Goldmark 08

goldmark

SPRING 2018

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g SPRING 2018 NUMBER 08

Contents 4

Michael Rothenstein - Contrasts and Confrontations

10 Augustus John - Etchings 18 Ken Matsuzaki - The Wabi-sabi Aesthetic 20 Jenny Grevatte - Painting Trees 24 Kündung - Hamburg’s Last Great Expressionist Periodical 28 Robert Dawson - A Most Uncommon Man 34 Richard James - Old Earth Saints

Spring has finally arrived, though with the recent flurries of snow, you’d be forgiven for not noticing it.

Fortunately, our Spring magazine has plenty of warmth and wit to thaw the Winter frosts: etched mastery from the hands of Goya and Augustus John; colour abounding in the vital prints of Rothenstein and Jenny Grevatte’s trees; and major appraisals of John Piper and the American potter Warren MacKenzie, giants in their respected fields. We hope you find something to enjoy.

36 Francisco de Goya - Los Caprichos 42 Warren MacKenzie - A Self-confessed Man of Mud 50 Janet Stayton - A Tuscan Reverie 54 John Piper - A Very Individual Talent

Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 4 © Mel Gooding 28 © David Whiting Photographs: Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro, Vicki Uttley Design: Porter/Goldmark, April 2018 ISBN 978-1-909167-50-6

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CONTRIBUTORS Mel Gooding is a writer, critic, and curator who has written and edited a number of books on the work of artists including Ceri Richards, John Hoyland, Patrick Heron, Michael Upton, Bruce McLean, Mary Fedden, Gillian Ayres, the sculptor F.E. McWilliam, and the architect William Alsop. He has recently been commissioned by Goldmark to write a major new publication on the printed works of Michael Rothenstein to be published later this year.

David Whiting is an art critic and curator who has written extensively about 20th century art and studio ceramics. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the International Association of Art Critics, writes regularly for magazines such as Ceramic Review, and has made contributions to the Guardian. Whiting has authored the first book on the life and work of the landscape painter Robert Dawson, to be published by Goldmark later this year.

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mICHAEL ROTHENSTEIN

Contrasts and Confrontations Michael Rothenstein was creatively impatient and easily bored. Capriciously changing colour ways; adding colour by hand; a cavalier disregard of the rules governing the uniformity of print editions and their numbering (he frequently failed to complete editions): these transgressions and omissions played their part in maintaining spontaneity and excitement in his production of printed images. They also made working with the artist a nightmare for tidy-minded print dealers, whose pricing depends on a catalogue order of established edition numbers, and on a strict visual consistency between individual prints. Unpredictable variations between prints are, however, a joy to collectors: any print, even one numbered, may be unique; and any print is likely to be of smaller actual edition (and therefore rarer) than its numbering seems to indicate.

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The intensity of Rothenstein’s strenuous interaction with material and mechanical/technological processes – always subject to accident and unpredictable contingency – accounts for the dream-like and automatic quality that characterises so much of his graphic work. His obsessive printing from pieces of timber and other found objects, his resort to found photographic imagery, and his juxtaposition in a single work of categorically different media had something profoundly in common with certain surrealist procedures, including assemblage, the ‘exquisite corpse’, the automatic techniques of collage, frottage and decalcomania associated particularly with Max Ernst, and the photomontage of Dada.

In his work, Rothenstein returned obsessively to certain symbolic images (birds, insects, fish, animals; machines, tools and implements), to emblematic signs (sun, moon, rainbow arc, circles, ellipses, crosses, etc.), and to combinations of both. He was fascinated by what he described as ‘images that persist’ (‘things,’ as Jasper Johns had put it, ‘the mind already knows’): ‘I think our response to things like that is immensely basic. .. A lot of my images are about these very persistent things, like a sunburst or a zig-zag, a lightning strike.

I find they animate the construction [of image and object] for me in a very special way.’ He might have added to this list: stripes and star shapes, targets and spirals, wood-grain patterns, symmetries and repetitions. Throughout his life, going back to his childhood drawings and through to his latest works, he resorted to this magical inventory, as if drawing on a source of mythic energy, or invoking the power of psychologically charged phenomena and common emblems.

Such a repertoire of images and signs perfectly suited the purposes of an artist whose imagination obsessively focussed on recurrent themes, treated in a variety of stylistic modes, finding expression in a bewildering diversity of media and techniques. Rothenstein may be considered as in the line of those modernists whose work is not governed by the idea of a single ‘signature’ style. Among the great progenitors and exemplars of this tendency (in various ways) we might count Picasso, sculptor, painter, printmaker of many styles and ‘periods’ (who said ‘I do not seek, I find’); Francis Picabia, a founder Dadaist and artist of many modes and moods (who

said ‘Our heads are round so that our thoughts can go in any direction’); and Robert Rauschenberg, of many media, from painting and ‘combines’ to printmaking, photography and dance (who said, ‘You begin with the possibilities of the material’).

Such artists are unusually driven: they exhibit a need to move quickly and unpredictably to the next thing. Such changes of direction may be brought about by experiment with a new or unfamiliar medium or technique. Sometimes they are a response to an unanticipated commission or to a novel personal circumstance, a new friendship or love affair, the death of someone close. Sometimes it is the consequence of the irruption into artistic consciousness of a compulsive subject. In Rothenstein’s case, a radical change of medium and style, and the adoption of new visual devices, might be triggered by a shocking news item, or chancing upon a jagged plank, a crushed object or a crumpled photograph, or the recurrent recall of the ferocious glamour – all fire and feather − of a farmyard cockerel, or the poignant glimpse of a punk couple on the Underground, or the arbitrary scribble of a child on a press photograph.

His complex prints – even those using only one medium − do not present us so much with static images as with visual events. They enact – in textures, forms and pictorial content – contrasts and confrontations, the unceasing concurrence of beauty and violence: they are visual analogies to the perpetual happening of the actual. Their surfaces − pitted, gouged, scraped, variegated − register the impress of the skin and grain of the physical world; ink flows, colours, smudges, stains and irradiates like water, blood, light and shadows. Glimpses of the stark actualités of crude half-tone press photography are dramatic tracings of light and darkness in violent or morally uncertain moments. Their startling mixes of different media, images, textures, colours and iconic signs bring things together in the same apparently haphazard manner of our encounters with things in life itself. The quick touch of the immediate; glimpsed recollections of emotional intensity; pure wonder; the sensation of beauty, the horror of the banal; intimations of joy and fear: looking at Rothenstein’s prints we are implicated in the real.

From Mel Gooding’s book on the prints of Michael Rothenstein to be published later this year by Goldmark.

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When Augustus John arrived at the Slade School in 1894, he was a Welshman in London; an unkempt country lad transposed to urban Bloomsbury. From his buccaneering dress sense to his outrageously prodigious drawing talents, he stuck out among his Gower Street peers like a sore thumb.

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augustus john Individualism – or rather Outsider-ness – was to define and dominate his life. He was outwardly brash, self-confident and cavalier, while nursing inward doubts. To escape the isolation of his own uncertain company, he surrounded himself with a – sometimes literal – caravan of progeny and paramours: Ida Nettleship, the artist wife to whom he ‘conceded’ marriage (though the institution suited neither of them) and who, selfdubbed ‘the Belly’, would bear him five sons in as many years; and Dorelia (née Dorothy) McNeill, the enigmatic young courtesan who gave birth to their first son together in a gypsy wagon parked in the hills of Dartmoor.

John himself was born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire in 1878. At the age of six he suffered the loss of his mother. It was she, an amateur artist (and the more sympathetic of his parents) who first encouraged the young Augustus and his elder sister Gwen in their discovery of ‘the mystery of painting’.

Their careers would develop in parallel: Gwen, the more softly self-possessed, demure - dressed all in black - but determined, intractable; and ‘Gus’, the extrovert who craved companionship and reassurance.

Both would be established through portraiture, though she was, by historic consensus, the more consistent painter. While Gwen’s austere female portraits went from strength to strength under the influence of Whistler, John was plagued by flashes of brilliance amid furious self-aborted efforts - a qualitative seismograph to Gwen’s steady upward curve. Though he

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sustained a celebrated career as Britain’s preeminent high society painter, his best portraits were less frequently commissions and more often, tellingly, paintings of like souls: family, artist friends, writers and patrons, fellow pupils, and the vagabond strangers who had so fascinated him as a child.

These he would portray not just in paint, but most emphatically in the etching plate. Printmaking marked a definitive point of divergence in his and Gwen’s careers; it was also where John’s true brilliance lay. Comparatively little has been made of his graphic work - perhaps because it seemed so much less important to himself - yet in etching, he achieved a level of expression to match the Old Masters. What they lack in colour and expansive size, in the impatient gestural slashes of paint that typify his oils, they make up for with exquisite emotional confession.

After their mother’s death, care of John and his siblings fell to their father. He was a solicitor – colder, and hopelessly detached – who, despite public fastidiousness, in private left the four children to their own devices. For John, who would build a lifestyle on non-conformity, his father’s dry insistence that the family derived from ‘a line of professional people’ kindled a catalytic distrust of orthodoxy: ‘I wanted to be my own unadulterated self, and no one else. And so taking my father as a model, I watched him carefully, imitating his tricks as closely as I could, but in reverse. By this method I sought to protect myself from the intrusion of the uninvited dead.’

He arrived at the Slade at the age of sixteen, Gwen hot on his heels. A born draughtsman, John flourished in the life drawing department under the robust teaching of Henry Tonks, the former surgeon turned art teacher. His sketches – evidence of a untaught, untamed precociousness - were widely circulated around the Bloomsbury halls and quickly garnered him a legendary status, one he saw fit to embellish.

Initially shy, with confidence he began to cultivate a dashingly Dionysian self-image based on childhood observations of Romani travellers, replete with thick beard, fine tailored tweeds, and a rakish smoking cap of black velvet.

It was here too at the Slade that John learnt how to etch.

Intaglio printing made for a natural transition from the pencil and chalk drawings that had marked him out as his generation’s promising talent. His early etched portraits, achingly direct in their description, bore the unmistakable hallowed touch of Rembrandt, but to John, they constituted little more than leisurely exercises. Preparation of the plates and the acid bath made etching a more protracted affair than painting or life drawing, and he may have enjoyed its measured change of pace, the opportunity to review and revaluate each impression. It was not until 1906, some six or seven years into his professional career, that the first collection of his prints was collated and published commercially.

By now John had met his first wife Ida, a fellow student at the Slade. With the birth of their first child due in 1902 he was forced to seek a more stable income, finding employment as an art teacher in Liverpool at a school attached to the University College. Though his stay there was short, it produced a series of etched plates that quietly established him as a new master of the medium. Etching is not a forgiving process; its thin, resin ground presents a peculiar, waxy resistance to the needle, quite unlike the rapidity achievable with graphite, yet John’s plates reveal all the intimacy and immediacy of pen or pencil on paper. He scratched as he sketched – varying pace and detail, from methodically built up passages of cross-hatching to delicately spare arrangements of whispered, spidery lines. As with his oils, most early compositions were portraits; a favoured technique, one he may have adapted from Rembrandt, was to surround the edge of the plate with dense, vigorous, inward strokes, bathing his subject in a halo of bright light that recessed into hatched darkness.

As Augustus’ career in portraiture began to take off, Ida’s was subsumed by motherhood. They were not natural parents: Ida came to resent the role of child bearer and craved the liberty of her student days, while for John, his offspring represented little more than a source of painterly focus. Their

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domestic life, though not bliss, was certainly colourful (John famously taught the family parrot to swear in Romany), but the arrival of Dorelia via Gwen, who had first discovered her at a party, disturbed what little stability they had, turning their relationship to a frustrated, polygamous ménage à trois. Both women sat extensively for John, forfeiting their own art for the sake of their husband. ‘I would rather lose a child,’ a pregnant Ida wrote to Gwen, ‘than the power of sitting. The longer I live the more subordinate do all things become to

that old A.E. [Augustus Edwin] the monster.’ They were at once competitors for his attention and intimate companions in their rejection of his more capricious moods, when they would take the children to Paris on their own, leaving John to sulk in his London studios (‘Our great child artist’, Ida wrote: ‘Let him snap his jaws.’).

For John, the next ten years were a decade of intense restlessness. He had begun to envisage their lives together as a modern-day incarnation of pre-industrial gypsies. Traveller

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folk and their attending band of ragamuffin children had long captivated him, with ‘those sardonic faces, those lustrous oriental eyes…Aloof, arrogant, and in their ragged finery somehow superior to the common run of natives, they could be recognised a mile off.’ His etchings from this time were all borne on a fanciful vision of rustic traveller life as he moved the family between Dartmoor, London and Paris, bivouacing off rivers and roadsides in a hand-painted caravan. He had Ida and Dorelia don Bohemian dress, or arranged locals in fisherwomen garb, painting and etching them into imagined pastoral vignettes. After Ida’s sudden death in 1907 from a postpartum infection, Dorelia’s presence became ever more dominant as the troupe moved once more to Provençal France. She was a gifted sitter, with a timeless face and smouldering Mona Lisa smile that lent authentic life to John’s fantasy scenes. The drawings had changed too; his touch was swifter, fleeting, his portraits produced with an increasingly economical summary of line, the bare sheet of a miniature etching scattered with hard-pointed details. Of the many he produced, it is perhaps the self-portraits that move most.

Superficially charismatic, with tousled hair and beard, hats perched jauntily on a head tilted to one side, the insouciance of the pose is undercut by the absolute directness of the gaze: in these few portraits, he teases out moments of utter vulnerability from his projected sureness.

In the intervening years, as John’s portraiture found him commercial success, printmaking was slowly subsumed by painting; he made no etchings beyond the First World War. Appointed briefly as an Official War Artist after being rejected for military service (he was notably the only recruit, bar King George, permitted to keep his beard), the post-war years were a time of celebrity commissions and a rise to public prominence. Elected a Royal Academician late in 1928, in 1942 he was awarded the Order of Merit and, ten years later, had his first autobiographical work Chiaroscuro published by Jonathan Cape (the second volume, aptly titled Finishing Touches, appeared posthumously some twelve years later).

John wrote as he had lived: whirling from one personage to the next, his rambunctious, anecdotal prose punctuated at unpredictable intervals by moments of candid, and sometimes painful, self-revelation. At its best, the text – some thirty years in the making – was like his portraits; it offered, if not clinical realism, a glimpse into the internal wrestlings that had pervaded so much of his life: admissions of estrangement, desire, loneliness, and a preoccupation with sex that bordered on the priapic (one spurious account recalls an encounter with a hermaphroditic model – like a ‘Greek ideal’ – in Paris: to John’s bold inquiry as to what the young woman did when in an amorous mood, the delightful answer, ‘delivered without hesitation, to my naïve and really inexcusable impertinence’, was ‘Mais Monsieur, je me masturbe.’).

Through his twilight years John’s output slackened as he struggled to acclimatise to encroaching old age. His last canvases grew ever larger, barer. Many were left totally unresolved, as if the wooden frame of the stretcher were shrinking beyond reach with every effort to contain and shape his fading bucolic vision. He died in 1961, aged eighty-three years old, at Fryern Court, the secluded Hampshire house where he had established a studio in the late 1920s.

The writer Norman Douglas spoke of John as ‘the last of the Titans’. Like the Ancient Greek pre-deities of the same name, he too was ultimately cast into oblivion by the new gods of the post-war art world. In death, as in life, he was an artist outside his own time. He had lived too long, still fruitlessly painting at a time when his particular vein of individualised traditionalism was far behind the current vogue.

His art was untrammelled by loyalty to any school or strain; though for a brief time he had conjured a Symbolist following, painting in Wales at the foothills of Mount Arenig with the lunatic painter J.D. Innes, for the greater part of his career he remained an outsider; the itinerant tomcat of Fitzroy Square, roaming between gypsy idylls in Southern Provence and his private London studios.

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ken matsuzaki the wabi-sabi aesthetic Ken Matsuzaki does not allow his noborigama kiln to rise beyond 1250˚c. Five or ten degrees in excess of this limit, for even a few minutes, could make a seven-day firing, containing nine hundred pots - half a year’s income - and consuming upwards of fifty sacks of coal and two and a half thousand bundles of split chestnut and pine, totally worthless.

Pottery is, at its essence, a numbers game; but it is one of inherent contradiction. One might define working in the immensely pressurised way that Matsuzaki does as the marriage of precision with the imprecise. Firings as protracted as his involve innumerable numerical fluctuations – temperature changes, atmospheric reduction and oxidation - the sum of which are, nonethe-less, pots that defy simple enumeration.

This duality between precision and imprecision, chaos and order, lies at the heart of wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi, until recently the prevailing aesthetic in traditional Japanese culture, is a philosophy of imperfection and impermanence. It takes solace in decay and obfuscation; in the degeneration of all things into nothingness and the genesis of life. Like Matsuzaki’s pots, it is enigmatic, idiosyncratic; more potent in the not knowing.

This yohen dish, with its dark, whirling motion, is the embodiment of the wabi-sabi aesthetic. It speaks the wabi-sabi decorative language of discolouration, cracking, splashing, splitting and mottling. With the shino brushed thick over a thin, silvered veil of slip and the oily pools of molten ash glass, it bears the earthly colours of rain, mud and smoke. It seems as if a koi pond frozen in time, the fat, milky-white fish drifting through murky waters; an archetypal wabi-sabi metaphor.

Like wabi-sabi, Matsuzaki’s work loses something in the analysis, is nullified in the explanation. It prefers the discrete comfort of shadows, the realm of the inexpressible where chemistry remains alchemy; where clay, silica, feldspar, and wood ash become swirling carp in a garden pool.

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Painting Trees

Jenny grevatte Modern British art has had an intimate relationship with the tree.

For a time treated as mere backdrop filler for topographical landscapes, in the late 18th century an explosion of close studies of arboreal specimens led to widespread reappraisal of the painting of trees. Painters were soon including specific varieties in their compositions and professing their favourites. John Sell Cotman made detailed analytical studies of species, studying their anatomy as if in a life class. Constable adored them, while his rival Turner remained ambivalent: famously bored with the evergreens of the French Alps, he transplanted to their slopes more varied examples from native British copses, but when painting at home favoured tall, thin, vertiginous examples, with a penchant for continental pines. Palmer preferred horse chestnuts in full, puffy bloom; Edward Lear the unloved olive tree among the oranges and almonds of Corfu. Ruskin famously wrote, ‘If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world’, and prescribed the close drawing of trees to his students: but despite this sudden blossoming of arboricultural interest, the tree was still too often relegated to the realm of ‘study’; rarely did it take centre stage with quite the vigour and vibrancy as it does in the work of Jenny Grevatte.

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‘I’m not so much trying to recreate what I see, but the atmosphere, the quality of light and colour that overwhelms me when I look at them…’

It wasn’t until the arrival of the Neo-Romantics – the school of Sutherland and the two Nashes, John and Paul – that the tree became a full-blooded, formal subject in and of itself, a modernist conduit for self-expression; Grevatte finds herself in good company. Like Sutherland, she likes to get up close to her subjects, to experience them from within the overarching ceiling of branches rattling against one other, where trees cease being single entities and form an interconnecting matrix of positive and negative shapes. Like Sutherland too, she does not always work from an actual scene or directly from a sketchbook. Sketches made en plein air build up into a repertoire of established forms and designs.

These combine to make imagined scenes, or settings from a ‘stored visual memory’ that have less to do with the actuality of place than felt experience: ‘I’m not so much trying to recreate what I see, but the atmosphere, the quality of light and colour that overwhelms me when I look at them...that’s usually the problem, how do you translate what is such an overwhelming sensation into paint and not overdo it, not say too much…’

Her influences are both direct – she cites Ivon Hitchens, a fellow painter of trees, from whom she learnt the power of wide, almost panoramic canvases – and oblique: the ‘curry paste yellows’ borrowed from Patrick Heron and William Scott, for example, that illuminate branches caught in patches of sunlight (St Ives has been an inspirational mainstay, both for its geography, where fertile woodland meets coastline, and its long artistic heritage). Grevatte’s own painting processes range from the methodical to the playful. Most of her paintings are dubbed ‘mixed media’, and for good reason. Many have laboriously layered surfaces built up from collaged elements

or broad painted strokes, the overlapping patches of dark and bright colour echoing intersecting branches and the dance of light between leaves. Splatter painting adds to her trees a convincing polychromy: look closely at the surface of an old oak or thorny hedgerow and you’ll find any number of reds and greens, rusts and lilacs in the spotted surfaces of the wood. Dribbling wet paint onto paper from a brush or pipette, random pools and droplets can be manoeuvred through the use of a straw, creating coloured streaks that catch the light.

This great combination of materials and arsenal of processes give Grevatte the power to convey the individual presence of one tree or another, the various weights and movements of a single specimen through the seasons: thick, almost impastoed paint for a mass of autumn leaves; thin, watered-down washes for slender winter boughs. Some techniques she has made quite her own: torn newspaper strips, arranged at corresponding angles, ingeniously mimic the black and white camouflage bark of silver birches that peels and splits like paper. Her dedication to exploring new avenues of paint application, of collage, grattage, sgraffito and splatter, demonstrate her awareness of the particular qualities of each new painted experience. Each new tree painting is not merely generic; it speaks to a specific experience, and to specific subjects. A series of paintings of oak trees are not termed ‘studies’ but ‘portraits’; each example is as multifaceted as a human figure. To treat them as Grevatte does, with as much expressive and sympathetic depth, reaffirms our peculiar relationship with trees, onto which we seem to project so many reflections of our own inner psyche.

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Hamburg’s last great Expressionist periodical As a Hamburg resident in the early 1920s, you might have been lucky enough to witness the brick-by-brick assembly of Fritz Höger’s Chilehaus building, rising up like the prow of a battleship over the corner between Niedern and Pumpenstrasse. Höger’s structure was to become the shining example of Brick Expressionism, an architectural movement parallel to expressionist programmes in the arts and theatre that took its name from the high-fired clinker from which its buildings were constructed. These new projects were characterised by towering, monotone brick facades. Variation was achieved through setting bricks in dynamic patterns or in sharp, rotating arrangements that projected out from recessed walls. Even the materials themselves lent variety: ranging in colour from russet to soot, the unrefined clinker bricks were naturally pitted and scarred; often damaged and misshapen bricks were purposefully chosen to add to the decorative variation.

To the local Kunstbund artists contributing to Kündung, what would be Hamburg’s last great Expressionist periodical, this new style of architecture must have resonated fiercely. They too were working in monochrome, with black and white woodcuts cut roughly by hand. They relied on the naturally variegated grain of the woodblock to lend surface texture, much like the defective clinker. And while they sought a wild, jagged, primitive quality to each cut, treating the threedimensional surface of the block like totemic sculpture, this harshness was tempered by a strict structural ordering of individual components; deliberate, purposeful – even architectural – composition.

Perhaps more importantly, the emergence of this new kind of building reaffirmed for the Hamburg Expressionists that their movement represented not just a repeal of the past, the rejection of the bourgeois academism that had stifled the arts for so long; it could forge a new vision for society, form the basis of a new, spiritually fulfilling aesthetic to take them into the future.

This was the birth of Kündung, the brainchild of Rosa

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Its title – meaning ‘Proclamation’ – announced the journal’s revolutionary spirit: Kündung heralded a new era of Expressionist art

Schapire and Wilhelm Niemeyer, leading academic luminaries of the Expressionist movement. The journal was founded as an adjunct to the recently established ‘Kunstbundes Hamburg’, a federation of local artists, writers, and patrons who promoted lectures and exhibitions of modern art.

Subscriptions to the journal would secure funding for the membership, and its editors were wildly ambitious: the print run would be kept luxuriously low at just 200 copies per run, raising the annual fee per Kunstbund member to a substantial 200 marks – almost ten times that of the equivalent Expressionist publication in Berlin. It was to be a large and lavish affair: short stories, lyric poetry and critical essays typeset in ornate Gothic scripts, all accompanied by printed woodcuts and lithographs by a host of contemporary artists.

Its title – meaning ‘Proclamation’ – announced the journal’s revolutionary spirit: Kündung heralded a new era of Expressionist art, poetry, and criticism, one that drew on the vitality of ‘primitive’ art and which would reinvigorate contemporary culture through a fusion of the figurative and the abstract (one issue even featured photographs of African tribal masks and sculpture as an indication of their influence).

The diverse subjects and styles within bore witness to the period of post-war flux in which Germany found itself. A number of woodcuts reveal disillusionment with a corrupt and morally and financially bankrupt society: the wailing couple of Radziwill’s ‘Liebesgram’ (the ‘Sorrow of Love’), or Robert Huth’s ‘Table Companions’ (‘Tischgenossen’) playing cards in a dejectedly empty bar. Others offer a more optimistic vision: children recur as a prominent motif, most especially in von Ruckteschell’s spiralling ‘Strollers and Children’ with inclining hills, its dizzying, gyro movement grounded by the upright mother figure in the central foreground.

Scattered throughout the text alongside these full-page prints were numerous ‘Wortbilder’ – ‘word-images’ – the great majority of them cut by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Schmidt-Rottluff had been a founding member of the Brücke group in Dresden in 1905, one of two major early Expressionist movements, and his contribution to the journal was critical to its success.

Niemeyer had been an early champion of his work, and through his relationship with the artist had built up a substantial collection of his paintings and prints. His support continued in Kündung, with a written analysis of SchmidtRottluff’s art and the ‘Befremdung’ – ‘Astonishment’ – that he saw at the core of his fellow Hamburg contributors’ work, exemplified by their bold, plain blocks of colour and their

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primitivist abstraction of essentialised figures and forms.

Niemeyer’s vision for the journal included ongoing experimentation with typography, an aspect in which Kündung exceeded all other Expressionist periodicals of its day, and it was Schmidt-Rottluff to whom he would turn for guidance.

Cutting individual letter forms to be laid throughout against typeset text, Schmidt-Rottluff was also responsible for the journal’s powerful title page, a tumbling, typographic tourde-force printed over different colour-blocks for each successive issue.

Printing took place in the technical studios of the Staatliche Geweberschule where Niemeyer lectured. The quality of the impressions, combined with their ‘extraordinarily low’ print run, made Kündung the foremost publication of its kind, as noted by German Expressionist expert Timothy Benson: ‘This exemplary printing facility and the substantial Kunstbund funding made possible one of the most sumptuous Expressionist periodicals combining poetry and art.’ A collective triumph of design, it was also the last Expressionist periodical to be published in Hamburg – an extraordinary undertaking cut short by the catastrophic financial collapse of the Weimar Republic.

Hyperinflation throughout Germany soon killed off the deluxe journal. Having premiered in January of 1921, it ran for just twelve issues before production was suspended and the publication folded. Since its release, many of its lesserknown contributors have faded into obscurity. The few editions that have survived reveal a host of unfamiliar names that prove the rich breadth of the Expressionist movement, and the particular strength of its Hamburg branch: Emil Maetzel and his ‘Blind Father’ (‘Der Blinde Vater’), symbolically isolated in the black block through a minimalism of incised white lines, his hand held tenderly by his young daughter whose sharp black eyes mirror her father’s unseeing white sockets; or the two village-scapes of Wilhelm Tegtmeier which, despite their rural subject matter, reflect the urban influence of the local Brick Expressionist buildings in their intricately gridded, patterned cuts. Kündung had provided, as Benson continues, a ‘clearly articulated view of late Expressionist beliefs about the poetic word and the visual arts’; and its success, albeit brief, established Schapire and Niemeyer as crucial defenders of contemporary art and design: ‘If Kündung was done in by inflation, it had survived well into the era of Expressionist obituaries, Dada, and the dawn of International Constructivism – not an insignificant accomplishment.’

This exemplary printing facility and the substantial Kunstbund funding made possible one of the most sumptuous Expressionist periodicals...

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Forthcoming Book

Robert dawson • a most uncommoN MAN Robert Dawson’s studio in his house in West Bridgford, near Nottingham, is much as he left it at his death in 1997. It occupies an upstairs room in the spacious Victorian semi-detached house which remained home to his wife Peggy. Like so many creative spaces, the studio is essentially hidden, perhaps providing some clue to its late occupant, who while a committed artist for much of his life, was a publicly reticent one. Though often described as a gentle giant, this man of impressive stature, who had a face like a Holbein portrait, was no pushover. Highly individual, he had strong viewpoints and principles, particularly when it came to the liberating possibilities of a good arts education, an important aspect of his professional life.

As an artist, Robert Dawson only became better known after his death; when the extraordinary contents of his studio − only intermittently exhibited − were at last fully revealed. Hundreds of oils, watercolours, drawings and work in other media were kept here, and in an adjacent storeroom. While his work was highlighted in the numerous group and very occasional solo shows he had, the impact of the work still to be seen was considerable. This was a man who lived for his art, his vision expressed in themes he returned to repeatedly as he sought to find a parallel in paint for the expansive outdoor subjects he loved.

Here are the expected trappings of an artist’s studio – an easel and sink, piles of sketchbooks on shelves, pots of brushes and turps, tubes of paint, lids and other containers used for mixing colours, gooey coagulations of pigment still looking fresh, as if the artist had just left the room. There are stacks of pictures, finished and unfinished, lying against walls, drawings and reproductions pinned up ad hoc. But perhaps less expected is that this is a library too, not only shelves of reference books on art and monographs on artists, but lines of books of history (volumes on the First World War are prominent) and biography,

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volumes on cricket, music and literature.

Poetry features prominently. There are writers like Auden, R.S. Thomas, Larkin, Housman and Hardy – poets associated with particular landscapes, just as Dawson was in his art. In this space you inevitably begin to get a sense of the range of Robert Dawson the man. Much of the geography of his life and interests is here.

Above a shelf hangs a typical Dawson subject, a thickly impasted oil of a moorland place, Quarnford in Staffordshire, very much in Bob Dawson country. A group of buildings is set amongst fields under a cloudy sky. The colours are those of our temperate and often brooding landscape, painted in the depths of winter with blocks of thick generous pigment. This is no piece of picturesque, no postcard view. The dwellings are ordinary and rambling, even a little ramshackle. This is a place of telegraph poles and humbler sheds, not the furniture of a classic beauty spot. Yet there is a modern everyday beauty here, where land meets village in the later 20th century.

And if the light seems wintry, the colours are still very rich, with a range of greys and greens that show Dawson’s love of the hues of winter, the movement of the foreground field brushwork echoing the scudding clouds above. A small accent of red − a very Dawson characteristic − adds visual relief.

Dawson was someone absorbed not only by the atmosphere of his subject but the substance of the paint, the turn of the palette knife, the scratch of the pen, and the transparency of his washes. His love of material and process is evident in the fact that he not only used oils, but pen and pencil and crayon, ink and watercolour,

collage and linocut printing. He enjoyed the physical engagement with these media, substituting and improvising with what came to hand. This was a part of his generosity. As Kyffin Williams said of Dawson’s sensual enjoyment of his pigment: ‘He, being a generous person [used] rich paint...he loved the quality...you can usually tell the character of an artist by his paint’.

Wales was artistically his spiritual home, and where he painted other landscapes, whether in Staffordshire or elsewhere, the scenes are often remarkable for their visual affinity to that country. Not here the usual trappings of landscape depiction, but the less conventionally attractive and scenic, the often ignored corners of village, hamlet or farm. Dawson saw a beauty in the ordinary and mundane. There is something almost ‘anti’ picturesque in his avoidance of accepted beauty spots, of the usual village views with church and pub (though these occasionally make an appearance).

These are weather-filtered places inhabited by buildings and perhaps a few animals, devoid of people but still with a strong sense of the humanity Dawson found. If human figures are absent, it may be in part because Dawson wanted to avoid the visual convention of using them to tame his subject matter. In any case, as his wife Peggy has commented, Dawson buildings have their own personalities, such is his attention to their quirky individual shapes, their idiosyncrasies and expressions. His farms, cottages and wayside sheds and barns essentially ‘people’ his scenes.

It is perhaps almost a cliché to talk of Robert Dawson’s sense of genius-loci, but it is his allegiance to place, to the particular areas where he had cause to stop his car,

draw and often revisit that pervades the work. If there was a natural fascination in the mechanics of painting, of composition and brushstroke, of experimental technique, it never superseded his essential interest in the texture − often humble and overlooked − that he found in the areas he got to know. While he was certainly influenced by the legacy of the romantic and neo-romantic depiction, and his own painting is often tinged with nostalgia, Dawson was essentially a realist of backwater hill country, a realism that often embraced the distinctive patina of industrial activity too. Indeed Dawson was as much a poet of the ‘edgelands’, of the 20th century imprint on moor and hillside, as he was of the wilder spaces. He was deeply attracted to this human hinterland.

Dawson’s landscape is emphatically a working landscape.

Avoiding the obvious, Dawson’s pictures provide as vivid a modern record of habitation and experience in upland England and Wales as we are likely to find (much as an artist like Joan Eardley did north of the border), and the result celebrates the rich physicality of his medium too. This is because Dawson rarely fell into formulas.

Just as he ‘felt’ his music, both when he was playing and when he was simply listening, he felt the quality of the paint too, and in some of his finest pictures there is a degree of difficulty, a sense of struggle with line and pigment which reveals just how involved he got with what he was committing to board or canvas. His very best work raises the bar with what you can do with the medium, a sensibility that sets him well apart from many of the more conventional landscape painters in post-war Britain.

From David Whiting’s new book on Robert Dawson, to be published later this year by Goldmark

view more Robert Dawson at goldmarkart.com

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price guide inside back cover

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Richard james Old Earth Saints

The Leach’s storm Petrel is a ‘pelagic’ bird: outside of the breeding season, where they return in the dead of night to nest and mate, they spend almost their entire lives out over the open ocean, hundreds of miles beyond the continental shelf. It is an extreme, remote existence; a repeating pattern of isolation and migration, during which they may spend weeks and even months without touching land, buffeted by storms and sleeping on the wing. We still have little knowledge where they go for long periods of their lives, or how they survive such conditions.

In due reverence to these nomadic creatures of coast and sea, Richard James undergoes his own northern migration to the Outer Hebrides and the Sound of Harris to collect material for his assemblages. These are handmade boxes – reliquaries to avian saints – of stupefying complexity and symbolism. A list alone of the component parts of Old Earth Saints barely covers the intricacy in its making: skulls of Shag, Blackbird and Green Woodpecker; Goose and Grouse eggs; the cruciform foot of a Petrel; hearts and tests of Sea Urchins. At the centre of the construction stand two connected glass tubes filled with stratified

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minerals, from core and mantle to celestial shelf: iron and brine (‘bits of the Atlantic’), flecks of gold, blood, crushed sedimentary rock, a minute tree fragment, all reaching up to a heavenly bulb of bluebell heads fixed in resin. The whole is then sealed with superheated sheep’s wool, the natural lanolin melting to form a sticky, sealing tar.

Everything here has its place, adds to the arrangement’s multipart meaning. All has been collected from the same stretch of island so as to be geographically ‘true to the place’, to what James calls the ‘mythical resonance’ of the outer west coast. The doctored prayer cards, so arranged in their frames, make of the whole a hagiography of things dead, the ‘once living stuff’ to which James has quietly dedicated his own private worship.

These are works of acutely intimate significance: votive offerings, prayers, altars to the unvenerated. Orchestrated with such precision, they remind us of the fragility of what surrounds us, the constellatory interconnectedness of all things: that all is made of star dust. What fragility we see, in the skulls and shells, blood and thorns, is one we share in ourselves.

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francisco de

goya

Los Caprichos A masterpiece of near unrivalled technical and satirical expression

The publication of Los Caprichos marked a defining point in Goya’s career. In 1792 he developed a debilitating illness – exactly what he suffered from, no one knows – which would ultimately leave him deaf. His recuperation took over five years, during which the isolation imposed by his withdrawal and his deteriorating hearing had a profound impact on his life. He quickly became depressed - cut off from the world, quite literally, by his deafness – and feared for his sanity. Distress and anxiety expressed themselves in new subjects: witches, raping banditos, gaol fights and moon-lit madhouses. In his alienation he read papers on the French revolution and began to draw with a frequency and conviction previously lacking. The resulting sketches, informed by the Enlightenment philosophies of Rousseau and Voltaire and his own bitter invective, would form the basis of Los Caprichos, Goya’s first major foray into etching. Unable to find a reputable publisher willing to take on the suite, the launch eventually took place in a perfumery across the road from his house.

The address? No. 1, Calle del Desengaño - ‘Disillusion Street’.

You couldn’t make it up; but then, of course, that is precisely what Goya did. Like Swift’s Lilliputian buffoonery or the cast of Voltaire’s Candide, the characters of Goya’s

Caprichos are apparitions of satirical semifantasy, derived from observations of Madrid’s society at large. An advertisement in the Diario de Madrid announcing the publication’s arrival in February, 1799, reiterated the fact: ‘[The author] has selected from amongst the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilised society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual…Since most of the subjects depicted in this work are not real, it is not unreasonable to hope that connoisseurs will readily overlook their defects.’

The allegorical use of a ‘dream world’ offered Goya an alibi, but anyone paying even the slightest attention to its contents could not fail to see direct parallels with Spain’s religious institutions, its bumbling aristocracy, or its viciously backward hobgoblin populace. The Caprichos present a veritable litany of behaviours vulgar and lecherous: the streets are rife with prostitution, gold-diggers, pursuers and pederasts, drunkards and hooligan demons.

Veiled references to the clergy equate their religious cult with witchcraft and diabolism, with old crones and Satanic goats cloaked in clerical raiment; priests glut and gorge with cannibal appetite while preaching abstinence and administering punishment.

It was savage, unflinching stuff, and Goya evidently anticipated a backlash: ‘The public is not so ignorant of the Fine Arts’, the advertisement continues, ‘that it needs to be told that the author has intended no satire of the personal defects of any specific individual in any of his compositions.’ He had invented the first modern-day public disclaimer.

His anxiety at the Caprichos’ reception is betrayed in the shuffling of print no. 43, originally the titular plate, to the very middle of the set. The artist, marked out by the stylus on his desk, sits slumped over his work, surrounded by the visitations of his own nightmares: scowling cats and whooping owls (associated not with wisdom in the Spanish tradition but brainless stupidity). Scrawled beneath the desk were the words ‘El sueño de la razon produce monstros’ – ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters’. The image and its caption were inspired by a title page to a 1793 edition of Rousseau’s Philosophie, whose texts were then anathema to both Crown and Church.

Swapping it out for a comparatively sober self-portrait, Goya may have hoped that his reference would go unnoticed.

He had good reason to be wary: though the Inquisition of the late 18th century was not the same rabid outfit that had struck terror into the heart of Spanish society two-

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hundred years previous, when detention, torture, and summary execution were commonplace, it remained as corrupt, bullying, and rapaciously litigious as ever.

If called to trial, there were few ways to indemnify against prosecution: at best, one could hope to escape with a hefty fine, confiscation of property, or brief internment; at worst, a prison sentence, exile, or financial ruin. Moreover, as court painter to King Charles IV, Goya was politically connected, and those connections may even have helped secure the suite’s production (the Caprichos were printed in studios in the attic of the French Embassy in Madrid). The last thing he wanted to be seen to be doing was prodding the Inquisitorial hornets’ nest.

Contemporary satire of the sort he had seen in England from Gillray and Hogarth was, by now, an established genre; thanks to the efforts of the latter, copyright of their engravings was even enshrined in law, and its authors were protected from claims of defamation. By comparison, visual satire in Spain prior to Goya was not just impracticable: it was virtually non-existent.

Los Caprichos provided a watershed moment, a cultural litmus test – and one that it promptly failed. The sales were pitiful: in four years just 27 copies were sold of the 300 produced. The project was a financial catastrophe of epic proportions: over 24,000 prints, plus rejected proofs, prepared and pulled over the course of a year and a half, virtually all for nothing. The King, who had taken a liking to Goya, eventually snuffed out the venture, requesting the surrender of all unsold sets and acquiring the original copper etching plates for his own collection.

Quite what had deterred putative purchasers remains unclear. There is little evidence the Inquisition had Goya in their

view more Goya at goldmarkart.com

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sights; nor were copies prohibitively expensive, though it was perhaps those with the greatest means to afford a set that were most brutally lampooned in its pictures. Asses appear as a recurring metaphor for the uneducated, pretentious upper-classes, while doctors, lawyers and ministers are portrayed as quacks and charlatans. Like Trump, Goya’s vision of society is grounded in the ‘art of the deal’: brides are sold off (all marriage, to Goya, is a transaction), sex is bought, witchcraft cults practise initiation and conscription, and men and women alike are swindled and enslaved. In Todos Caerán (‘All Will Fall’) human-headed birds of various ages and stations – a sword-bearing soldier, a hooded priest – circle a female decoy. Her plump breasts and delicate ringlets identify her as a prostitute, perhaps a recent new recruit: she uncomfortably avoids their gaze, resolutely facing away from her oncoming clientele. Below, two more prostitutes treat a recently captured punter to a colonic regurgitation. Already plucked of all his feathers (a common idiom throughout for paid-for-sex), he is left with nothing, spewing his empty guts onto the floor. By their side, the madame, bedecked in Goya’s familiar white clerical robes, appears almost like the Mother Superior of a convent, knelt in faux-penitent prayer. It is a scene of eyewateringly acerbic cynicism, in which no one escapes with any dignity.

Throughout the Caprichos, Goya is careful not to overplay his disgust. Innuendo provides the series with obscene levity: the priest who clutches his money-bags like swollen testicles, or ‘The Shamefaced One’ (El Vergonzoso), whose nose is a circumcised penis (‘it would be a good thing’, writes Goya in his explanatory notes, ‘if those who have such unfortunate and ridiculous faces were to put them in their

price guide inside back cover

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breeches’). But of all the socio-political themes at play in the Caprichos, anti-clerical imagery is the prevailing force of the suite.

In Nadie nos ha visto (‘No One Has Seen Us’) the late critic Robert Hughes finds a perfect example in the priests that ‘gorge themselves, mouths opening into those voracious chasms of darkness that were for Goya, as they are for us, the most menacing emblems of an unleashed, cannibal orality, those terrifying expressions that stir the same primordial fears as the mouth of Goya’s later Saturn, tearing his child into gobbets…’ The cross-hatched apparition behind, whose hand reaches out as if to bless the cup, provides a wicked spin on the ritual of the communion wine that becomes the blood of Christ.

The Caprichos were not just a tour-deforce of satire: they were a suite of technical mastery too. Before their publication, the last etching apotheosis had been achieved

by Rembrandt. In Rembrandt’s time, the process was still relatively straightforward: a metal plate – usually copper – was covered in a thin ‘ground’ of waxy resin which was then smoked over a flame, the soot turning the surface of the wax black. This made it easier for the etcher to see his design, which he illustrated by drawing into the resin with an etcher’s needle. Where he drew, the copper under his line was laid bare. The plate was then submerged in a bath of acid, where the mordant ‘bit’ the exposed lines in the copper plate. These bitten grooves held ink when the plate was cleaned of the ground and prepared, and an impression could be taken on a rolling press. Large areas of darkness could only be achieved through very close, dense, cross-hatched lines that gave an impression of uniform blackness, but by the time Goya came to print the Caprichos a recent technological advance was available to him which allowed

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gradations of tone comparable to a watercolour wash. This technique was called aquatint: it involved dusting fine particles of resin onto the plate, which was then heated, causing the resin to melt into a minutely pock-marked ground. Goya and his technicians were among the first in Spain to make use of it, and the results were astonishing. Figures emerge from near total blackness, lurk in the shadows, leer out in contrasts of linear sharpness and aquatint haze; at least two prints were composed wholly through aquatint, blocking out and rebiting the plates over and over again until the composition was complete – an extraordinary feat of technical printmaking.

The process would become essential to the Caprichos’ theme: Goya’s host of goblins and ghouls are creatures of the night, belonging properly to the world of dreams; aquatint plunged the series into a twilight wash of sepia. These images from a first edition set, known to have been one of the first thirty or so copies that Goya had bound, reveal the sumptuous levels of depth and perspective this new skill afforded him.

The term ‘caprice’ is normally redolent of fantasy and whimsical fancy, but Goya’s are as nightmarish as they come. The final, apocalyptic plate of the series – Ya Es Hora (‘It is time’) – calls the heady nocturne to its end, as witches, phantoms and howling devil-priests retreat into the night with the arrival of dawn and the ‘waking’ of Goya’s dream vision. In its savage jabbings at the moral depravity of Spanish society, its journalistic exposé of cultures of corruption and stupidity, it anticipated the modernist vigour of the Expressionists and the wartime anger of Dada, from Ernst to Grosz and Dix. To know that it was a failure on its release only reaffirms its extraordinary modern-day status as a masterpiece of near unrivalled technical and satirical expression.

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New Exhibition in June

warren mackenzie A self-confessed man of mud Warren MacKenzie was always most comfortable at the wheel. ‘The making of the pots is the part I like best. Michael Cardew has said, “There are people who are glaze people, there are people who are fire people, and there are people who are mud people,” and I guess I’m a mud person, because it’s the making of the pots, manipulating the clay in a variety of ways, which I enjoy the most.’ Inseparable from his studio, at 94 he is still to be found at his foot-powered treadle wheel throwing the loose, lively pots that once made him one of America’s most famous potters. For over thirty years he was the amiable professor of ceramics at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis whose teaching had a transformative impact on the growth of crafts in the Mid-West, and who would be responsible for the ensuing pilgrimage of young potters to what is now known, charmingly, as ‘Mingei-sota’. He also remains one of the last living links with Bernard Leach, the British potter and writer who precipitated a revolution of his own in the early 1940s and fathered a new generation of ‘studio potters’. For a little over two years MacKenzie and his first wife, Alix, fresh from their college programme, plied their new craft at Leach’s pottery in St Ives, and it was to him that they owed their first true education in clay.

available online in June

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Like Leach, both had begun their creative lives as painters before arriving, by circuitous route, at ceramics – ‘by the back door, you might say.’ They met at the Chicago Art Institute, where MacKenzie had enrolled in 1942 on a fine arts course.

A year later, he was drafted; after three years in the army, where his graphic skills were put to use designing training posters for safe gun assembly, he returned to Chicago, only to find the painting course over-subscribed with returning G.I.s. Ceramics was one of few courses with spare places to fill; and so began, quite by accident, a life dedicated to clay.

The course at that time was woefully inadequate: what little teaching they received was meagre, from a tutor incapable of throwing on the wheel. But in 1940, Bernard Leach’s A Potter’s Book had been published. From the fresh embers of war it swiftly kindled an appreciation for craft: at a time of murderous industrialisation, Leach declared not just the artistry, but the necessary humanity of traditional, handmade pottery. A national success, it soon made its way to America and, by good fortune, to a fellow student in MacKenzie’s class.

With eloquent philosophical and technical instruction, Leach’s book was a revelation: ‘We all rushed out and bought this book, because Leach talked about establishing his pottery in England, his training in Japan, and the way a pottery can be run. He said such things as, “Any person should be able to make 50 pots easily in a day’s time,” and, “Any person should be able to throw a 15-inch-tall cylinder.” Well, we couldn’t do any of those things. And so on alternate days, when the instructor was not there, we would sneak into the ceramics studio and try to do what Leach said we should do.

Needless to say, we didn’t succeed very well, and in addition we angered the instructor, because there were hundreds of very bad pots sitting around the studio.’

Jointly graduating in 1948, MacKenzie and his wife were faced with the prospect of establishing their own pottery. For guidance, they looked to the one potter from whom they’d learnt everything they knew: ‘We had decided we needed further training, and certainly Leach was the one we turned to. So we went to England that summer and we took examples of our work along with us and showed them to Bernard Leach and told him what we were trying to do. And of course, he took one look at our work and said – very quickly – “I’m sorry, we’re full up,” and this was his way of politely saying, you just

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don’t make the cut.’ Their rooms in St Ives were booked for two weeks; unwilling to return empty-handed, MacKenzie requested that they spend the remainder of their stay around the pottery, watching the day-to-day running of the workshop and learning what they could from observation. Leach gladly acquiesced, and at the end of their visit invited them to join him for an overnight kiln watch. Meeting him after midnight, they talked for hours; by morning, Leach had changed his mind, inviting them to return a year later for fulltime apprenticeships.

Their time in St Ives was to be formative. Under the watchful eye of Bill Marshall, they gained a technical proficiency that was still lacking, but throwing pots according to the pottery’s prescribed catalogue was creative drudgery. Forms were thrown in batches, according to daily or weekly ‘making lists’ (a practice MacKenzie still uses to this day): cups, plates, casserole dishes, all made to an exact size, weight, and proportion. Of the first 600 mugs MacKenzie threw, only the last 50 were accepted by Marshall, an infamously dextrous thrower, as ‘the lowest possible standard’: ‘We learned to control clay, to put it where you want it and not just wherever it wanted to go, and that was valuable.’

Perhaps more importantly, living with Leach provided an insight into his motivations and the friendship with the renowned Japanese potter Shoji Hamada that had so shaped his thought: ‘He had a fantastic collection of early English and Japanese and Chinese and Korean pots and German pots, contemporary English work as well. And we had access to this collection. And it was there that we really first came in contact with the work of Hamada.’ Through their relationship with the philosopher critic Soetsu Yanagi, Hamada and Leach had been two early proponents of Yanagi’s ‘Mingei’ movement: a championing of the ‘people’s art’ of folkcraft, and an espousal of the virtues of simple, anonymously produced, functional, utilitarian objects. By the time MacKenzie met Leach, both he and Hamada had outgrown Mingei and become celebrity craftsmen in their own right.

Though ostensibly they lived Yanagi’s creed – Leach through the functional wares produced in his pottery, Hamada through his anonymous ‘unsigned’ pots - as artists both sensed the limits of what Sebastian Blackie termed Mingei’s ‘creative cul-de-sac’.

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Through observing their work, MacKenzie also soon became aware of the differences between the two potters themselves.

Leach, the draughtsman, theoretician, author and articulator; Hamada, the infinitely more gifted thrower who rarely drew and seldom explained. Though it was the philosophy of Leach that had set them on their path, it was in Hamada that they saw the future of their own pots: ‘Alix and I, we both saw the danger that lay in planning things out on paper and then simply executing them. With Hamada there was a much more direct sense that the piece had happened in the process of making on the wheel; that was what we wanted to do with our work.’

Leaving England to return to America and set up their own studio, they took the Mingei style and philosophy with them, arguably with greater dedication than either Leach or Hamada to its recommendation that the work be affordable for the many: organising Hamada’s first transatlantic exhibition on their return, MacKenzie was tasked with pricing Hamada’s pots: ‘He would describe the work to me, and I would think about it and I’d say, “Well, if I made this, it would cost so much,” but then, this is a famous potter from Japan and therefore I’d multiply that by five or seven and I’d say, “Well, does $11 sound all right to you?”’ (to Hamada’s credit, he never winced).

Like Hamada, the work took its influence from folk pottery: ‘We both came to a conclusion individually, but also collectively, that the pots that really interested us were the pots that people had used in their everyday life: whether it was ancient Greece or Africa or Europe or wherever, the pots that people had used in their homes were the ones that excited us.’ At its core, and what has sustained MacKenzie’s pottery in the more than fifty years he has been making pots, was the idea that the work be economical, and for everyday use. To this end, he achieved a rhythm of working that was extraordinarily productive: 600 pots or so per firing, with 12 firings a year. All the work was made on the wheel for speed; slab building and press moulding were too inefficient: ‘I wanted my pots to be as inexpensive as possible so people can buy them in quantity. Clay is not expensive. Glaze materials are not expensive, when you figure how little goes on a pot. Your only real expense is your time. And so, if you can control your time, you can sell a pot for not too much money.’

Undoubtedly, MacKenzie was underselling his talents. These were not pots that were rushed or ‘churned’ out on a production line: quite the opposite, in fact. Though MacKenzie threw to a predetermined list – ten yunomi; five platters – every form emerged with subtle variations, deviation and distraction deriving from the repetition of the act. If the mood took him, the list was abandoned altogether; there was little of the strict ordering of his Leach days, nor the intensely focussed practices of more self-conscious potters: ‘Some potters throw very slowly, and make a completely different kind of pot than I make. I make a rather casual pot…

The Koreans have an off-hand approach to art which I admire a great deal. I try to emulate that attitude.’

Inevitably, this ‘casualness’ has revealed itself in the making.

MacKenzie’s work has a wonderful lilt to it: lop-sidedness, undulation in its lines, swooping cadences and delicious curves. In a number of forms – tall lidded jars, carved and faceted boxes – there is a naturalness counterbalanced by an inventive, and even cheeky wit: his characteristic drop-lip bowls, for example, the heart-stop theatrical throwing of which has to be seen to be believed. Though he came to clay through paint, brushwork was rarely present in his work – only broad, sweeping, or spattering, if at all – and decoration was kept to a minimum. He remained a thrower at heart: the few decorative techniques employed often relied on the wheel, from paddled patterns, or rouletted, chattered rims that reinforced the centrifugal rhythm that moves through all of MacKenzie’s pots.

In The Unknown Craftsman, Soetsu Yanagi’s seminal folk art thesis, domestic handmade crafts were to his philosophy (as Leach later paraphrased) as wild flowers to horticulture: the wild, untameable, and enviably vital bloom that lives in unconscious harmony with the natural world. In the stifling hothouse that is much of today’s ceramics, Warren MacKenzie is just such a wild flower. He shares with those anonymous masters of the past an ‘ordinariness’: not drabness or dullness, neither predictable nor merely pleasing, but a truthful and sustaining beauty that reveals itself only to the ‘seeing eye’ and passes, unnoticed, the inattentive majority. Though it graces major museum collections, his is pottery that has been made explicitly for constant contact, the use-wash-use cycle of the everyday. They are, truly, pots for life.

available online in June

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janet Stayton A Tuscan Reverie The broad, rich paintings of Janet Stayton are a present-day paean to the Mediterranean.

They open like shuttered windows onto their still life scenes, unfolding towards the edge of the canvas as busy interior spaces blur into fringe street scenes, Roman colonnades, and nocturnal waterfronts.

For over ten years now she has been producing her large-scale canvases in a secluded workshop at the heart of Pietrasanta, Tuscany. The local marble has made the town a popular refuge for sculptors through the centuries, with numerous stone-carvers and bronze casters setting up shop in the middle of town. Stayton’s own studio space nestles in among the old sculptors’ workshops. Clean, white-walled, industrial, it is in total contrast to the luminous six-foot paintings that hang from its walls in states of near completion; a gallery of singing colour amid the cadaverous white of marble blocks and dust-filled yards.

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Stayton’s paintings are to Tuscany what Matisse gave to the Provençal communes of Nice and Vence, just off the glistening Côte d’Azur. Stayton has inherited much from the French giant: the perspectival shifts, as table tops spill into rooms, roll out through windows into the vistas beyond.

Each scene is framed multiply, drawing the eye around and through the depth of the painting: the edge of the table, a handsome rectangle of colour, sets the main stage; but behind, window frames, portico doors that lead into cobbled streets, curtains and distant cloisters all hint at a world of Tuscan delights beyond. Matisse’s own still lifes, populated with distinct objects of equal presence, often painted in hot, flat colour, posed a simple but profound question: what is the subject of this work? The conch shell or the wine bottle? The coffee pot or the seated nude? It is a question that has delighted Stayton, and which she revisits with renewed excitement, tempting our gaze past the immediately colourful into the mysterious margins and their outer world.

Despite their similarity, however, these paintings are not mere pastiche of Matisse.

Fundamental differences are here to be found, notably in Stayton’s palette. Where Matisse often favoured the near-primary – the crimson reds,

the suitably azure blues – Stayton’s preferences are for the faintly unfamiliar: a kind of perfumed blue that blends into lavenders and violets, reds that are plum or dark pink, and a lemon yellow with the citric tang of a post-prandial shot of limoncello. ‘Sometimes I feel a colour shining behind my eyes’, she says, ‘ready to illuminate a painting…’ In particular, Stayton uses white for outline, often for objects in the periphery, lending nocturnal vignettes a surreal, silver stillness. The paint itself is applied in a variety of thicknesses and surfaces: dry and textured to the fore, often with sgraffito marks dragged through with the tip of a brush; looser in the backgrounds, with a mosaicism that recalls the Post-Impressionist work of Bonnard and his fellow ‘Nabis’ painters.

The Italian for still life – a phrase Stayton is certainly familiar with – is ‘Natura Morta’; literally translated, ‘Dead Nature’. There is nothing morbid about Stayton’s interiors, nothing lifeless about her arrangements of objects, or her illusory allusions to nearby Mediterranean streets and seascapes. Though often devoid of people, her still life canvases manage to radiate colour and life, with all the human suggestion of the laid table, the prepared fruit, the wine and fish awaiting us in a Tuscan reverie of her imagining.

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John piper In the swaggering views of stately homes, or the resurrectional portraits of crumbling, moss-covered ruins, the presence of prior souls, spiritual simultaneity through the ages, presses against the page in those great swathes of black and brilliant colour that could only be Piper’s own.

An elderly customer once related the tale of her invitation to lunch with John and Myfanwy Piper. Seated at the far end of a long refectory table, Piper arrived with a stack of plates and began to sling them down the length of the table like whiskeys in a mid-west watering hole. Our customer, scarcely able to catch hers before it ricocheted onto the flagstone floor, looked down at her hands only to realise that what she was holding was a Picasso plate. It’s a story of typical irreverence from Piper, who in fact held Picasso in deferentially high regard.

Had he been alive to witness the Tate Liverpool’s recent attempts to equate the Fawley Bottom resident with the great Spaniard, Piper would no doubt have baulked at the premise – though the comparison reveals at least one interesting parallel to their lives: where Picasso has been embraced and celebrated for his diversity across media, Piper’s eclecticism has seen him criminally overlooked. As Orde Levinson pointed out in the introduction to his catalogue of Piper’s graphic work, Piper’s own summation of Picasso’s frustrating virtuosity could as easily be applied to his own work: ‘[He] is a bad member of a school, either as pupil or master. His development cannot be seen as a progress, or as any kind of movement except a series of hops, skips and jumps all executed with great mastery. As a leader, therefore, he is unsatisfactory – exasperating.’

That same ‘exasperating’ technical impulsion has seen critics baffled as to what to do with Piper. In an elegy to the neglected

genius of Graham Sutherland, the writer William Boyd invoked an ancient proverb from Archilochus – ‘The fox knows many things; the hedgehog, one big thing’ – to compare the multitalented Sutherland with the one-trick-portraitist Francis Bacon. Like Sutherland and most other ‘graphic’ British artists for whom printmaking constituted a worthwhile exercise, Piper was an inveterate fox, shifting stylistically from one medium to another; but the critics tend to favour a hedgehog: a Bacon, or a Freud. In an attempt to make a hedgehog of Piper’s vulpine merits, most have reduced his art to two basic prescriptions: that he was a topographer, with a particular interest in churches and stately homes; and that he was a Romantic.

Both terms are used pejoratively. ‘Topography’ has all the dry associations of description and illustration without the expressive wilderness of landscape, while ‘Romantic’ is as much an insult by omission: romantic, they mean, as opposed to ‘avant-garde’, ‘modernist’, ‘contemporary’. Implied is a sense of backwardness: a parochial longing for the sentimentalism of Girtin, Cotman, Turner, and Constable. In fact, Piper’s engagement with early 20th century modernism was both profound and wide-ranging. In the early 1930s he produced Constructivist assemblages, dabbled in Surrealism, and made collaged abstractions in situ, bringing torn sections of paper with him to a scene and tearing and arranging in front of his subject (a method he would revive in the early

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Piper discussed colour at length with his technicians, especially in silkscreen preparations with Chris Prater, and he well knew the chromatic power of black to lend punch to neighbouring shades.

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1960s, producing large-scale gouache collages of beaches along the North-West coast of France). Five further years dedicated solely to abstract painting taught him how to lay colours side by side, ‘when they have no goods to deliver except themselves’. This compulsive experimentalism was to become Piper’s defining characteristic as an artist, and would continue late into his career in collaborations with the renowned technicians Stanley Jones at the Curwen Press and Chris Prater at Kelpra Studios. ‘People think it dishonest to be chameleon-like in one’s artistic allegiances,’ he wrote in 1937. ‘On the other hand, I think it dishonest to be anything else.’

Though much of Piper’s superficial modernism was shed by the time he came to produce his great architectural suites of the 1960s and ‘70s, these later prints owe much to that formal training. ‘I think the discipline of Cubism and the styles which followed have been a great help to me’, he wrote in 1964, the same year A Retrospect of Churches was published: ‘They made me realise the absolute need, however romantic or sentimental one wanted to be, for extreme discipline in painting.’ Scrutiny of the early Cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque, coupled with an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of Gothic and Victorian architecture, provided him with an acute sense of the impact of the vertical line pitted against the horizontal. In a great many of his church portraits the former is emphasised, exaggerated even, in both the main subject and the periphery: the church tower at Castlemartin looms up into the rainclouds like an obelisk, its skyward movement echoed by tendrilled trees that appear to stretch up to the downward streaks of black rain. Buttresses, turrets, transepts and tracery windows all contribute to this vertiginous leaning, as do the wild, chalky grasses and mass of gravestones, like fingers pushing up heavenward through the dirt. Elsewhere, in the sprawling estates of Ettington Park, or the broad forecourts of Blenheim Palace and Waddesdon Manor, Piper stresses the horizontal in vigorous bands of colour.

Piper often employed this Classical mechanism, encouraging the eye symbolically up towards the firmament or out across more remote vistas; but this formalism was always borrowed to serve, rather than suppress, the subjective experience: ‘Romantic painting is about the particular,’ he wrote, ‘not the general. The subjective artist who does not particularise and define makes no progress but loses himself in a miasma.’

Underlying the topographical prints is a profound Romantic spirit: a sense of the particular, melancholy and nostalgia, the

genius loci – spirit of place – that suffuses Piper’s work.

Myfanwy described it as the, ‘mysterious magic presence that collects the dreams of the past which, like wasp stings, accumulating in the blood, accumulate in the mind and imagination.’ Here that accumulation muddies on the page: weather, place, time, and environment seem all to bleed and coax into one, from the jewelled patches of colour that spill from brickwork to earth to the ubiquitous, Stygian washes of dark blue, green and black that so often mist Piper’s views.

Piper did not do colour by halves. There is little by way of delicate, pastel hues in his palette: the blues are ultramarine, Prussian, Royal; the reds sanguine and scarlet, bottle, emerald, and feverish greens, amber, turquoise, liquorice and cruor amid cigarette-ash grey. But of all colours, it was black that ultimately dominated Piper’s work, that defined almost every print in his oeuvre. In his earliest wood engravings - pastoral vignettes in the Neo-Romantic manner of Sutherland and Nash - he realised the monotone vigour in the reverse colouration of white line on black block. In the later works, black is near omnipresent: black ink, black charcoal, thick black washes. Piper recognised black as the colour of arrest: the pen ink that captures a pose in a sketchbook, the dark charcoal of a life study, the black wash that grounds colour, gives it limits, cages it and confines it to the page, the black that captures the experienced moment. Piper discussed colour at length with his technicians, especially in silkscreen preparations with Chris Prater, and he well knew the chromatic power of black to lend punch to neighbouring shades; how it killed the light penetrating the paper, forcing it to illuminate areas of lighter colour, like the lead frames of stained glass.

Piper’s black squalls were to become something of a joke among his detractors: presented with the portentous wartime skies of Piper’s Windsor Castle watercolours, King George VI famously remarked, ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.’ But in a number of topographical prints, the preponderance of black seems less a comment on England’s inclement weather and more a signal towards the other obsession of Piper’s life: the camera. A trio of clerical portraits in Piper’s Retrospect – Fotheringhay, Christ Church in Spitalfields, and Gedney’s tower in the fens – have the white-on-black quality of photographic overexposure; Harlaxton blue, ethereal and ghost-like, appears like a processed negative. The camera was to play a central role in Piper’s post-war career, both literally in the incorporation of photographic materials, but also in Piper’s changing perspective. Works like the theatrical panels produced for

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Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice opera feel almost directed, as if composed through a viewfinder. This new perspective was made explicit in the title of the Eye and Camera prints.

Every image is potentially filmographic: from the murder mystery body shapes that seem to reference the title sequences of Saul Bass, to the voyeuristic shots of Myfanwy in knee-length boots, with all their intimations of deviant kink.

Stones and Bones, perhaps Piper’s strangest graphic offering, took the photographic theme further: photographs blend into chalk lines and acid washes, as if peeling, melting

and bubbling from chemical heat. Its videographic end papers, one in negative, the other positive, bookend a bizarre narrative combination of images, from annotated landscapes and rock formations to photographs of primitive stone carvings and brutally chopped up pornographic snaps.

Collectively they have the psychological thrill of late Hitchcock, dealing with conflicting contemporary themes: sex and death; the direct, drawn image and the detached, mechanical photograph; the intimate and the panoramic; the human figure and the landscape of form.

If the Eye and Camera and Stones and Bones series revealed Piper as an unsung modernist, in his topographical prints he was happy to admit a certain provincialism. The titles of his places, especially the churches, are often peculiarly English: there is a satisfaction in the particularity of local parish or hamlet. Significantly, Piper was a practising Christian, and so he brought to these places a concern that was not just aesthetic, but spiritual. The flannel-grey brick of the parish in Ottery St Mary and the ruins of the Benedictine abbey at Binham are lit up with the burning orange of Pentecostal fire; their wild, unexpected bursts of colour suggest moments that transcend mere appreciation. Piper’s unearthing of the roots of forlorn and forgotten churches echoes something of the spiritual quest of Eliot in Little Gidding, where ‘the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire’ and the ‘intersection of the timeless moment / Is England and nowhere.’ Piper’s churches provoke the same existential question that so dogged Eliot in middle-age: is Christ to be found here, too, in country parish and priory, so very far from the holy land?

Levinson described Piper’s genius loci as ‘a sort of spiritus mundi, the soul of the world, with memory passed on from generation to generation – that line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast, luminous sea made ‘ready’ for us to recreate, to explore, enjoy and appreciate.’ That idea of ‘generation to generation’, the historical tradition which so fascinated Eliot, lies at the crux of Piper’s work, be it topographical, figurative, technical or experimental. In the swaggering views of stately homes, or the resurrectional portraits of crumbling, moss-covered ruins, the presence of prior souls, spiritual simultaneity through the ages, presses against the page in those great swathes of black and brilliant colour that could only be Piper’s own. His was a very individual talent.

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