Goldmark 09

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SUMMER 2018

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g SUMMER 2018 NUMBER 09

Contents 4

Honoré Daumier - Robert Macaire

10 Graham Sutherland - Transforming Landscape 18 Randy Johnston - Current Exhibition

What would Summer be without a chilled drink and a beautiful Goldmark publication to while away the afternoon hours? Our latest offering takes us from France’s most historically important satirist to Britain’s least known printmaker, via two greats of European Modernism and American ceramics, an etching by the irascible Lucian Freud, the last works of Ceri Richards, and much more besides. We hope you find something to enjoy.

26 Joe Tilson - Zita 28 Terry Willson - An Enigma in Print 36 Derrick Greaves - The Sower 38 Christopher P Wood - Monoprints 42 Ceri Richards - Journey Toward the North 50 Lucian Freud - After Chardin 52 Ken Matsuzaki - Bending the Rules of Tradition 58 Jankel Adler - The British Years

Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 18 © Robert Silberman 52 © Phil Rogers 58 © Richard Cork Photographs: Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro, Vicki Uttley Design: Porter/Goldmark, June 2018 ISBN 978-1-909167-53-7

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CONTRIBUTORS Robert Silberman (Professor of Art History at University of Minnesota) teaches courses in film history, the history of photography and modern and contemporary art history. He writes regularly for The Burlington Magazine, Ceramics: Art and Perception and other publications. He has served as guest curator and catalogue author for five exhibitions at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis Phil Rogers is one of the world’s leading studio potters. In addition to exhibiting internationally, he has written respected books on ash glazes, throwing techniques and salt glazing and lectured all over the world, most notably in South Korea and the USA. Rogers’ work is held in more than 50 museums worldwide, and he is represented by the Goldmark Gallery.

Richard Cork is an award-winning critic, historian, curator and author of numerous books on art. An alumnus of Cambridge University, Cork became Slade Professor of Fine Art at his alma mater from 1989-90, and was Henry Moore Senior Fellow at the Courtauld Institute from 1992-5. He has written for the Evening Standard and as Chief Art Critic for The Times, curated exhibitions at the Tate and the Royal Academy, where he is an Honorary Fellow, and is a regular broadcaster on BBC radio and television.

honorÉ daumieR

Robert Macaire In the summer of 1832, Honoré Daumier was sent to prison for six months after offending the king and his officers in a particularly acute satirical cartoon. Sainte-Pélagie, the Paris gaol house to which insurrectionists and persona non grata of the time were sent, was said to adjoin the local zoo. Through the bars in his damp cell, Daumier could watch the animals opposite prowl about their cages.

It was one of life’s ironic symmetries, and the kind of biographical detail of which writers dream. But the image of a captive Daumier observing the captured beasts across the street was also, in its own little way, prophetic. It was Paris’ own human zoo that had first sharpened his eye and honed his critical powers; and when the parliamentary assembly eventually outlawed criticism of its political and royal institutions, it was to this spectrum of human indecency that Daumier would return for inspiration for his archetypal ‘Robert Macaire’ series, through which he smuggled his antiestablishment jibes.

Born in a house just off the Old Port of Marseille, Daumier was raised in the streets of Paris. His father Jean-Baptiste, a simple glazier, harboured hopes of becoming a poet, and in pursuit of a literary career had moved the family to the capital when his son was just eight years old. The young Daumier grew up in times of social and political tumult: as a child, he would have known of Napoleon’s climactic fall from grace and the subsequent restoration of the monarchy; as a young artist, he witnessed first-hand the fermenting undercurrents of civil unrest. Sketching daily in the city streets, one day he professed to his parents his desire of becoming an artist.

Appalled at the idea, they left the matter in the hands of a friend and patron, Alexandre Lenoir, who to their great surprise took Daumier under his own wing. He was made to study

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paintings of the Old Masters – Rembrandt, Rubens, and Titian – and make accurate copies, rapidly honing his instinctive draughtsmanship. By 1829, he was working in a print firm under the publisher Achille Ricourt at a time when lithography, then a nascent technology, was big business. ‘You have the touch’, Ricourt told the young Daumier; and so began a career in print.

Then came revolution. The current ruler King Charles, aging and ineffectual, had allowed his subjects to institute a suppressive set of new laws that brought heavy-handed censorship of the press into effect. Sensing public opinion was on their side, publishers hit back with force: within weeks, the revolutionaries were assembled and barricades littered the streets. Too slow to appease, Charles was forced to escape to England and, in the subsequent confusion, was replaced

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by his cousin Louis-Philippe, hastily ushered back from selfexile by opportunistic agents of the crown.

Louis-Philippe promised liberalism, but it was not forthcoming. Where the rebels had hoped for progressive action, he instead promoted a continuation of the status quo: hoarding public funds, refusing changes in electoral law, and, before long, reviving a tyrannical intolerance of public criticism oblique and overt. Monarchists and revolutionaries, until just recently sworn enemies, were for a time united in mutual distaste for the new regime.

Daumier was now working as a political cartoonist, and soon paid the price for his own subversive take on the sovereign’s reign. ‘Gargantua’, a searingly critical sendup of LouisPhilippe’s financial excesses, portrayed the new king as the eponymous giant of French myth, famous for his gluttony: a

One of the most important men, I will not say only of caricature, but also of modern art.

Charles Baudelaire

ramp leads up to Louis’ pear-shaped head, along which the citizens of Paris carry baskets of gold to deposit in his gaping mouth. His breeches stretch under the strain of his corpulent belly, and he sits upon a chaise percée, a portable toilet seat around which parliamentary subjects gaggle in their attempts to catch any falling scraps. The print had been intended for publication in ‘Caricature’, a radical new journal established by the exciting young publisher Charles Philipon, before the plate was seized, Philipon fined, and the young Daumier, at just 24 years old, imprisoned. In recent years Philipon had revolutionised the journalistic landscape through his various periodicals, in which he put his own editorial judgment, barbed wit, and brilliant visual eye to superlative effect.

Producing a number of lithographic cartoons for Philipon’s new journals, Daumier had quickly become his star pupil, developing his skills through frequent attacks on the puppeteer monarch and his bloated ministerial and legislative bodies.

During Daumier’s prison sentence, and in direct response to the state’s draconic gagging of the press, Philipon established a second, daily journal. Entitled ‘Charivari’ – ‘cacophony’, or ‘uproar’ – it would become Philipon’s finest achievement in print. For three years they jabbed at the king relentlessly, weathering court summons, arrests, seizures of prints and plates, trials, and eye-watering fines. After a series of bloody uprisings were brutally quashed by the king’s troops, trials of the subsequent detainees rigged, and an attempt on the king’s life by a lone rebel thwarted, ministers brought a decisive end to what little lenience they had left. In September 1835, the parliamentary assembly announced that the publication and sale of any print must be authorised by the interior minister, with penalties of prison time and effective

bankruptcy for those found fomenting dissent. Freedom of the press in France was, for a time, dead.

‘Caricature’ could not survive in such circumstances; but in ‘Charivari’, satire would live on. Daumier and Philipon could not attack the king, but they could expose the civil and industrial climate it had created, sustained, and come to represent. While poverty was widespread and social injustice pervasive during the reign of Louis-Philippe, business, meanwhile, flourished. Industry was almost totally without regulation as factories, docks, and the world of finance made the most of this dog-eat-dog economy. Daumier proposed to reflect the rapacity and greed of this new world in a ‘human zoology’ of ‘French Types’, portraits of ‘the various classes which constitute the ornament of society.’ From these first experimental models, the ‘Robert Macaire’ series was born.

Macaire and his emaciated sidekick, Bertrand, in fact began life not at the end of Daumier’s pen, but on the stage.

Originally written as a two-penny villain in an overcooked drama concocted in 1823, after the premiere performance bombed, the actor playing Macaire chose, without consulting the rest of the cast, to ham up his part, adopting the role of charming buffoon, replete with a tramp’s outfit. This comic reimagining of the play was an overnight success, and before long the ‘Macaire’ type had become a ubiquitous trope on the streets of Paris.

Philipon and Daumier appropriated the now wellestablished character to their own political agenda. Sketches were supplied by Daumier, while Philipon was responsible for the text, the two working closely to bring levity to each vignette. So successful were they, that the series was extended to 100 scenes, with the titular anti-hero in a variety of predicaments and playing a number of different parts, from

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profiteer to publisher, crooked lawyer to remorseless landlord.

Daumier’s Macaire, like the original, was totally unscrupulous, utterly self-promoting (a reflection, perhaps, of Philipon’s own powers of marketing), garrulous, unsympathetic, a scoundrel and a cheat. Money – either disputedly owed or disreputably earned – lies at the heart of almost every sketch. Macaire the ‘Discount Broker’, his neckerchief hiked shiftily up over his mouth, open hands and large, plain overcoat hiding the luxurious printed fabric that spills out behind him, offers an incredulous client in exchange for 40,000 francs, ‘25 francs in cash, 3,000 francs worth of white mustard and articulated clogs, 3,000 francs worth of fried chips, a carriage wheel, two cows, four shares in Physionotoype, and a quintal of useful facts’ (‘I don’t have any other assets in hand’, Philipon’s text continues, ‘but these are worth their weight in gold!’).

Their adoption of the well-known Macaire as the symbol for Louis-Philippe’s reign was not just commercially shrewd; it also served to deflect future litigation on the part of the state assembly. Macaire is notably not a member of the bourgeois class – though the victims of his swindles often are – and his tricks are, often transparently, those of the everyday huckster.

In this manner, Daumier and Philipon could both suggest an equivalence between the ludicrous brigandry of Macaire and the behaviour of industry giants and paid-out politicians, whilst denying any intended connection; they were made the targets of precisely the fraudulent exploitation they were (not so secretly) felt to symbolise.

Exquisitely drawn and heightened with hand-coloured gum arabic, the Macaire cartoons firmly cemented Daumier’s reputation as preeminent caricaturist in Paris, inspiring generations of political cartoonists to come. One final Macaire scene illustrated here skewers the social-political milieu of Louis-Philippe’s Paris and Daumier’s own role in it with such witty self-reflection that it scarcely needs further description.

An eye-patched Macaire lounges at a café table, the tattered top hat perched atop his head a nod to the king, whom it had come to represent; Bertrand sits opposite, his lean features closely resembling the king’s aide, Guizot. Attending the table is a bemused gendarme, hands on hips, as Macaire begins one of his celebrated declamations: ‘We are shareholders in the Agricultural Institute of Goêtho, in the Physionotype, in the late Health Society, in the Mor-Lycos, in toilet paper for thieves, in The Joke, a newspaper that is very political, and in a host of other philanthropic operations; we have drawn our dividends and are spending them on our good health… Waiter, another morsel of cheese!’

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GRAHAM SUTHERLAND Transforming Landscape

A versatile technician and an artist of intense personal vision, Graham Sutherland is widely considered one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. In addition to his extraordinary contribution to portraiture, public and religious commissions, and a much-lauded career as a painter in oils, Sutherland dedicated six decades of his life to printmaking and graphic design, resulting in a legacy of work that, despite its breadth, retains a powerfully unique voice.

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Born in 1903 in Streatham, Sutherland’s considerable artistic talents were first realised at Goldsmith’s School of Art (192126) where he quickly became a highly skilled etcher. As a young boy he had spent his years immersed in natural history and geology, closely observing, sketching and absorbing the natural world while on countryside holidays and family outings.

Encouraged by the Goldsmith’s head, an established etcher himself, these early sources of inspiration and his developing draughtsmanship were put to proficient use. Sutherland soon specialised in engraving processes, particularly etching, and devoted himself to mastering the required techniques. In 1923 his first prints were published, swiftly followed by a oneman-show in 1925, the same year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers at just 22 years old.

Early influences included the mystic, Romantic landscapes of the visionary artists William Blake and Samuel Palmer and the idyllic etchings of Whistler, with bucolic scenes of cottages and dilapidated farm houses sat amidst overgrown hedgerows. Now recognised and regarded for his work, Sutherland was also offered a teaching position at the Chelsea School of Art, instructing students in engraving and etching whilst exploring his own graphic style.

In 1929, however, the demand for prints of every kind declined dramatically in the catastrophic aftershock of the Wall Street crash. In the subsequent global economic depression of the early 1930s, Sutherland turned to painting, ceramics, graphic design, and other varied commercial work in order to earn a living, including the well-known poster designs for Shell petrol and the London Passenger Transport Board. The sheer variety of projects open to him, coupled with the fresh discoveries of oil painting and the verdant landscape of Pembrokeshire, contributed to a powerful, personal artistic style that emerged and developed in the pre- and post-war years.

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Pembrokeshire, where Sutherland had first visited in 1934, remained a constant and significant source of inspiration. view more Graham Sutherland at goldmarkart.com

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Throughout the 1930s Sutherland began experimenting with lithography, a medium well suited to his love of drawing and to which he would return frequently in his later years.

With the outbreak of World War II he was made an Official War Artist from 1940-45, his appointment and the paintings he produced during this time of bomb-damaged streets in the London Blitz spurring on his artistic career as his work became more widely circulated. In the late 1940s important religious commissions followed, including the large Crucifixion (1946) for the Anglican church of St. Matthew in Northampton, as well as the critically acclaimed portrait of the writer Somerset Maugham in 1949.

The success of Sutherland’s public commissions was instrumental to his growing reputation as an artist, though as he soon learned this renown brought highs and lows in equal measure. Commissioned to produce what is perhaps his bestknown work, the enormous tapestry Christ in Glory (1962), for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral after its destruction in the war, Sutherland’s vast installation represented a profoundly personal endeavour to the artist who had converted to Roman Catholicism back in 1926.

By contrast, at the public unveiling of his infamous portrait of Winston Churchill to an audience of thousands in 1954 the completed work was openly mocked by Churchill before being destroyed by his wife some years later. Archive footage of the unveiling shows a seated Sutherland writhing in discomfort in the background as the laughter of the audience, ignorant of his presence, rings through Westminster Hall.

By the 1960s printmaking, and especially lithography, returned to Sutherland’s focus in full force. During these last few decades of his life he produced almost three times as many prints as he had in the first half of his career, experimenting with ever more vivid uses of colour and form.

As well as new subjects, such as the birds, beasts and insects of his Bestiaries and the famous Bee suite of lithographs, landscapes and natural objects such as trees, rocks, and root formations were subjected to greater distortion and abstraction.

Pembrokeshire, where Sutherland had first visited in 1934,

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had remained a constant and significant source of inspiration for Sutherland’s canvases throughout the preceding years, but it wasn’t until 1967, long after his artistic reputation had been established, that he chose to return there repeatedly over the next ten years. South Wales’ lush, fertile landscape and its age-old banks and estuaries captured the artist’s imagination, and in sketchbooks and letters to friends he revealed his love for the place: …I may go for a walk. There is everything around me. I look: certain things that one sees, almost by accident, seem to strike me more than others. Out of a thousand things I see – one juxtaposition of forms above all others seems to have a meaning. I don’t always understand what I am doing or what I am likely to do…my mind is receptive – but vacant… …The quality of the light here is magical and transforming – as indeed it is in all this country. Watching from the gloom as the sun’s rays strike the further bank, one has the sensation of the after tranquility of an explosion of light. Or as if one had looked back into the sun and had turned suddenly away…

Sutherland’s description of the ‘transforming’ landscape echoes the changing nature of his own work. Natural forms of growth such as tree roots and thorn bushes are frequently depicted close up or from foreshortened viewpoints. These organic, biomorphic formations curl, bulge and burst their way around the page, every mutated branch or totemic rock lent a powerful sense of life. Sutherland’s work of this time is almost animistic; even dead trees, sprouting shrubs and unmoving stones seem to possess a living, breathing spirit.

Sutherland returned to Pembrokeshire for the last time just a month before his death in London in February 1980. Despite numerous retrospective exhibitions devoted to his work, both at home and abroad, during the last two decades of his life, his impact on British post-war art has only recently come to serious critical attention. As haunting as it is enlightening in its depictions of landscape, his art is not easy; yet it must rank among the most expressive and evocative that this country has produced.

Current Exhibition

randy johnston A half century ago the British novelist and physicist C.P. Snow commented on the yawning chasm he felt separated what he called the two cultures, that is, the sciences and the humanities. As a young man Randy Johnston moved across that divide, and the catalyst for his shift was clear: Warren MacKenzie.

Johnston was headed toward a career as a medical doctor or marine biologist – Jacques-Yves Cousteau was an early hero – when he went in search of a photography course and wound up in an introductory ceramics class instead.

MacKenzie was the teacher, and he has been an important figure in Johnston’s life ever since as a mentor, role model, and friend. Turning toward art and away from science does not necessarily mean completely abandoning one for the other. That is especially true with ceramics, with its technical side encompassing such important matters as kiln construction and firing temperatures, clay bodies and glaze formulas. It is even possible that for many potters the technical, analytical aspects of ceramics are an essential part of the appeal, the perfect complement for the expressive, imaginative elements. Ceramics, like photography, enables practitioners to draw upon both the right and left side of the brain in a kind of internal dialogue. Johnston does display some qualities identified with the scientific method: he is organized, a deliberate worker, and a problem-solver who welcomes a good challenge. Yet his love of wood firing suggests a willingness to court chance as well as assert control. No matter how careful the preliminaries, there always remains the ceramic leap of faith involved in surrendering work to the fire for the final stage of creation. A firing may be a kind of experiment, and it may be more than a figure of speech to discuss scientific and mathematical theories or proofs in terms of elegance and beauty, but the scientific pursuit of definitive truths about nature is not the same as the aesthetic search for possibly ambiguous and metaphorical truths about human nature – and Johnston made his choice long ago.

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Born in 1950, Johnston is, chronologically speaking, a child of the mid-century. His work can be far from what is usually taken as mid-century modern – clean-lined Scandinavian designs, or International Style modern architecture, all glass and metal and right angles. Still, Johnston represents that historical moment as both a ceramicist and a modernist. As a ceramicist, because he in effect belongs to the third generation of the modern studio pottery movement, following Bernard Leach and then MacKenzie (and MacKenzie’s contemporary, the Japanese master Tatsuzo Shimaoka, with whom Johnston apprenticed). As a modernist, because his artistic vision extends beyond ceramics to other art ascendant at the time, New York School painting and sculpture. It is also strongly shaped by the early 20th century avant-garde, including the revival of interest in archaic and non-Western art that accompanied the rise of modernism.

Johnston has for a long time demonstrated an individual style, with a recognizable, if constantly evolving repertory of forms. The most notable feature may well be the sense of physicality. Johnston’s work often appears monumental, but never ponderous. Johnston likes to match assertive physicality with equally bold surface treatment – thick-flowing black and white ribbons set against earth-toned backgrounds, punctuated by bursts of brighter colors like small eruptions.

The designs can attain a remarkable complexity, as on a platter that may be regarded as a purely abstract emblem, loaded with mythical possibilities, yet also manages to suggest a landscape view with layered mountain ranges or perhaps a glimpse of a galaxy whirling at the edge of the cosmos. There is another side to Johnston’s sensibility, however, visible in more lyrical works with white-on-white surface treatments, often delicate linear designs that conjure up rain, or grass and plants blowing in the wind. Similarly, while the sturdy slab constructions rely on a meticulous, slow process, with yunomi and tea bowls a sense of immediacy is essential, so Johnston works more freely, to achieve a sense of ‘grace and casualness’.

Whether working in a heroic or a lyric key, Johnston always seems to find a way to create a sense of visual drama. He will place a raised seam slightly off-center on a vessel form to introduce tension, splitting the space with the kind of ‘zip’ effect identified with the painter Barnett Newman. Or he will exploit the contrast between top and bottom, as in the fullbodied storage vessels, where he uses his experience with the wood kiln to develop a division between heavily fireaffected areas above and relatively untouched areas beneath.

In a work with its vertical shaft divided into alternating light

The designs can attain a remarkable complexity, as on a platter that may be regarded as a purely abstract emblem, loaded with mythical possibilities, yet also manages to suggest a landscape view with layered mountain ranges or perhaps a glimpse of a galaxy whirling at the edge of the cosmos.

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and dark bands, the precise geometry sets off the dark fluid form pouring down the side; in a spectacular bonus, near the bottom colored streaks appear in that luscious spill. This effect, as Johnston notes, could not have been predicted, and it is not the only recent case where the blessings conferred by the kiln show why wood firing can be so seductive. An oval form carefully placed to catch the kiln’s flow of fire and heat on an edge exceeded expectations by emerging with two brilliant yellow areas that sing out, while the extraordinary textures and layering on the surfaces of other works provide a kind of deeply compelling, endlessly fascinating abstraction that belongs to ceramics alone.

Now that Johnston is no longer teaching, he has more time to explore some of the many ideas that have engaged him over the years. The complex nature of his process is evident in how his long-term interest in the work of two great early modern artists has affected his recent work. First, there are the elegant concave works indebted to Giacometti’s Spoon Woman (itself influenced by the Dan people’s ceremonial spoons). They include small raised elements like handles that almost make them seem like versions of tribal artifacts, for winnowing or grinding perhaps. But in fact the raised elements had their origin in the vertical nose forms on Cycladic sculptures, which Johnston shifted to the horizontal, a reminder of how an artist’s sense of formal necessity can generate its own logic. The surface treatments, subdued rather than expressionistic, further reveal Johnston’s artistic method as he tries different options: parallel lines in one, a herringbone pattern in another that recalls Shimaoka’s signature imprinted cord effects, and a white version that conjures up a ghostlike stringed instrument (or a grove of saplings), with a horizontal dark line to provide counterpoint and reveal once again Johnston’s finely calibrated sense of division and proportion.

Johnston’s recent works also display a fascination with pedestals, inspired by Brancusi, that shows how a focus on a single element can shape an entire series. For Brancusi, a pedestal was not a minor adjunct to the sculpture but an integral element. Johnston has often used supports to maintain stability, as can be seen in the beautiful recent work that incorporates three shallow, dish-like forms set at different angles. (These forms, in another display of Johnstonian transformation, derive from Chilean winemaking tools; though made of clay, their surfaces suggest well-worn wood or metal.)

With more vertical, vase-like forms Johnston became interested in exploring how the addition of a plinth-like base

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created a more figural, sculptural look: in some the base remains a conventional rectangular block separate from what stands above; in some the base is a curved continuation; and some are in effect both, as in the case of that astonishing fluid, frozen outpouring that links the banded sculpture and its base. Finally, there is the work that consists of a base form, a rectangular slab, with deep gouged grooves – a demonstration of how the exploration of one element can lead in an entirely new direction, opening up new possibilities.

Johnston’s teapots deserve comment because they reveal other aspects of his method and style. No delicate porcelain confections, they possess a characteristic rugged strength.

They are not wheel thrown; Johnston uses paper patterns to create the individual elements before assembling the whole.

They may at first glance appear almost willfully archaic and non-modern, with curves that avoid sinuous sleekness and other elements that present a disconcerting angularity. But a more extended look reveals a jazzy piece of rhythmic play, with visual drama once again provided by the carefully cultivated surface effects from the wood firing, with the lighter areas on top set against the darker ones below. The bulging, hefty handles are not the product of ergonomic research resulting in the perfect design for the perfect composite user, but imply a particular kind of firm grasp, with the irregularity adding character. The bend in the spout may suggest an elbow or knee, but actually derives from Minoan and early Iranian ceramics, in pots with bird-beak spouts. One favorite teapot design, with a rectilinear rather than curvilinear body, is based on Japanese cast iron tea kettles. Part of Johnston’s fascination with the Japanese original came from an unfinished, raw edge required by the casting process, but he was also intrigued by the incorporation of circle, square and triangle as basic elements, so that there is a geometrical, metaphysical concept embodied in the work’s physical form.

That brings us full circle, back to the relationship between the two cultures. Johnston’s interest in the intersection of mathematics and art, whether in the geometry of a teapot or the possible application of the Golden Spiral and Fibonacci figures to a curve, is too particular and personal to neutralize Lord Snow’s warning about the general separation between the sciences and the humanities. But it does offer one more powerful reminder of how Johnston’s expansive vision is constantly bringing together past and present, the conceptual and the formal, in the service of his art.

Robert Silberman

Joe tilson ZiTA

Of the generation of post-war British artists trained at the Royal College of Art – a list that includes David Hockney, Sir Peter Blake, and Frank Auerbach, among others – Joe Tilson is exceptional in being as admired in Italy as he is in his native country. For almost sixty years now he has treated the Tuscan hilltop town Cortona and Venice as a second home, with studios in both regions.

Produced in 2010, Zita is one of a recent series of constructed works centred around Venice and its instantly recognisable ‘Venetian’ windows, whose shape Tilson has here adapted. Like many works that draw upon the skills he developed as a young carpenter, Zita incorporates a joined wooden frame with acrylic painted panels and lettering.

Adorning these compartmentalised panels are a mysterious collection of symbols relating to Venice (The ‘V’ reflected in the top left-hand corner and the accolade arch in the righthand column), Christian hagiography (the scallop shell of St James), and ancient myth (the elements of earth, air, fire and water in the bottom row). Among these many symbols, Zita even boasts a direct connection to the city: its circular dove motif, made from opaque white Lattimo ‘milk’ glass, was produced in the glass factory in Murano, which has remained in operation in Venice since the 15th century.

Zita derives its title from Santa Zita, patron saint of maids and domestic servants, who worked for a slothful family in the Tuscan town of Lucca in the early thirteenth century. One tale relates the young Zita, beloved for her piety and her work ethic, taking leftover bread into the streets to help feed the homeless. Spied upon by a member of the family, she was confronted hiding the loaves within her apron; to their amazement, as she opened her smock the bread was transformed into flowers.

As well as being declared ‘incorrupt’ upon her exhumation by priests in the 1500s – Zita’s body was found not to have decomposed, but naturally ‘mummified’ – Saint Zita’s name has been connected to the Ancient Greek word for ‘seek’, and she is often invoked to find lost keys, another symbol that recurs throughout Tilson’s oeuvre.

Sourced via Tilson’s print atelier and authenticated by the man himself with a signature on the back of a photograph of the work, Zita demonstrates that, even as he approaches his 90th birthday, Tilson continues to produce work with as much intellectual depth and colourful punch as ever.

view more Joe Tilson at goldmarkart.com

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terry Willson

An Enigma in Print ‘It has long been a worthy custom that artist-printmakers stay close to the press.

No doubt the ball on Rembrandt’s palm was often smooth as parchment and his lifeline ingrained with ink; the tradition of craft lives on, but the old calling of the artist-printer is now exceptional.’

These words were written not by Terry Willson, but Richard Hamilton, venerable British Pop artist and highly adept printmaker in his own right. They first appeared in an essay on what Hamilton felt was the imminent and inevitable evaporation of technical printmaking expertise in Britain, following the boom-and-bust revival of print ateliers throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. First published in 1990, it was entitled simply: ‘Endangered Species’.

Willson was one such artist-printmaker. Hamilton serves as his introduction here, if only for the fact that virtually nothing is known, or has been written, about his life and work. An exceptionally proficient print technician, at the height of its success his studio, Palm Tree Editions, was attracting work from some of the biggest names commissioning artists’ prints, including Auerbach, Freud, Kitaj, Ed Ruscha and Denis Masi.

Then, almost as suddenly as he had established himself, Willson disappeared. His studio was left completely intact.

The organiser of a major retrospective in 1988, put together in collaboration with the Kent County Library, wrote with ‘facile hope’ that Willson might return to produce his own images again, but to no avail. By the time Hamilton’s essay had been published, he had vanished, the first apparent victim of that predicted extinction.

In many ways, Willson’s career charted the rise and fall of British print workshops, with the market for artists’ prints opening up in the early 1960s in response to technological advances in serigraphy (silkscreen printing) and the resurrection of etching instruction in British art colleges, thanks to the likes of Julian Trevelyan and Anthony Gross. Born in

1948, by the time Willson attended his first art institution – Huddersfield School of Art in 1966 – the renaissance was well underway. London was abuzz with the emergence of new editioning workshops and ateliers. Chris Prater and Rose Kelly of Kelpra Studios, founded in 1957, led the way in pioneering extraordinary new technical expertise in silkscreen printing, followed later by the inimitable Chris Betambeau of Advanced Graphics in 1967. British lithography was revived under Stanley Jones at the Curwen Studio in 1958. Editions Alecto, set up in ’62 by a group of ex-Cambridge graduates, published some of the most important portfolios of the next two decades.

And, just as Willson was enrolling on the vocational graphics

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course at Bradford Regional College, Studio Prints was born in 1968, run initially by Dorothea Wight, then jointly with her husband Marc Balakjian, where they produced etchings for high-profile artists well into the early 2000s.

Willson spent ten years in art education before setting up his own print studio, graduating from Stourbridge College in 1973, where he had studied as a painter, before taking a postgraduate course in printmaking at the Slade. The London college’s etching department had benefitted enormously from a long period of invigoration under the tutelage of Anthony Gross, a master of the etched line, who retired from his post in 1971. Willson would have emerged, in 1976, with unparalleled knowledge and experience of the medium; a prestigious Prix de Rome scholarship in etching and engraving, awarded upon his graduation, confirmed the fact.

Delayed only by a brief year spent lecturing around the country, Willson set up his first – and only – commercial studio in 1978. Palm Tree Editions, set in the heart of Camden Town in north London, printed for a great many contemporary masters, but it was from here too that Willson editioned his own prints. Like many in his line of work, he was a child of British Pop, clearly informed by the artists who had first frequented and helped establish the great studios of the late ‘50s and ‘60s. The prints featured many of Pop’s hallmarks: the union of fine art elements and graphic design, the handdrawn and the photographic; word and image in contrast; that sense of the televisual or the journalistic, in the screenprints especially, where the dot matrix of press photography could be emphasised and exploited; and in the disruptive, and often jarring, reassembly of collated images, the Pop Art magpie mantra of crop and cut, layer, repeat and repurpose.

One could be forgiven for finding in this strange, and often dystopian mix, innumerable simultaneous influences at play.

Disquieting anatomical studies of pose and movement, with skeletal men thrusting left and right before gridded backgrounds, feel almost like the spectral apparitions of an

Eadweard Muybridge ‘human locomotion’ photograph inhabiting a geometric Gordon House etching. Many of the titles, with pseudo-scientific or mock literary pretensions, read like Paolozzi suites: ‘Isochronous Variations’; ‘Hints for Sand Weavers’; ‘Theatre of the Absurd’. A number of prints from the latter seem to reference directly Hamilton’s own iconic ‘Adonis in Y Fronts’ and ‘What is it about Today’s Houses. ..’ collages, with bodybuilder hunks superimposed on graph paper backgrounds. Even the ‘Landscape Fragments’, lone studies in peopleless buildings, a world apart from Pop’s repertoire of kink and kitsch in their smoky gloom, feel haunted by the ghost of Edward Hopper. This last series of prints, with their almost cinematic quality of light and shadow, reveal Willson as a master of the etching and aquatint processes.

For all its visual debts, Willson’s work retained a compelling, distinct voice of its own – a considerable achievement for one visually saturated with the day-to-day printing of other people’s images. They possess an admirably difficult and unsettling tenor which a more commercially-minded artist might have neglected to explore with as much technical investment. Willson seemed destined to take his place as one of the very great etchers of his generation; but by the late 1980s he had disappeared, leaving Palm Tree Studios and all its equipment behind him. His whereabouts remained entirely unknown until recently, when Willson reached out to the Goldmark Gallery himself. Meeting Mike Goldmark in his London residence, he explained how he had met and fallen in love with a Marks and Spencer heiress. Infatuated with one another, the pair had eloped to the Canary Islands, where they hoped to live out their lives together.

They had over ten years before empty coffers and Willson’s failing health forced them back to England. A life spent at the acid bath will ravage any constitution, as anyone who has ever visited an etcher’s atelier and been hit by the wall of solvent fumes can attest. Resin dust used in aquatint catches in the throat; coloured ink particulates, lead and zinc chromate yellows in particular, settle like tar in the lungs. Constant

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inhalation of thinners leads to narcosis and even permanent brain damage, while nitric acid and ‘Dutch mordant’ – a noxious mix of hydrochloric acid and potassium chlorate – give off irritant gases that aggravate the lungs and trigger debilitating emphysema. For many etchers of Willson’s generation, most recently James Collyer, one half of the esteemed J.C. Editions, the effects would eventually kill.

Breathing, much less talking, becomes a constant and painful struggle.

And so the work must speak for itself. Willson’s art is a world of extremes, visual, cultural, political. The technicolour advertisements of ‘Billboard No. 3’ and ‘Lumb Lane’, the infamous stalking grounds of Bradford’s sex trade, contrast the promises of sex against the grim reality of brick walls and social decay. ‘Isochronous Variations No. 3’, with its chairbound subject, resonates with IRA dirty protests, tortured combatants, scenes of the Troubles which, in Willson’s time, had become near omnipresent on television news. Among Willson’s many (often self-) portraits is one of Brian Winston, professor and expert in popular media, film, journalism, and documentary ethics who has written at length on the blurring of fact, fiction, and commercial interest in the partisan world of news journalism. Winston sits on a deck chair, a row of empty seats behind him, as if director on an eternally empty set, or stranded on a coastless sea (a repeated landscape in Willson’s work). Other prints seem similarly informed by Winston’s research, toying with themes of dreamlike verisimilitude: eerily vacant glasshouses and conservatories, unlit interior scenes, all dust and shadow, as if the documentary cameras had been left running long after their subjects had disappeared.

In Willson’s work, we are denied the visual familiarity of figures in recognisable spaces: landscapes are unpeopled; people, unplaced, suspended in the graphic void. His is a world as distinctive, enigmatic, and unknown as the printmaking legacy he leaves behind him.

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DERRICK GREAVES The Sower

In the late 1960s, Derrick Greaves’ world changed. ‘Things, objects became flat,’ he wrote: ‘That is, they had a certain controlled depth. It was not Cézanne’s flatness, neither was it Cubism, ‘hermetic’ or ‘synthetic’. It was mine – I hadn’t looked for it – how could you?

– but it was mine.’

Greaves had enjoyed instant and widespread critical acclaim in the early 1950s. The landmark solo exhibition at the renowned Beaux Arts Gallery in London, 1953, which brought him substantial recognition in the national press, opened when he was still a student at the Royal College of Art. Greaves, alongside John Bratby, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith, was labelled one of the ‘Beaux Arts Quartet’: the four poster boys of ‘Kitchen Sink’ painting, celebrated for their muted oils depicting scenes of gritty social realism.

Ten years later and his painting had changed almost unrecognisably. Shedding the Kitchen Sink moniker, this new style drew upon early years working as a sign-writer’s apprentice.

Relinquishing gestural marks and textures of paint, he began instead to combine the bold

outlines and expressive colours of Pop with the melancholia which had served his earlier domestic interiors and still lifes.

The Sower is typical of this new period, produced after a 1967 holiday in Provence with the photographer David Mindline.

Here, in charcoal sketches made in the heady southern French countryside, Greaves invoked the memory of Van Gogh, for whom the Provençal light and landscape was so important: ‘Every decade or so, I felt I reunderstood Van Gogh…It was very odd coming to it through my own work.’

The Sower owes a spiritual and thematic debt to Van Gogh’s many paintings of sowers in fields, and in particular to an 1888 oil of the same title. The thick, impasted golden sun of Van Gogh’s original is transmuted here to a refulgent sphere, hot orange offset by a background of purple, its chromatic opposite.

The sower himself is reduced to a giant hand, a recurrent visual theme in Greaves’ later paintings, scattering chrome yellow seeds across the breadth of the canvas. So hot is the sun overhead that its corona overlaps the outflung hand of the sower, recolouring his thumb like a great disc of coloured acrylic: ‘The “interval”’, Greaves wrote in his journal, ‘the intervening space, invaded, and to a certain extent, annexed the objects. Similarly the object pressurised its environment. Edges became crucial. Outline became crucial, ambiguous and then an end in itself. Line emerged as form.’

With hard edge, broad planes, and flat colour, The Sower evidences Greaves at a critical stage in his career: abandoning that which had brought him approbation, dismantling his pictorial language, rebuilding the remnants into a body of newly expressive, symbolic work.

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Forthcoming demonstration

Christopher p Wood

Monoprinting forms a vital part of Wood’s mysterious work. We caught up with him to find out a little bit more about the process…

Monoprint, monotype. What’s in a name?

There’s a subtle difference between the two that most people aren’t aware of. A monoprint uses a ‘matrix’ – or ‘plate’ – with permanent features that can be reprinted more than once: an etched background, for example. While no two monoprints will be exactly the same, they might use the same ‘key’ plate; as a result, monoprints are sometimes produced as ‘variations on a theme’, perhaps with varied colouring or hand-drawn elements. A monotype plate, on the other hand – usually a blank sheet of glass or acrylic – has no fixed marks on it that can be reprinted.

While I use both methods, in the last two or three years I’ve been mainly producing monotypes, using stencils cut from true-grain, which is a kind of plastic that you can paint on, wash, and reuse. The process relates a little bit to the collages that I’ve been making, in that you’re rearranging cut shapes and forms, interrupting them with freely painted marks or effects achieved through the printing process. I can move around the plate and respond to it in a very spontaneous and direct way. The major difference is you’ve got much longer to consider where you’re placing things on a collage, whereas in monoprinting, because of the drying times of the ink, you’ve got – at best – ten minutes to get your act together before the individual elements start to dry.

You’ve talked in the past of monoprinting as a way of ‘liberating’ images. Are these compositions fully formed in your head, or are they born on the press?

When each plate goes under the rollers, most often what comes out isn’t exactly what you had expected: there’s a lot of wastage. When you’re making a lot of prints quite quickly,

you’re weighing and measuring expectations before the plate goes through against what actually appears when the impression has been taken. In that sense, you have to be fairly open, I think, the whole time you’re making prints, to the elements of change and surprise. If you go in wanting very definite results, quite often you’re disappointed – but, more importantly, you also miss some of the very interesting things which can happen if you are prepared to act more impulsively and be more spontaneous in your appreciation of what comes off the press.

The other side of the coin in printmaking is that there’s a lot of preparation which you are in control of: size, scale, the type of marks or processes that you’re going to use. There is that interesting mix of resolving at every stage to get those things absolutely right, and being prepared to be surprised.

You’re almost always working in series when monoprinting.

Do you find that things happen early on that then change your approach to later plates?

Oh definitely. The whole interest, for me, in painting and collage too, is that one starts off with something which is quite definite, only to end up in a place that is very different from where you began. The starting point, in a sense, has to be definite: you have to make those first marks or that first image, but after that it’s very much a call and response. You’re listening to your instinct, following any intuition you might have to change something, sometimes quite radically, because you feel the imaginative suggestion that you should.

That’s why I work in series: because even as you start, you’re wondering what the fifteenth print is going to be like, and the journey to that print will hopefully produce four or five really interesting pieces that are all very distinct and diverse.

Chris Wood will give a talk and demonstration on monoprinting in the Gallery later this year. 60 seats only. Phone for details.

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You mentioned ‘wastage’ earlier – are those four or five interesting prints you’re searching for quite elusive?

They can be. Most printmakers will talk of the ‘printmaker’s devil’: a curse that means even when you’ve prepared every step as you normally would, something on the day just doesn’t work. Then there are other days when the printmaking gods are with you, when everything lifts from the press beautifully.

There is an odd sort of alchemy involved in it which I guess is a bit like musical performance: sometimes you get into a stream of imagery, where a percentage, a weight of the marks you’re using and how they’re transferring means nearly every print will have something worth keeping. Other days, it’s absolutely the reverse, and you have very frustrating periods where nothing seems to come away from the press with its own life, which is precisely what you’re after. But the nice thing about those sorts of days is that I have a lot of material for collage at the end of the day; in that sense, nothing’s wasted.

That’s a nice idea – that the collage and the monoprinting are sort of complementing each other.

Yes – on the collages I’ve made you’ll often find scraps of monoprint that have been ripped up. And the collages often provide the visual spark for the next series of prints. It’s a sort of ‘Ouroboros’: a self-feeding process.

In your most recent work you’ve used collaged photography, 18th -19th century portraiture, hieroglyphs - is there an idea or influence in particular that you are working through at the moment?

illustrating the idea of mystery in an art historical context, referencing Romantic painting and Surrealism, artists like Blake who were interested in the ‘other’ world, since 2011 I’ve been drawn to make things which are mysterious in their own right.

I’m interested particularly in thinking about modern figurative painting and contemporary figuration, how it’s possible to make a figurative image to which one cannot immediately apply a kind of archetypal narrative. The moment you include a figure in a picture, people want to read a story or sequence in it: it’s in our nature I think, as human beings, to want to understand the interrelationships in an image, to try and see a succession of events or the connections between disparate elements. What I’ve found working more spontaneously, using collage and monoprinting and applying those processes to painting, is that I’m making cryptic, figurative images which you can’t pin down with a specific narrative, no matter how much the intellect wants to do that.

It’s an interesting parallel with printmaking, where one is usually talking about editions and series: already you’re setting up, if not a narrative, certainly an order - print No. 1 through 20, and so on. Is there a tension there, producing images that are connected to each other whilst trying to avoid a discernible narrative?

I think unless, like the Abstract Expressionists, you start with gesture, inevitably the starting point is known. It’s like the Heart of Darkness: you begin in Gravesend and it’s a known point, but then the journey takes you to deep places you couldn’t possibly have dreamed of before. I’m more interested

Since 2011 I’ve undergone a fundamental shift in the way that I think about the imagery I’m making. Since being an art student, I’ve consistently explored the idea of the ‘other world’, the mysterious world of poetic inspiration. Even from a very young age, I sensed a challenge to the idea that everything could be explained in scientific or mechanical terms; something in that didn’t chime with the way I felt about the world, and that was probably the driving force for my going to college in the first place. That exploration, that seeking out an explanation for the way I felt, went on through my post-grad and beyond for ten or fifteen years. The paintings were really about the ‘Sublime’ moment, and what that moment, across all the arts, actually means.

What’s subsequently happened is that I’ve become more interested in work which is simply mysterious. Rather than

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not in the original starting point, but where it’s all going to end up. Quite often where one thing ends you find the starting point for the next series, so it’s a continuous cycle of exploration.

For instance, the paintings I’m making at the moment take as their starting point painted porcelain: China blue, willow pattern plates; that’s the starting point, with respect to the ideas of pattern, configuration, and colour. But what I’ve actually ended up with so far is something entirely different, something very strange, but somehow still related intimately to that long tradition of ceramic decoration. You’re always

building on a tradition somehow, pushing something forward.

Even this morning I was thinking about these paintings with this beautiful China colour, which at its densest can be black, but at its lightest is a very delicate shade of blue. I’ve ordered the same colour in a printing ink and will start making some monotypes using this blue as the chromatic base. I’ll probably use some of the imagery from the paintings as the foundation for those prints, but I’m fully expecting the monoprints to shoot off and diverge in all sorts of interesting directions.

Everything is linked together really: each medium offers insight into the next.

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ceri richards Journey Toward the North

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In the summer of 1960, at the National Eisteddfod in Cardiff – a legendary Welsh bardic contest – a show of Ceri Richards’ work was held titled ‘Homage to Music and Poetry’. In a preface to the exhibition catalogue, Richards expounded on his belief in the artist’s role as a summoner and searcher of meanings: ‘One can generally say that all artists – poets, musicians, painters are creating in their own idioms, metaphors for the nature of existence, for the secrets of their time. We are all moved by the beauty and revelation in their utterances – we notice the direction and beauty of the path they indicate for us – and move towards them .. .’

‘Secrets of their time’; the philosopher Carl Jung had made the very same observation of Richards’ own work in an effusive letter of 1958, describing his recent paintings as ‘the most frank and revealing confessions of the secrets of our age.’ The quote had obviously stuck in Richards’ mind, like pips seeding a fruit plucked unknowingly, two years later, from the stores of his subconscious.

Secrets and metaphors were key to Richards’ conception of art: they were to be buried deep and unearthed, scattered to sea and left drifting ashore, woven into the fabric of a poem or the passage of a musical phrase, hidden, found, then obscured again. Artists, writers, poets, and musicians were both guides and the guided; excavation and transformation were, to him, the heart of the artistic act.

Journey Toward the North, Richards’ last great graphic work before his death in 1971, is a meditation on transformations. The series comprised seven lithographs made to accompany poems by Roberto Sanesi, writer, poet, and foremost translator into Italian of the works of Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, two Welsh poets close to Richards’ heart. They had first met in 1958 at Watkins’ house on the Gower Peninsula, where the three artists walked the clifftops ‘retracing,’ as Sanesi later described, ‘the steps of the dead poet [Dylan

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Thomas] across the landscape he had known as a boy’: ‘It was then that I learnt to love a country, a culture and a climate of art that by now have become deeply engrained in me. In the years that followed we met a number of times, in Richards’ studio in Edith Grove, or in Venice, where we went for walks together. Gradually, the friendship and intellectual rapport between us deepened.

The idea of a book began to take shape.’

Journey Toward the North grew from a confluence of imaginings and experiences: Sanesi’s poetry, whose basic themes were his reflections on Gower and the poetry of Thomas and Watkins, which seemed to him almost to have become one with the peninsula, suppurating like dew on the clifftops, clinging to the salt air and white chalk; and Richards’ response, coloured, as it was, by the anticipation of his own death.

Sanesi’s title had suggested to Richards another poetic sequence he knew well: Schubert’s Winterreise (‘The Winter Journey’), a profoundly melancholic cycle of songs composed in the final months of the composer’s life. In a rather poignant moment of poetic foreshadowing, Schubert – like Richards – never got to see his final work published, succumbing to illness while amending the final proofs for the score.

Journey Toward the North soon became, for Richards, a conclusion of similar poignancy: a return home and a departure point; the resolution of life and a yearning for something beyond; endless cycles of life and death, creation and destruction, patterns of germination mirroring the creative act, universal themes all ciphered through personal resonances and hidden meanings.

Richards made a number of preparatory sketches before finally committing his compositions to the plate. In the best of

these, we see him seeking out these patterns, unearthing those secret meanings, quite definitively and without hesitation.

Early drawings show that he made few major changes to his designs, instead returning again and again to the same visual echoes in Sanesi’s lines that had most struck him – fingers intertwining, flowers spreading petals to the borders of the page – as if to reaffirm their emblematic power.

A series of highly finished preparatory paintings brought these searchings to a close. They are as close to the final portfolio images as any Richards produced and reveal him at his expressive best. Vaucluse, titled after the Provençal spring where Petrarch wrote his love sonnets to Laura, was in fact the very last image Richards ever produced.

Desperately sad but beautifully resolved, Richards invests this lilting drawing with layers of reference. The hands are those of three people: Petrarch, whose love letters, unrequited, dissolve into the water of the

Vaucluse fountain; Sanesi, whose poems are become one with cliffs and sea; and Richards, his final drawing turning to water before his hands. It is an extraordinary contemplation on the transience of life, the impermanence of all things felt, made, and experienced, an idea returned to with aching delicacy in the fleeting memory of butterflies and blossoms suspended in Elegy for Vernon Watkins, written after Watkins’ recent death in 1967.

But Richards is also careful to bring this cycle full circle, to find rebirth in the fragile and ephemeral: the ‘roses in negative’ of Information Report XVI, an account of one of Sanesi’s many visits to Richards’ studio, bloom above ‘roots and leaves of sex’ in ‘the study lit / by an unfinished eden grove.’

In Richards’ companion piece, the Winter visit is summarised in dusky blues, plants unfurling at its centre, the virginal earth deflowered beneath the flowering roses. He balances transience with fruitfulness, growth

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with decay, birth and dissemination, recalling perhaps those lines of Dylan Thomas that had inspired some of his very first prints: ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer.’

The lithographic version of Vaucluse was the very last print of the suite to be prepared, drawn directly on a plate brought

by Stanley Jones to Richards’ house in Edith Grove, Chelsea. Jones, master printer at Curwen Studios and the foremost lithographer of his generation, had been a student assistant of Richards’ at the Slade, where the elder artist first taught him the lithographic process. Delivering the block to Richards’ studio, their relationship was brought to a poetic close: Richards died the very next day of a heart attack. The suite was later published posthumously by Gino Cerastico, a great admirer and collector of Richards’ work.

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Though he cannot have known when, Richards must have intimated in these last months of preparation that death was not far. Giancarlo Vigorelli, a literary critic and close friend of Sanesi’s, identified in the publication of the suite Richards’ last triumphant breath of life: ‘I keep wondering: did Ceri sense in himself that these were the last lines he would ever draw? And for answer I keep going back to look at these lithographs, and I find the butterfly and the violet each becoming the metamorphosis of the other, or rather, each the primordial apparition of the other in the regained paradise of his art... Ceri must have had an active and not merely passive presentiment of dying, so powerful is the ache for life that emanates from each line. There is no tiredness in his hand or faltering of his touch, but a firmness all the more shattering for being so light and understated, as when Sanesi on a visit to his studio in Chelsea saw him during a break from work: “Passing /

through his hair a hand that has moved leaves / and roots of sex . ..” ’ Journey Toward the North remains one of Richards’ most powerful, and certainly most affecting works. From the lyricism of its drawn lines to his measured use of colour, it reveals an artist confronting the most painful passage of his career, well knowing the closeness of the end and the legacy which would be left behind. Roberto Sanesi, Richards’ partner in this extraordinary final chapter, finds resolution in these parting images of love and strife, creation and destruction: ‘...in all these last works where the features of human existence are no longer the only thing singled out for examination in the context of natural metamorphosis, life and death have become reconciled in one perennial flux.

Among these ever-renewing blues and greens, of the hills of Wales and the sea, Richards’ painting had never been more luminously radiant or calm.’

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Jean-Siméon Chardin, The Young Schoolmistress, 1735-6

lucian freud

After Chardin

The words most often used to describe the paintings of Chardin – gentle, tender, graceful – are not commonly applied to the works of Lucian Freud. They were, on the face of it, artists of polar opposites: where Freud delighted in the morbid passage of time, Chardin painted children engaged in the leisures of youth. His subjects were delicately described, with skin of buttermilk to Freud’s lard, the yellow-grey swathes of flesh that belonged more properly in an abattoir.

Where they find common ground is as painters ‘of the Great Indoors’, to steal a phrase from Julian Barnes; as composers of interior spaces. ‘The Young Schoolmistress’, painted around 1736, is among Chardin’s most elegant constructions of space and light. When Freud was asked in 1987 by the National Gallery to make an ‘Artist’s Eye’ selection of works from its collection, it featured prominently on his shortlist. Freud thought the titular ‘schoolmistress’, an ingénue sister tutoring her sibling in a scene of roleplay, to have the most beautifully painted ear in the history of art. Over a span of two decades, he found himself drawn repeatedly to this image of innocence.

When the National Gallery approached Freud again in the late ‘90s, asking him to produce a painting in response to the collection which would be exhibited in an upcoming millennium celebration, it was ‘The Young Schoolmistress’ to which he turned once more. Freud made two paintings – one larger, one smaller – before committing himself, as he often did with favourite subjects, to complementary etchings.

Etching bookended Freud’s career. In the late 1940s he made his first copper plates in a Paris hotel, baptising them in acid in the bathroom sink (‘One dip. Really quick and

dangerous.’) Graham Sutherland – an early, and unsuccessful, mentor – took notice of Freud’s efforts and offered him his own etching tools, with the suggestion that he hone his craft.

But Freud had little interest in technical paraphernalia: etching was, for him, a means of liberation, much like drawing, and Sutherland’s advice was sourly rejected. It was not until 1982, some 34 years later, that he returned to the medium.

Like many of Freud’s etchings after paintings, ‘After Chardin’ was reproduced directly onto the plate in front of the canvas, reversing the original image. Certain details were omitted – the missing stylus pin, for example – while significant changes include the vigorously textured background, full of quivering movement where before there was soft light. He tended to crop his etchings, often uncomfortably close, which here has the confronting effect of placing us directly in Chardin’s original. ‘In doing so’, writes the curator William Feaver, ‘he moved the heads closer together and accentuated their features, his touch being more robust than Chardin’s. ..

The child became less amenable and the girl, his sister presumably, more bossy.’ Freud, with typical waspishness, put it rather more succinctly: ‘Such intellect as there was in her, I left it out.’

Printed by master printer Marc Balakjian, the copy illustrated here - owned by (and dedicated to) Freud’s framer of 20 years, Louise Liddell - was just one of twelve proofs produced for the edition. It stands among those late, great etchings which ushered in the final decade of Freud’s career, in which flesh and cloth somehow take on, through etched line, the hoghair heft of his best work with the brush.

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New Exhibition in September

Ken maTSUZAKI

Bending the Rules of Tradition At the very end of the main street in Mashiko there is a three-way junction.

To the right is the road to Kasama, a neighbouring town also known for its pottery; to the left, the Town Hall and the bus stop for the (very early) bus to Tokyo. Straight ahead is a quiet country lane that climbs gently round a wooded hill with views over the town of Mashiko. On the right one can see large and elegant thatched houses nestling amongst the trees. An archway underneath one such building leads to the compound of the renowned Japanese potter Shoji Hamada, now the workplace of his son, Shinsaku, and grandson, Tomoo. A little further along the road is the pottery that, until his passing in 2007, was the workplace of Tatsuzo Shimaoka, Hamada’s favoured pupil. Then, as if to complete the ‘family tree’, one comes to the home of Shimaoka’s own favoured apprentice: Ken Matsuzaki.

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Apprenticeship is an important feature of ceramics in Japan. Students are required to regard the master with enormous respect and, at first, the life of the apprentice can be laborious, repetitive and subservient.

During their residency, however, the student can absorb a great deal of whatever it is that makes the master a great potter. Often, it is a case of watching and digesting rather than being taught, and apprentices are expected to see their time with the master as both a privilege and an opportunity to hone a deeply ingrained discipline that will last a whole career. It is a relationship that could barely exist here in the West. The dynamics of the liaison are steeped in tradition in a country where traditions are seriously maintained and self-discipline is seen as a virtue above almost all others.

As Matsuzaki writes (I have paraphrased a little):

‘As Shimaoka’s apprentice I had the responsibility of doing small tasks around his work space: cleaning the studio, acting as his driver, and even giving him massages three times a week…Because of my skill as a masseur, I always accompanied Shimaokasensei when he travelled away from his workplace for exhibitions in major Japanese cities or when he gave workshops overseas.

More than ceramic technique, from Shimaoka-sensei I learned philosophy, the necessary mental attitude when making art, and how to think about ceramics. The ability to do massage provided me with invaluable time to discuss these things with him since Shimaoka-sensei never allowed apprentices to ask questions while he was working.’

It is well-known amongst potters that those who apprentice often struggle to find their own voice. Sometimes they never quite succeed in breaking away and their work is

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tethered stylistically to the master forever.

I can think of another apprentice to Shimaoka who, even after many years away from the hot flame, still limps along making weak pastiche and earning a living by association.

Matsuzaki wrote about just this dilemma – and again I have paraphrased just a little: ‘During the last two years of my apprenticeship I worked on creating ceramics for food and researched decorative motifs. By the time I finished my apprenticeship, I was able to make my own shapes with their own unique decoration.

About thirteen years after I became independent, a specialist from a foreign country saw my cobalt blue glaze and egret motif and commented that, to him, it looked like a copy of Shimaoka’s work.’

How that comment must have stung! I know very well that such criticism can wound deeply; but what marks out the courageous man from another is the reaction to a comment like that. For Matsuzaki, it triggered a long and self-searching period of thought about exactly what was his role in this ceramic world: ‘…Even if the motif on my jars was original, the similarities of shape and glaze proved that the degree of originality was minimal.

For several years afterwards I spent all my time thinking about how to create a new way of working for myself and, in my fifteenth year of working independently, I decided to completely abandon everything in ceramics I had done thus far…’

In 2004 I wrote that, ‘Matsuzaki’s lineage is as straightforward as the road that takes you to his home – from Hamada Shoji via Shimaoka Tatsuzo. Yet his pots display little that is obvious in the way of direct influence from either of his illustrious forebears.’ For

over twenty years now Matsuzaki has trodden his own path, forged his own style, and has done what Bernard Leach said we must do in quoting William Blake, ‘to drive our wagons over the bones of the dead’ – to find one’s own way, one’s own voice. We potters have a responsibility to do just that.

There is, in fact, little else as potters that we have left to do. People do not need our pots any more: there are many other purely functional alternatives. Pots are bought because people see and appreciate an artistic expression. They understand the contemplative role that a pot can play in their lives and view it in the same way that one might a painting or a sculpture.

On this subject Matsuzaki maintains a refreshingly modern and, some Japanese commentators might even say, slightly revolutionary stance. Ken is concerned first and foremost with beauty. He sees his role as a potter to make works that satisfy the eye first and the hand second. If a tea bowl functions as a tea bowl – if it meets all the exacting aesthetic and tactile requirements of the tea master – that’s important of course; but the bowl is also a stand-alone object that, aside of its function, should work as a visual composition.

In conversations with Ken the word ‘natural’ crops up rather a lot. In his work he is at pains to create objects that have an unpretentious, genuine quality. Yes, many of the underlying themes are driven by traditional forms: tea ceremony wares – Chawan, Mizusashi, Koro, Kogo – pots for Ikebana, pots for the presentation of food.

But while he has taken function as his framework, he has, with utmost respect, bent the rules of tradition, loosened the bonds of convention, defied what might perhaps have been expected of him and

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created an oeuvre that is immediately recognisable as his own. That alone is a considerable achievement: to come through a five-year apprenticeship and then to take the courageous decision fifteen years into his career to abandon what was familiar and safe and surmount a whole new approach with such power, skill and subtlety is the mark of a great artist.

It is easy to find geological analogies to the natural world in Ken’s pieces: water reflecting on the surface of a rock, lichen, mosses, snow-capped peaks and volcanic fusion. What is also to be appreciated is that, as part of the daring and tumultuous change that took place all those years ago, he began to work far less at the potter’s wheel. Instead he chose to hand build many of his pieces – a much slower process, but one that gives the maker more time to think and to consider.

Much of what happens in nature happens slowly; so it is with Matsuzaki’s pots. First of all, the making is often a lengthy process.

He has developed a coiling technique which allows him to coil build spiralling, somewhat eccentric closed form vases and even his square bottles. The large jars are also coiled with great similarity to the methods of the Ongii potters of Korea – only at the very end does he throw the neck and lip. Whilst in essence this method is slower than throwing on the wheel, Matsuzaki has become highly adept at this skill and works at speed to produce enough work to fire an enormous four-chamber wood-fired climbing kiln twice a year.

Here again the rhythm of his work cycle is evident. The firing takes place over seven days. Nothing is rushed, nothing forced.

Where some might cheat by throwing into

the hot kiln handfuls of fine wood ash, Matsuzaki prefers to build the surface of his pots with time and patience. I have fired with Ken in Mashiko, a privilege bestowed upon few, and can testify to the painstaking control that he brings to the firing.

Ken is, in effect, painting with fire. He uses the alkaline vapours released by the heat of the fire together with the wood ash and carefully selected clays and slips to create surfaces with immense depth and colour.

The firing of a four-chamber climbing kiln is a complicated modus operandi. Because of the extended length of the firing, the peak temperatures need not be as high as a shorter firing and for Ken it is important not to overfire. The atmosphere within the kiln is held in reduction for more than five days and the temperature kept static throughout the same period. At the end of the firing, Ken will introduce forty sacks of charcoal to bring about an extra strong reduction that turns the Shino glazes to a variegated, golden metallic surface and ensures that the rivulets of ash-induced glass are emerald green.

Matsuzaki is an experienced wood firer and to watch him make minor adjustments to the air intake to the kiln, the damper in the chimney, or making judgements about reduction or temperature balance is to watch a man totally self-possessed.

Outwardly he is relaxed and manages the team of shift-working journeymen firers with a calm but authoritative air. He immediately knows if something is amiss and will intervene, but for the most part is content to watch and to gently steer until, on the sixth day, he is required to introduce the mounds of charcoal.

The fiery, constantly surging maelstrom

which is the firebox of this large kiln creates zones of differing temperatures and atmosphere. Each chamber has its own character and produces pots of a very different nature. The last chamber, for instance, contains pots with an ash glaze all of which are later refired in oxidation to produce a form of yellow Seto glaze. The long firing uses two-and-a-half thousand bundles of wood, each one costing almost two pounds each. However, the length – and therefore the expense – of the firing is crucial to its success. Without this extreme and arduous timescale, the feldspars would lack the softness, the alabaster-like surface he requires. There would not be sufficient time for the movement of molten glass, or for the layers of colour and patina to develop on the surfaces of the various clay bodies.

The firing is as near to geological action as one can get – thousands of years of heat and pressure encapsulated in seven days.

On 11th March 2011 Japan was devastated by its own geological catastrophe – an earthquake and resulting tsunami. Mashiko was badly affected and most of the climbing kilns, in a town whose lifeblood is pottery, were reduced to rubble.

Workshops too were hit, and many precious artefacts, particularly at the Hamada Reference Museum, were smashed or badly damaged. Matsuzaki’s workshop was no exception: both wood-firing kilns were destroyed and had to be rebuilt. In the seven years hence, Mashiko has risen from this disaster, lives have resumed, and production has continued undiminished.

Now we can see once more in the UK ceramics that are, in every way, world class from a man who is, in every sense of the word, a master of this craft of ours.

Phil Rogers

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JANKEL ADLER The British Years

Back in 2014, Goldmark put on one of the largest exhibitions of paintings and drawings by Jankel Adler for over 50 years. As a major new show in Wuppertal, Germany, reappraises Adler’s legacy as a key member of the 20th century avant-garde alongside Picasso, Chagall, Klee and Dix, we look back on esteemed art historian Richard Cork’s examination of the profoundly moving work Adler produced during his final years in Britain.

By the time he reached Scotland in 1941, Jankel Adler had been exposed to the Second World War battlefields at their most gruelling. A year earlier, at the age of 45, his long abhorrence of Nazi aggression made him join the Polish Army of the West and train as a gunner. But Adler soon became embroiled in the disaster of the Dunkirk campaign, and he left France with a contingent of Polish soldiers. They came to Glasgow, where a troublesome heart condition saw him demobbed on health grounds. And so he settled for a brief period in this lively and relatively peaceful city, which had become a meeting-place for European immigrants escaping Fascist oppression.

Here, Adler renewed his friendship with Josef Herman, a fellow Polish artist who had moved to Glasgow in 1940. ‘It was with Jankel that I could share my more intimate fears’, Herman recalled later with gratitude. ‘These were years of fears. Both of us were Yiddish-speaking, we were both from Poland, hence we could look into each other’s faces with understanding. In the company of others we were a conspiracy of two.’ Herman’s presence in Glasgow undoubtedly helped Adler recover his strength and resume activity as an artist.

The paintings and drawings illustrated here testify to the eloquence of the work he produced in Britain before his early

death, near London, in April 1949. Buoyed by exhibitions of his work, first at the Annans’ Gallery in Glasgow with a catalogue foreword by the eminent Scottish painter J.D. Fergusson in 1941, Adler arrived at a powerful and eloquent final phase in his career. The undertow of tragedy running through these images must have intensified in 1942 when Herman was told, by the Red Cross, that his entire family had been exterminated by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Herman suffered a total breakdown and, according to his future wife Nini, ‘Jankel Adler stepped in and nursed Josef through those weeks with maternal tenderness. Was it perhaps to heal them both.’

Adler had himself suffered grievously from Nazi discrimination. After growing up in the textile town of Łódź, as the eighth of twelve children, he moved to Germany and studied art there during the First World War. The young Adler was regarded as ‘a suspicious alien, to say the least’, and ordered to report to the police once a week as a civil prisoner.

But he was highly regarded by his teachers, and after the war returned to Germany where he met many avant-garde artists, including Otto Dix who painted Adler’s portrait in 1926. His own art flourished, especially in Düsseldorf where he won awards and received a commission for a wall painting in the

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city’s Planetarium. The possibilities offered by abstraction fascinated him more and more, especially after Paul Klee became a Professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts in 1931. Adler was given the studio next door to Klee, and the two men became friends. After Klee’s death Adler wrote a perceptive essay in 1942 called ‘Memories of Paul Klee’, where he declared that, ‘Klee, when beginning a picture, had the excitement of a Columbus moving to the discovery of a new continent. He had a frightened presentiment, just a vague sense of the right course. But when the picture was fixed and still he saw that he had come the true way, he was happy.

Klee, too, set out to discover a new land.’

The same words could be applied to Adler’s work as well.

But the rise of Fascism was terrifying, particularly after 1933 when he bravely signed an ‘Urgent Appeal’ by artists and intellectuals warning that ‘we will face the imminent danger of the destruction of all personal and political freedom in Germany.’ Hitler’s success prompted Adler, later the same year, to leave Germany for the last time. After travelling restlessly through Europe, he realised in 1937 that he had been branded a ‘degenerate artist’ by the Nazis, who removed his work from German museums and included him in the travelling Degenerate Art exhibition, alongside Beckmann, Dix, Grosz, Kandinsky, Klee, Kokoschka, and many others.

Adler became depressed, exclaiming: ‘I am so fed up with everything! What kind of worth has a human being?’ Though he rallied for a while in the heat and light of Cagnes-sur-Mer, where he lived and worked from 1938 until 1940, the persecution worsened. Private collectors, fearful of the Gestapo, even began destroying the paintings and drawings

by Adler in their possession.

Mercifully, most of the those he went on to produce during the 1940s have survived. These late works reveal just how much powerful emotion informs the art Adler made throughout his fruitful British period. One of the largest from this time, Interior, was executed in 1944. He had left Scotland a year earlier, after showing in Glasgow’s experimental New Art Club and then spending a few months in the artists’ colony at Kirkcudbright. London beckoned, despite the horrors of the Blitz. And in 1943 he found a Kensington studio at 77 Bedford Gardens, where two promising young Scottish artists were already working: the Roberts Colquhoun and MacBryde.

Strange figures can be discerned in the darkness of Interior.

But Adler leaves them lurking mysteriously in the shadows, behind a table thrusting out towards us over a warm red floor.

The figures are so abstract and angular that they have an

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almost robotic air, a reflection of Adler’s memories of the soldiers he had witnessed at war, armed and rigidly encased in their defensive uniforms. His experience of the beleaguered battlefields in France never left him: two of his finest 1940s paintings, now owned by Tate, are called The Mutilated and No Man’s Land.

Even so, most of the work he produced in Britain does not specifically confront us with identifiable images of men at war.

Instead, Adler concentrates time and again on an unknown room. Fascinated by still life, he fills the lower section of one large painting with clusters of fruit, vessels and a cloth laid out on a table-top. The whole assembly looks tempting, and proves that he was not averse to celebrating the pleasures of everyday life. All the same, the view through a window above seems to tell us that the sun is about to set. Everything here may well be shrouded in darkness very soon.

Another still-life painting appears more festive at first.

Dominated by a single fish lying on a plate, it is elsewhere alive with abstracted segments of form and colour which suggest the possible presence of figures. We cannot be sure, and Adler must want us to accept his invitation to ‘discover a new land’, as he had written of Klee. In a smaller painting, the various objects assembled on a surface seem secure enough, but the bizarre creature suspended above them appears to be opening its ravenous mouth and preparing to gobble them all up.

Adler was clearly haunted by the omnipresence of danger and extinction. Nevertheless, he refused to give in to despair.

Bent on defying the enemy and ensuring his own survival, he devoted one of his paintings to defining an all-important moment of release. A cage sits on the table, harshly summarised by a series of bleak lines. Yet the bird who once lay trapped inside has been liberated by a standing figure on the left, who allows the pale, emaciated creature to fly towards a window where sky is visible beyond.

The longer we scrutinise Adler’s work of the 1940s, the more we find ourselves caught up in a dramatic struggle between extremes of the human condition. One picture is devoted to a reclining nude woman, whose well-nourished limbs stretch across a shallow space while warm colour flares behind her.

Leaning on her left elbow, this handsomely proportioned female is reminiscent of Picasso at his most neo-classical.

Adler here asserts the reassuring solidity of flesh, and gives it an almost sculptural presence. At another extreme, he presents us in a different picture with an upright, half-length female nude as insubstantial as a ghost. With breasts bared,

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hair blowing in the wind, she looks vulnerable and exposed.

Her facial features are divided, like a Cubist painting, into fullface and profile. But this adds to the sense of chronic uncertainty, and the woman’s entire figure seems on the point of dissolving into the ominous, nocturnal darkness surrounding her.

By no means all Adler’s human figures are naked. Two drawings, one restricted to contours and the other more fully modelled, focus on a clothed woman seated in an armchair.

She looks melancholy, and so does the haggard elderly man in a line drawing which might be a homage to Otto Dix. With legs crossed, this dishevelled man leans on a table and gazes downwards. Wrapped in a voluminous coat, he appears to be enduring the cold. But his facial expression is disconsolate, and an air of profound weariness pervades the scene.

During his productive time in London, Adler was nourished by stimulating contact with artists and writers like Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas and Oskar Kokoschka – as well as Kurt Schwitters, who had sought refuge in Britain from Nazi oppressors and lived in the capital city after brief internment as an enemy alien in 1940. Adler also joined the ‘Ohel’ Club for Jewish intellectuals, whose other artist-members included Martin Bloch, David Bomberg and Ludwig Meidner.

Exhibitions of Adler’s work were held in galleries as prominent as the Redfern, Reid & Lefevre, and Gimpel Fils in London, Waddington in Dublin, Galerie de France in Paris, and Knoedler in New York. Even so, nothing could protect him from the wholly devastating impact of hearing, in 1945, that all eleven of his brothers and sisters had been killed by the Fascists.

No wonder that most of the figures in his drawings from this period seem so fundamentally alone. One woman does at least have a cat as a companion, and she clutches the animal while encouraging it to nuzzle her face, but most of these late pictures feature distraught, spectral people in isolation. Some of them seem more like children than adults, and they stare out at us as if bewildered by the pitiless world they find themselves inhabiting. One sketch shows a woman standing erect in profile, clearly displaying the advanced stage of her pregnancy. She looks determined to remain firm and resolute, yet Adler stresses her intense vulnerability. He was, above all, committed to telling the visual truth about a human race wracked by incessant warfare, deportation and the horrors of the concentration camps. His achievements during these traumatic final years, before his sudden death at the age of 53, deserve full recognition.

Richard Cork

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NEW PUBLICATION

Coming Soon From Goldmark SPECIAL EDITION - £450 Hardback with printed cloth Includes an original drawing, 2 etchings, a cd and dvd Two volumes in slipcase

Introductory offer price - £350 STANDARD EDITION - £35 Soft cover

Essay: David Whiting 160 pages, 110 colour illustrations.

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Old dwellings huddled together within the folds of Welsh and Staffordshire landscapes constitute a recurring motif in the work of Robert Dawson. With the exception of some passing cattle, Dawson appears to depict deserted villages, devoid of life. But don’t be fooled, for this is work that crackles with energy. It is there in the vigorously painted surfaces that possess their own physical intensity. And it is there in the vision of an artist, who through tone and colour, transforms these seemingly lifeless environments into places full of character, often sinister and mysterious.

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