, produced for and consumed by the broader public. To this end, he sought out training in lithography and, finding the college department lacking, enrolled on a course at the Camberwell School of Art. Before long he had become one of the foremost proponents of the medium, at a time when lithographic interest and invention in Britain was practically non-existent.

What little has been written about La Dell centres, for good reason, on his work as a teacher, returning as he did in that capacity to both Camberwell and the Royal College, where he taught until his premature death in 1970; but he was the son of two amateur painters, and paint remained a constant in his life: a private avenue of expression in contrast to his public role as printmaker.

‘The Shambles’ is a wonderful example of the balance

he achieved, in either medium, between realism and romanticism, his straightforward English sensibility blending with a Gallic painterly gusto (the La Dell family was of French heritage). ‘There is an intensification of colour,’ writes John Haldane of his later works, ‘used less in the company of independent drawing and more as the primary means of image making. Having begun as a northern realist, La Dell seems to have ended as a southern impressionist.’

Undated, ‘The Shambles’ was probably painted in the late 1950s to early ‘60s, named after the famous street in York which is its subject. Derived from the old AngloSaxon ‘Fleshammels’ (literally, ‘flesh shelves’), the Shambles was once a thriving meat market, with row upon row of butchers’ shops fringed with ‘snickets’ and ‘ginnels’, passageways that branch off the main street like capillaries. By the mid-20th century the old traders had all but disappeared, and the Shambles instead became a popular destination for sightseers and bricà-brac enthusiasts.

La Dell’s painting offers a charming snapshot of this cultural transition – post-war Britain in an age of postcard prosperity, a time when new motorways, holiday camps, and national rail campaigns prompted a welcome swell in domestic tourism – but the real delight here is in the brushwork. The serpentine mosaic of cobblestones that snakes up the middle of the picture parallel to its ‘runnels’, the channels along which blood, guts and unwanted offal once guttered down the street, drawing the eye down the twisting alleyway mapped overhead by cantilevered roofs. The banded strokes used to render three female figures to the bottom right are deliciously broad and impressionistic, cleverly mirroring the diagonal brickwork above and lending yet more sweep to the centre of the canvas.

Bonnard and Vuillard are the names most often related to La Dell’s work; but the real spiritual forebear here seems more Maurice Utrillo, whose minimally peopled scenes of Montmartre streets under snow find their analogue in La Dell’s palette of pinkish brick and yellowgrey paving. It is, on the face of it, an utterly mundane scene made unexpectedly absorbing through inspired treatment of form and medium – a quality that defines La Dell’s work in paint and print, and which formed the core of his personal artistic principles.

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PABLO PICASSO DIURNES

Découpage et Photographie In November 1954, Picasso was struck by the news that in nearby Nice the ailing Matisse, his lifelong friend and rival, had passed away. ‘Au fond, il n’y a que Matisse’, he was fond of saying – ‘When all’s said and done, there is only Matisse.’ Now, suddenly, there was only Picasso; and in homage to the Frenchman’s great final works, the colossal colour collages and paper cut-outs, he entertained his children with a pair of scissors one winter afternoon making paper masks and animal faces. Years later, they would provide the basis of Picasso’s sole commercial venture in the world of photography: the little known Diurnes suite.

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It had proved, in other ways, a turbulent year for the aging artist, then in his early 70s. He was between women – Françoise Gilot, the artist-lover who had just left him, and Jacqueline Roque – and studios, his private unrest revealing itself publicly as he abandoned his Parisian garret on the rue des Grands Augustins for two new Provençal villas.

Sequestering himself in the sun and shade of the Côte d’Azur, he seemed creatively to feed off the personal drama: he had a new muse in Jacqueline, some 50 years his junior, whom he had met working at the Madoura Pottery in Vallauris, where he continued to produce his ground-breaking hand-painted ceramics. He had also begun, at a local printmaker’s instigation, to experiment with linoleum cuts, producing large posters for the town’s pottery fairs and local bull fights held in his honour; and in his spare time, he found himself cutting sculptures from wood and assembling them from bottles and goat skulls, editioning the resultant voodooist bricolages in bronze. He was a man possessed, driven by private frustrations and an insatiable creative itch that no one project seemed able to scratch.

It was with this tumultuous backdrop that he first began to work with the young photographer responsible for the birth of the Diurnes. André Villers, born in Beaucourt in 1930, was just 23 when he first met Picasso on a deserted street in Vallauris in 1953, a camera clutched nervously in hand. At 17 he had been hospitalised suffering from decalcification as a complication of his tuberculosis. At his doctor’s request, his parents had sent him to a clinic in the southern French town, where he spent five years confined to a hospital bed. With time, he regained the use of his legs and, as part of his therapy, took slow walks around the town and enrolled on a local photography course. In the years to come he would make his name as a portraitist of the great European artists of the 20th century – Miró, Léger, Dalí, and Chagall – but his first would be Picasso. Plucking up the courage, he stopped the artist and asked if he might photograph him there in the street.

Their meeting was to prove unexpectedly fruitful.

Photography informed a great portion of Picasso’s working life: since the early 1940s he had flirted with the medium in private, documenting in a large number of ‘homephotographs’ the work in his studio and the still life setups from which he drew and painted compositions. In 1949, the potential scope of photographic experimentation was emphatically brought home with a visit to his Vallauris workshop by Gjon Mili, an Albanian-American photographer of renowned technical wizardry, culminating in the now

ubiquitous Life magazine images of Picasso drawing with a light torch on a long exposure photograph. In Villers he had found an eager young protégé for his own explorations, and he did not hesitate to invite the young man to his squat little villa ‘La Galloise’ on the Chemin du Fournas to find out what he was capable of.

He was not to be disappointed. Villers recalled his first visit in later years, how Picasso’s domineering presence emanated from the man and the many works in clay and on canvas strewn about the house: ‘Every room he moved into became another studio.’ Unearthing his découpages cutouts, Picasso directed Villers simply to ‘play with them’: ‘So I “puzzle-cut” them, placed the pieces on a clean sheet, and the results made [him] take on a serious air. It allowed me to dream that I had enough talent to work alongside the genius that he was.’ The results were, for Picasso, a revelation: ‘People take me for a fool when I try to tell the truth,’ he told Villers, his usually mischievous smile disappearing from his face: ‘I see that you have understood me.’

In the subsequent years the two developed a close working relationship, Picasso gifting Villers his first Rolleiflex camera as the pair played with negatives overlaid with hand-cut abstractions and the effects of solarised overexposure.

Inspired by the Arcadian beauty of their local Provençal landscape, the Diurnes images were born of experimentation with the photogram, images produced without a camera by placing objects onto the surface of a light-sensitive material, such as bromide paper, and exposing it to light. Rediscovering Picasso’s impish paper masks, they planned to superimpose each cut-out to reveal images of the surrounding countryside beneath, using the photograph as a natural way to texture and tone each mythological portrait.

The title Diurnes – ‘Daytime’ or ‘By Day’, from the Latin diurnus – invoked the daily source of light that enables the photographer to develop his images and the painter to illuminate his landscapes – a collaboration between the artist and the natural world. In response to the suite of prints, Picasso’s old friend, the poet and writer Jacques Prévert, produced a semi-surreal script to accompany their publication, starring the various creatures of the series as speaking characters in a strange to-and-fro dialogue. They herald Villers as photographer extraordinaire and Picasso as choreographer, musician and magician, ‘un enfant naturel’ – a child of nature – by whose hand, with light and scissors, an architecture of ‘plaster, grains of rice, gravel, mirrored waters, horizons and clouds, packing crates and cathedral glass, earth and sea,

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view more Jankel Adler at goldmarkart.com

five-finger ivy, wild grasses, asparagus, lint, lace, and thunderstruck olive trees’ is ‘defigured, refigured, and transfigured’ before our eyes.

Prévert’s text confirmed how Picasso and Villers had sought to show the beauty of nature through the everyday scenes of life en Provence, to reveal that the sublime could be found as easily in the crumbling walls and wire fences of a ramshackle farmhouse or the veins of a dead leaf as the great cultural feats of man: Were there only seven wonders of the world on earth, it would not be worth going to see them.

Let alone the sea, women, or the sun, every stone has its story. Every coppice its virgin forest, every ruin its ‘Great Wall of China’, its cliffs of Étretat, and every little street corner its ‘Hanging Gardens’.

The human sense of scale is so rough a tool, and the ugliest lice on the head of the baldest man is a somebody.

The smallest grain of sand is life-sized. But nature is no megalomaniac: she is naturally kind. And in her ‘green room’, she helps both the painter and the photographer to develop their portraits of her scenes, all the echoes of her colours, all the figures of her ballets.

The 30 images in the suite, chosen from around 100 trials, encompass the essential themes that defined Picasso’s later

career: the typical Bacchic imagery of horned fauns and centaurs, bleating goats’ heads and cavorting animals; Jacqueline’s distinctive Roman profile; and the mysterious, theatrical symbol of the mask. The faces of Diurnes, as Prévert’s poetic text so cleverly suggested, appear like characters in an Ancient Greek comedy, with irreverent smiles set on a distinctly Mediterranean background.

In their Dionysian mood, they echoed the working method of their two creators, who rearranged photographic snaps in the rooms of Picasso’s second villa, the magnificent ‘La Californie’ on the coast of Cannes, where Esmerelda, the artist’s goat, roamed freely in the unkempt garden. Their darkroom was set up separately in Lou Blauduc, an abandoned mansion in the marshlands of the Camargue, where wild white Camarguais horses and black bulls could be seen from the shuttered windows, herded by the local gardians.

Eventually published in 1962, the 30 Diurnes photograms were translated lithographically and published by Berggruen in Paris in an edition of 1,000, each set released in its own presentation box. Though still comparatively unknown, the suite epitomises a critical and prolific period in Picasso’s working life, when an ability to innovate and make play with new techniques, allied to an unfaltering sense of imagination, saw him produce some of his most successful suites of prints.

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New Exhibition in November

There is a satisfying circularity to the life of Ron King, founder of Circle Press, where a career spent making books began with one too. ‘When I was a child,’ he says animatedly in his West Sussex studio, pointing us towards a macabre photograph of severed heads, ‘I saw this picture in a book on my father’s bedside table.

I was fascinated by the story of this gang of cangaceiros, led by a guy called Lampeão who reaped absolute hell up in the north of Brazil. Their heads had been cut off once they’d been finally caught, and I’ve had an obsession with them ever since.’

RON KING Studio Visit

Ron leads us through the workshop, driven by a boyish exuberance that seems never to have left him. In the studio stands a solitary, black, skeletal bandit staring from behind his mask – one of a menacing series produced after Lampeão’s band. Over his shoulder on a high shelf sits a row of alabaster-white heads carved after the same photograph, their eyes closed as if asleep.

Black and white; evil and innocence: the duality is obviously important to King, and as we discover more sculptures and etchings of the same subject, there is a growing sense that the rebel archetype has remained a constant in his career: ‘I think I’m considered a bit of a renegade,’ he says, shifting back uncomfortably in his chair: ‘I have quite a socialist streak in me.’ All of a sudden, the boyishness is gone, and his otherwise smiling face weathers frustration and distaste: ‘I think English society will not change, as long as you have this hierarchy, this leaning towards royalty and class. I’m lucky I’ve changed my accent – I bet you anything if I’d talked as I did then I wouldn’t have been listened to in some of the museums.’

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Telling, then, that it was in America, not England, that Circle Press really found a market when first established in 1967. When sales of his first book failed to materialise in the UK, it was with characteristic fearlessness that Ron left for the east coast, flying from city to city on a nonstop ticket to pitch the project to anybody who would listen. ‘I can’t remember anyone saying to me, “Oh bugger off, we don’t know who you are.” In the States they’d never seen anything like that before, and they were very receptive.’ The enthusiasm for Ron’s work across the pond has never since been matched here, and it is to the great detriment of British art that the legacy of Circle Press, now firmly cemented in the canon of great British publishers, lies with its archives in the Yale Centre for British Art, and not the British Library or the Tate.

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, to a Jewish mother and a father who worked for the Bank of London and South America Ltd, in the depression years King moved with his parents to Rio, where they settled in Niterói on the poorer side of the bay. With the end of the war he was sent back to England and Eastbourne College where he found himself an outsider: the half-Jew from Brazil with a foreigner’s accent. Bullied at first, he soon proved himself as a boxer. Even now, as he approaches his 87th year, one senses the pugilist within him – that physical alertness, the narrowed flashing of the eyes, the instinctive pluckiness that King radiates and which has seen him, no doubt, through more troubling times.

From Eastbourne he came to Ardingly College, where the art master introduced him to modern French painting. ‘I wasn’t particularly original: I was quite conventional, and I still am to a certain extent quite conventional in my imagery.’

One would scarcely believe it, looking at the kaleidoscopic scope of what King has

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turned his hand to over the years. Though best known for his decades-long dedication to independent publishing, he began life as a painter and has since worked as a sculptor in wire and wood, carving from tree logs, assembling manymaterialed mobiles, and editioning puppets, pop-ups, and letterpress chests. Across this multiplicity of works, certain themes persist: the totemic power of the alphabet, and, more generally, of word and image in tandem; playing cards, masks, and folding concertinas; mythic narratives, from Shakespeare plays to Eskimo folklore; and, of course, the Brazilian culture of his youth: ‘The carnival, kite flying, model-making and paper, the whole masquerade – they excited me. That’s influenced me all my life.’

Confronted with the diversity of the work, one quickly concludes that Ron must be a fast learner. Some of his many skills were evidently picked up at art college, where he had to fight his father to allow him to attend on the condition that

he train only in commercial disciplines: ‘So I went to Camberwell and learnt to typeset. It was a completely democratic sort of situation, with people of all types there.

There were some quite famous people teaching too – Robert Medley, and the Welshman, Ceri Richards, Trevelyan, Brian Robb – and some very interesting people like Elizabeth Frink.

She was only a couple of years ahead of us, very friendly.’

After graduating, Ron left for Canada with his wife, the sculptor Willow Legge. Like so many others in his field, many of the practices used in later publishing were honed here in commercial industry. He worked initially at Maclean-Hunter publications in Toronto, arranging magazine layouts, then earned an art directorship at Canadian Homes and Gardens.

A perspicacious addition to the team, King was responsible for a total redesign of the magazine, resourcefully surviving for two years on a pitifully low budget. It would prove good practice for later excursions into self-publishing: ‘If we ran out of money for drawings, I would do them and sign them under another name,’ he remembers, that glint of mischief returning to his eyes.

Though in the meantime he had been well appreciated as a painter, returning to England after a successful one-man show he found, after months of stilted half-starts, that he could no longer paint. Running out of money, he turned instead to teaching at Farnham School of Art, where he was first introduced to silkscreen printing. His time with the school was not to last long, but from the department head he bought a bulk load of equipment and, freelance once more, began to make monoprints.

The breakthrough came when Editions Alecto, publishers of some of the best-known print suites in British art, asked King to edition a series of his prints. His first major project, a retelling of Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ through abstract, carnival-inspired masks, fell through after a rift in Alecto left the company treading water, but by then the books had already been printed. Publishing them himself under a new moniker, they became the first offering of Circle Press, a roundtable of like minds that in the years to come would encompass over 100 celebrated artists and writers.

The range of styles was broad: ‘I’ve always been quite catholic in my taste. As long as someone came up with a good book idea, I didn’t care whether it was representational or abstract or whatever, as long as it was likely to be something which had integrity to it I was quite happy to do it.’

Regular colleagues included John Christie, Ian Tyson and the

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poet Roy Fisher, all of whom introduced prospective collaborators to the press. Their first publications delighted in text and image working in concert, not as illustration but in complementary dialogue. The influences were as miscellaneous as their content, but as Circle Press grew in size and confidence, Ron began to tackle stranger challenges: a foldaway ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’, after the eponymous opera by Bartok, inspired by a Pinocchio pop-up book in New York, was the first to abandon text and introduce actual construction, while ‘Tabernacle’, a celebration of the discovery that the King family had always been in printing, presented a seven-drawer box representing seven generations of publishers, each one filled with type designed after a wooden set originally owned by his grandfather.

Having started in Guildford, in the late ‘80s Circle Press moved to a workshop on ‘London’s worst drug road’ in All Saints road, Notting Hill, by chance ‘bang in the middle of the carnival area’, where it would eventually close its doors – but Ron King still continues to work: publishing, editioning, always collaborating. Surveying his contributions to 20th century print, he speaks of his time with an odd mixture of pride and humility: ‘I once said about Alecto, when they had people like Hockney and Paolozzi working there, well, they’re the race horse – and we’re the mules, the donkeys’ stable; but they need us. And I suppose I feel that way too about the books: you’ve got to contribute even though you may not be tops; you’re supporting other things.’

The work itself tells a rather different story – one of a collection of publications that radically changed the way we look at and define ‘artists’ books’, and whose instigator will in years to come, no doubt, be celebrated as a true thoroughbred of the British printmaking scene.

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CHRISTOPHER P WOOD Painted Pots

There has been a wonderful creative symmetry fulfilled during the creation of these painted pots. The initial impetus for the project came from a series of paintings which were themselves first inspired by ceramic painting: the naivety of early Delft tiles; the strange, ubiquitous pattern named ‘Willow’, with its decorative motifs which we know so well; and the unselfconscious flair of the brush on Eastern and ancient pots of all ages. Pots are wont to tell a story – of their makers, often of their times and the stories of their times. They are vessels both literally and metaphorically.

My starting point was the acquisition of two antique tubes of ‘China Blue’, still unopened and soft to the squeeze. Old paint has its own characteristics, distinct with the times of its manufacture. Today the colour is known as Prussian Blue and it remains, tonally at least, one of the most versatile pigments on the palette – at one end of the scale a dark with an almost impenetrable density, and at the other end a delicacy like watercolour. It’s a pigment with the range to express almost anything: perfect for painting pots.

Working in collaboration with a wonderful potter like Kevin [Millward] has been a thrill – we seemed to hit it off from the first. There’s a whole range of techniques to learn and understand, though likewise many parallels, particularly with printmaking which requires similar processes, and Kevin seemed to know instinctively what shapes would suit my ‘Blue Period’.

The pots were designed on the page, drawn, without hesitation, until I was satisfied with the forms. I wanted the large jars and chargers to be as closely related to my paintings

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as possible without sacrificing originality or spontaneity; for the smaller vessels, I wanted fluidity and painterliness. Though similar to working on gesso, which has a porous, matt surface, I quickly found that biscuit fired clay is a far less forgiving medium. Until the fluidity of the ceramic glaze was just right, it felt like painting watercolour onto an egg box – fine for outline, but less helpful when after a more expressive quality.

Decades of mixing paint and printmaking ink soon came to my aid, and after a few hours the process of painting on clay felt natural.

The images for the chargers flowed quite logically from my paintings, but working in the round presented new difficulties.

Here the image is understood almost like sculpture, in the sense that the object must read coherently from any angle.

This was the challenge of the jars: to make an image that engaged from 360 degrees while maintaining a wholeness when the pot was experienced walking round it. There’s great physical presence in Kevin’s pots, and I found myself tapping into and reacting to that quality during the painting, enjoying the material presence of the image as it emerged on the jar.

What’s interesting now that I’ve returned to my Blue paintings is the range of scale I’m experimenting with, as well as developing ideas discovered during the painting of the pots. New things are happening as another vein of imagery presents itself. There are plenty of missteps, of course – false starts and failed compositions – but it’s all about pushing forward. As Miles Davis once said, ‘If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.’

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ELYSE LORD

Master of the Colour Print

In 1990 Gladys and Kurt Lang published ‘Etched in Memory’, an astonishingly ambitious and detailed survey of the painter-etchers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries whose artistic contributions have since been forgotten. In a chapter entitled ‘The Case of the Disappearing Lady-Etchers’, the Langs examined how female artists’ reputations in particular were affected. Posing the question of their disappearance to British dealers and historians familiar with the period, they received overwhelmingly one of two responses: that the artists concerned were ‘not very good’; and that the demands of marriage, childbearing, and upkeep of the household quashed any hopes of successful careers.

Both myths were swiftly debunked: only half the women ever married, the Langs revealed, and only one in five had any children. Though their statistics indicate the difficult choices such artists faced between work and family, the truth behind their obscurity was a far more complex picture of social expectations, a reticence for selfpromotion, and even the awkward or unfortunate timings of their deaths. Often the collaborative nature of etching, which facilitated the breakthrough for so many women artists in the first place, then ironically made it difficult for them to establish solo careers; and those that did, choosing commercial over domestic security, struggled to safeguard their reputations without children or spouses to manage their posthumous estates.

In light of the Langs’ study, the life of Elyse Lord presents us with a fascinating case.

Independent research by print aficionado Darrel Karl found that her early marriage to a wealthy clerk of Holy Orders ensured her financial safety without the pressures of childrearing. That she enjoyed substantial critical acclaim in her time is also welldocumented: Lord’s work proudly inaugurated the first volume of print collector Malcolm Salaman’s Masters of the Colour Print series in 1927, but even as early as 1924 popular art magazine The Studio was singing her praises. ‘Here is a young English artist,’ wrote Georg Bröchner, a passionate Danish author and art collector, ‘a true child of the Occident, who apparently through sheer artistic intuition, has sensed the spirit and visioned the peculiar beauty of the Orient. It seems all to have become hers in a strange, spontaneous manner, blended with and enriched by her gift of rare imagination, a veritable Aladdin’s cave yielding at her bidding the one gem after the other.’

‘Intuition’ and ‘spontaneity’ – terms carefully chosen, for Lord, like most British and American artists who worked in the ‘Oriental’ style, never visited the places or people she illustrated. The inspiration for her images of whirling acrobats, dancers and musicians, and exotic flora and fauna originated in the large collections of Asian and Indonesian art held in public institutions. Under the British Empire, the mid-to-late 19th century was an age defined by anthropological acquisition, and Lord

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enjoyed the benefits of a museum culture of rapid – and often legally dubious – expansion. Both the British Museum and the V&A housed examples of Chinese paintings, Javanese puppets, Indian silks, and the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints from Japan that so revolutionised modernist art and design. The latter may even have inspired one of Lord’s favoured printing techniques, where colour was overprinted on etchings and drypoint engravings using woodblocks. Manipulating the applications of ink to block allowed for variations of tone comparable to painted gouache or pochoir.

As Bröchner writes, the mastery of colour in Lord’s paintings and prints soon became their calling card: ‘Miss Lord’s colour schemes are subtle in the extreme – at times one would call them sumptuous, veritable poems in mellowed yet festive shades which I think she might safely challenge any of her sisters and brethren in the arts to rival.’

Quite where Lord’s prodigy stemmed from remains something of a mystery. Born Elise Müller to German parents in 1885, we know nothing of her childhood. By 1908 she had married a Reverend Thomas Ashe Lord at the age of 23 – not 18, as she later claimed – and, like many Germans working in Britain at the time, chose to anglicise her name in the face of growing hostilities between their two countries. She was, in the Langs’ words, ‘absolutely uncommunicative’ about her private life – a reclusiveness which in today’s art world might have proved a shrewd marketing ploy, but which has only frustrated retrospective research.

She attended Heatherley’s School of Art – one of Nevinson’s many haunts while a young student at the Slade – where undergraduates were encouraged to draw not only from nude models but also those in costume, and not, as per more traditional instruction, from ‘Antique’ sculpture. Her early talents evidently found her good fortune, with shows at both national institutions, including the Royal Academies in London and Scotland, and major commercial galleries including the Redfern, Goupil, and Lefevre. Opening their London gallery in 1926, Lord showed prints with the latter in multiple exhibitions from 1928-31, when fellow exhibitors would have included Modigliani, Picasso, and, a year before she committed her first show, Matisse. Famous Picasso and Dali exhibitions in 1931 and ‘36 may even have inspired some of the stranger stylistic departures in Lord’s work: the surreal, contorting, corkscrew limbs of an Indian Dance pastel, or the fractured brushwork of Elephant on thin brown tracing paper, both intended for translation to print.

Though a skilled painter and watercolourist, like many female artists it was her etched work for which Lord became best known. Initially she made all her prints herself, from plate to pull; then, as her career took off, some of the more arduous print work was taken on by external publishers under her close supervision, as was customary for practising artists. The actual engraving of the plates was never delegated, and her particular skill as a craftswoman became a frequent highlight in reviews – Bröchner again: ‘I want to say a word about Miss Lord’s printing, for she does all her own printing. It has been said of her that as an artist she has been endowed with that precious gift, le feu sacré; one might add that as a printer she has the skill, the fervour, the unflagging ardour of the ideal craftsman of the

Renaissance, ruthlessly scrapping what cannot pass muster before her exacting scrutiny. Her etchings are simply masterpieces of printing…’

The work was resoundingly successful, both commercially and critically: ‘It was a harbinger of the future,’ note the Langs, ‘that they continued to sell at 12 to 15 guineas in the depressed market of the thirties’ – both here and in the States, where although demand for such prints remained high, dealers had to contend with import duties and a plummeting stock market.

After the Reverend’s death in 1943, not far from Oxford, Lord lived the rest of her life in solitude until her own passing in Abingdon in 1971, apparently producing little work in the post-war years. Without children, most etchers left their estates to family or friends; others foresaw that maintaining their legacy was better left to

those with ‘skin in the game’, and so bequeathed prints and paintings to dealers and gallerists. A widow of considerable assets when she died, Lord left her own estate to her last publisher, H.C. Dickins, and in so doing ought to have ensured her posthumous reputation.

As it so happens, this was not to be; without evidence for the cause of her now relative anonymity, some have laid the blame, as they did others, with her publisher.

Many who inherited bodies of work sold their contents en masse, flooding the market for quick liquidity. Lord’s edition sizes were small – mostly 75 copies, with some earlier editions as little as 50 – and so while she kept a number of proofs aside, it is easy to understand how mismanagement of the estate could have seen it frittered away.

Beyond those proofs, she also made no definitive record of her graphic output. Bulk

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sales of her prints would thus have been doubly damaging, both devaluing the work at hand and disseminating it without establishing a catalogue or ensuring ownership of works in national galleries and important collections. Contrast her situation with that of Laura Knight, whose brazen eccentricities provided her with an abundance of publicity and who was already famous as Britain’s ‘greatest woman painter’ before she ever picked up an etcher’s échoppe; or indeed Orovida Pissarro, another Orient-inspired artist, who, despite working in the shadows of her male relatives, survived oblivion by meticulously documenting every one of her nearly 8,000 impressions from 107 plates, providing a complete catalogue with examples of almost every print to the Ashmolean Museum on her death in 1968.

Little wonder there has been no catalogue raisonné of Lord’s work, which was often undated, existed in both coloured and uncoloured variants, and by conservative estimates may have numbered in the lowto-mid hundreds.

If her images seem definitive of a particular age, or even approaching cliché, it is because this was a standard she set: one of the most successful genre artists of her generation, many subsequent etchers took to producing scenes of the Orient, though rarely with the delicacy or the affinity she possessed. There is such sympathy in her depictions of these people, whether labouring or in festive regalia, that it is easy to forget that these were subjects which were, in truth, totally alien to her. She drew with a shared humanity that balances that otherwise pervading sense of ‘otherness’ that typifies latter-day pictures of the Far East: ‘Over them all,’ Bröchner concludes, ‘there is a strange fascination, and they make a most enchanting little gallery – things of beauty and a joy for ever.’

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DER ROTE HAHN KARL SCHMIDTROTTLUFF

‘...here we immerse

ourselves in a world that,

liberated from reality,

born of ecstasy, extends

to the stars. It is saturated

with mysticism, the fertile

soil of all great art...’

Rosa Schapire

One of most enduring gifts the Expressionist artists of Germany left us was their dedication to print – and most especially those published within periodicals and journals. In these the thick, black lines of their woodcuts, embedded alongside text on the page, retain the diverse flavours of their political, social, or spiritual context. The holism of Expressionism, which went far beyond the artistic and the literary into the realms of philosophy and sociology, is sometimes lost in individual prints; in situ, they can be appreciated as part of a powerful and moving totality. In the rarest examples, more often absent from mainstream art histories, can be found real diamonds among the rough of political polemic.

Though one would struggle to find mention of it outside the driest of academic theses, Der Rote Hahn was in fact one of the longest-running journals of the post-war period: 60 issues, printed across 40 volumes (some were published as double releases) between 1917 and 1925. Its editor, Franz Pfemfert, curated an eclectic range of content that seemed to alternate between impenetrable political theory, Marxist calls to revolution, and highly unorthodox Expressionist prose and poetry, much of it illustrated by contemporary printmakers. Whatever broader

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the act of creation; there I have the world under my fingers.’ A founding member of Die Brücke in 1905, with the outbreak of war he was drafted in 1915 to the Eastern Front and quickly recruited by the officer corps of the Oberzensurstelle, the main German censorship bureau, where he remained until the end of the conflict.

It was here, in 1916, that Schmidt-Rottluff first met Alfred Brust, an Expressionist dramatist and novelist and his fellow collaborator in their sole contribution to the Rote Hahn series. The pair would have found it unsettling, no doubt, to be suddenly in a position where they were required to censor, and at times fully suppress, precisely the kind of publications they had been contributors to.

Like Schmidt-Rottluff, Brust felt profoundly

the need for transcendence in art. He explored in his various dramas how humanity could deliver itself from its excesses and its idiocies by rejecting bourgeois civilisation and returning instead to nature and a more primitive appreciation of life. Deep contemplation, spiritual salvation, and Christian self-sacrifice were all important central themes, as was the bridging between cultures and religions old, new and far-flung. A native of East Prussia, the ancient myths of his homeland feature heavily in his works, most especially in ‘Das Spiel Christa vom Schmerz der Schönheit des Weibes’ (‘Christa from the Pain of the Beauty of the Woman’), the very play published in Der Rote Hahn with SchmidtRottluff’s accompanying illustrations.

‘Das Spiel Christa’, a one-act tragedy, offered a strange, and at times shocking, spiritual mix: Lithuanian and Latvian mystical deities who converge with the figure of Christ; and the message of the Passion,

counter-cultural movement the editorial aimed at was entirely lost on the working classes it hoped to motivate, and promoters frequently complained about its ivory tower exhortations. ‘What we strive for is alien to them,’ wrote one exasperated patron to Pfemfert in November 1918, almost exactly when the issue illustrated here was published: ‘They have no desire to understand it…Today’s proletariat despises intellectual pursuit: according to his view, it is a privilege of the educated that, for him, is synonymous only with those that “have”.’

The anxiety was shared by Karl SchmidtRottluff, who contributed to his fair share of such publications: ‘During intellectual discussions, I am easily lost in uncertainties, which happens less when I am engaged in

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delivered in folkloric song, in a bizarre final scene that blends wicker man paganism with the stigmata in a ritual crucifixion.

This meeting of mysticisms is reflected wonderfully in Schmidt-Rottluff’s woodcuts, with their own union of West African iconography with the formal vigour of European modernism. The Stranger, the central figure of the play and an incarnation of Saulele, the Baltic goddess of the sun, is beautifully rendered as a slender, almost Gothic nude figure, her arm a black stake that skewers through the centre of the print.

Another figure, his eyes burned out with a Paschal candle, is portrayed simply with flashing white sockets, blinded in a moment of profound Oedipal revelation.

These portrait heads, masks carved from the block like votive offerings instilled with tragic pathos, speak to the severity of Schmidt-Rottluff’s spiritual awakening when faced with the horrors of the Russian front – but the power of this kind of figuration was something he had grappled with long before the war. In a letter to a patron in 1913 he wrote how, ‘I often have exaggerated heads monstrously compared to other body forms as the nexus of the whole psyche, all expression. But all other body shapes tend to move spiritually toward the head, assemble there and thus the shape grows big all by itself…I want to create a relationship between the cosmic and the earthly moment. This sounds somewhat mystical in our thoroughly cynical age, but whatever has been left to us in the course of time from the art of the past – from Egypt, or Michelangelo – what gives these their immortality: it is the experience of transcendental things in the earthly.’

As with other issues in the Rote Hahn series, ‘Das Spiel Christa’ was published

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under the administrative arm of the leftwing journal Die Aktion – ironically, one of the very first publications to suffer confiscation immediately prior to the war by the very department for which SchmidtRottluff and Brust were now working.

Whether the volume itself was well-received or not remains unknown – but in 1919, Rosa Schapire, art historian, writer, and one of the central figures responsible for promoting and propagating German Expressionist art in the 1920s, wrote of the overwhelming effect Schmidt-Rottluff’s wartime woodcuts had had upon her: ‘According to a beautiful saying of [the Austrian-Jewish philosopher Martin] Buber, quality in the work of art only ensures

admission into the “outer circle”; in the inner, “however, from time immemorial stand the works that embody the meaning of the world.”

Schmidt-Rottluff’s religious woodcuts qualify for membership in the “inner-ring.”

The most secret mysteries of the soul reveal themselves in black and white, in lines and planes with the stirring power of the confessions of the mystics when full of their God, they bear him witness…Each time Christ’s figure is different in expression, bearing, structure, even in the centuries-old motif of the halo a new expressive power dwells. Like rays it dissolves the background, swells like a phosphorescing flame, ghostlike around the head of the divine one…’

Amidst the deafening roar of the German war machines, Schmidt-Rottluff appears to have found a purity of voice; from the purgative fire of shellstrikes and scorched earth, a cathartic cleansing of the spirit. ‘Our highest happiness is also our most painful,’ laments Brust’s Stranger, the play’s sacrificial maiden. ‘Yes,’ replies the Son, ‘for we are most solitary at that height.’ The same could be said in reverse of Schmidt-Rottluff’s time at the front, where confronted with the depths of human despair and industrial violence, at his most alone, he made his most affecting printed images. ‘It may be the most glorious testament to the freedom of the spirit,’ wrote Schapire, ‘that the majority of these religious woodcuts, which bear such fervent witness to the deity, originated in Russia during the war. Nothing of the agony the artist went through during the war penetrated into the realm of the spirit. As a creator, a builder of new values, he freed himself from all inhibitions and suffering.’

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A Satisfactory Balance The work of Francis Davison was never meant to be easy. In execution, the artist limited himself to the purism of found paper, cut or torn and never painted.

In interpretation, he insisted at his only

FRANCIS DAVISON

major lifetime exhibition that his work be hung untitled, unattributed, and without description. His tremendous personal shyness seeped into his exquisite collages, and it is only with time and contemplation that they begin to reward with their own peculiar, hidden resonances.

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A student at Cambridge University, Davison initially intended to become a poet before taking up art as his vocation after a trip to St Ives in 1946, where he stayed with fellow classmate, friend and abstract artist Patrick Heron. It was here, in the same town where he fell in love with his future wife, the artist Margaret Mellis, that Davison first began to draw and paint seriously.

The St Ives school – a movement that emerged almost by accident when Mellis and her previous husband, the artist Adrian Stokes, took in Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and their three young children to last out the war – centred largely on abstraction, reducing landscapes and interior scenes to simplified planes and blocks of colour. Mellis’ own work, in which still lifes were transformed into textured arrangements of pattern and colour, offered the self-taught Davison an early

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artistic direction. As she recalled in later years, ‘He only started painting because I did, I was always painting. I had the influence on him. In fact, I brought him up. Then he got frightfully good and went right past.’

Davison’s early oils drew heavily upon the works of the St Ives community. He employed a rich range of gold and ochre, midnight blues, scarlets and turquoise, caught somewhere between the muted, earthy tones of Nicholson and William Scott and the hedonism of Heron’s pinkish reds, oranges, and purples. His own development towards abstraction took time: moving to the Cap d’Antibes in France with Margaret in 1947 and then spending their honeymoon in Venice in ’48 (where they would return a year later), his subjects drifted between balcony scenes of gondolas and azure stretches of coastline and beaches. These first painted boards hum with the warmth

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of Matisse’s fauvist paintings of the same landscape, where the forms of trees, masts, sails and sand are simplified with rough brushstrokes and an obvious, tactile enjoyment of the paint.

In 1950, Davison and Mellis moved back to England, buying a run-down cottage near Diss in Suffolk, one of few houses they could afford. Almost immediately, Davison’s sympathetic palette changed with his surroundings: greys, greens, chocolate blacks and paper bag browns supplanted the bright shades of the Mediterranean. His sense of form was irrevocably altered too, as farmhouses and their surrounding fields were translated into evermore reductive planes and shapes. Within a few years, his approach to paint had become increasingly radical and stylised until, in 1952, he turned his attention solely towards collage.

In many ways, the abrupt move to collage was a logical step: his last paintings in the early 1950s were increasingly concerned less with paint and more with form and the juxtaposition of lines, colours, and textures. Practically speaking, collage had its benefits: paper scraps were cheaper than oils, and could be stored more easily both before and after assembly. Compositions of shapes could be realised far more quickly too, with the additional ease of being able to rearrange his scraps at will before deciding upon their final position.

Davison’s first collages were often small and subdued in colour – thanks to what little was available – typified by drab olive, greys, mustard yellows, and the natural tones of pulp and cardboard, though with time he grew more confident in size and scope. Over the next thirty years he worked tirelessly at his creations, from miniature paper patchworks to colossal six-foot arrangements of harmonious strips, circles and squares of pure colour. He found he worked best within limitations: his paper was always found, used, and never painted, more often torn by hand than attacked with scissors, an ascetic creative vision through which he saw himself as the ‘only true collagist’.

Though in their feathered edges these works appear haphazard, as if flung together, their configuration was the result of extreme focus and design. Later collages introduce new shapes: small squares, outlined triangles, holes, hidden tongues of scrap barely visible underneath overlapping lattices. Larger lines are often made up from multiple, individual strips of paper, carefully mapping out a direction across the composition. Look more closely and one finds evidence of tiny, punctured holes from drawing pins used to

hold pieces in place as a collage was being resolved.

Notes found amongst Davison’s papers in the years following his death reveal something of the probing nature of these works: People often ask what is the aim, what is the meaning of the collages, instead of looking to see what has been made with paper instead of paint. So I don’t explain them.

I look at them again and see that what was obviously a mess has taken shape… …It’s flat, there are empty spaces, there’s slight relief, one piece of paper goes behind, another comes in front.

There are false starts, crossings out, suggestions that are not followed up.

This work the paper is doing gradually arrives at something ‘made’, cutting away what is not wanted, adding more and taking away, more of this colour, less of that, simplifying, messing until everything is lost or saved… something modest appears, a satisfactory balance and stillness, a suggestive form.

The ‘stillness’ that instils all of Davison’s collages, even his most textured and expansive, derives from a delicate balancing of tone, movement, and direction. Brighter papers – yellows and pinks especially – provide blushes of colour, but the anchor is often a combination of hushed browns, blues and greys. In one late and particularly large collage a central grid of jostling paper strips, interwoven like hedgerows delineating farmland borders, are softened by a subtle and restrained rural palette. Like the countryside with which Davison and Mellis surrounded themselves, the whole is ordered and loose at the same time; linear, but not bound or confined, each olive-brown, beige, and bistre box nestling against the next.

Davison died in 1984, his life’s work and estate left almost untouched and with few works sold. Through complimentary shades of light and dark, he had created images that were at once intensely colourful and calm, of simultaneous strength and serenity, but his desire for anonymity had come at a price.

Many exhibition-goers at his first and last major lifetime show at the Hayward in 1983 found the lack of accompanying biographical and descriptive text arrogant, as if their omission were part of a cheap tactic for publicity. It would take some years after his death before his contribution to post-war abstraction was properly understood.

Though he had abandoned the indulgence of paint to devote himself to pure shape and form, he nevertheless

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remained a master of colour. Most notably, he preferred – even demanded, when it came to the Hayward exhibition – that his compositions be framed on dark brown, grey and green backgrounds, and never stark white, where he thought the softness of his chosen hues and their interrelation might be lost.

The curator and writer Julian Spalding, a close friend, confidant, and organiser of the Hayward retrospective,

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remembered being invited to Davison’s house to give his verdict on the many works compiled for possible inclusion in the show. Those that did not provoke immediate approval were destroyed unflinchingly, frequently by fire and regardless of Spalding’s or others’ protestations. The few compositions that survived his destructive streak must rank among the very best of his enigmatic masterpieces – and indeed the best of British abstract art.

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frontis: Marino Marini, Giacolieri, etching with aquatint front cover image: © Jay Goldmark. Opposite Mitsukoshi department store, Tokyo, during a visit to photograph for Ken Matsuzaki’s new exhibition.

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