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Tag Archives: Paul Nash

The measure of all bulk

15 Tuesday Mar 2022

Posted by Paul Kincaid in art, books

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Ben Nicholson, Cedric Morris, Christopher Neve, David Bomberg, David Jones, Edward Burra, Eric Ravilious, F.L. Griggs, Graham Sutherland, Ivon Hitchens, Joan Eardley, John Craxton, John Nash, John Piper, L.S. Lowry, Mary Potter, Paul Nash, Robin Tanner, Sheila Fell, Stanley Spencer, Walter Sickert, William Townsend, Winifred Nicholson

The enormous matter of landscape is the measure of all bulk, the floor on which we crawl.

I love this book. It is perhaps the best book about painting I have read, although in truth I haven’t read that many. I want this book beside me, or rather I want the author of this book beside, as I go around a gallery, explaining to me what I am seeing, what I am feeling.

Or maybe not, since Christopher Neve does quote, with approbation, Ben Nicholson saying that he does not like to talk in front of paintings, because it interrupts what the pictures are saying. But then, before this book, I’m not sure I really appreciated what the pictures were saying.

The book is Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th-Century British Painting by Christopher Neve. It originally came out in 1990, but this is the revised 2020 edition, with additional content on Sheila Fell.

Sheila who?

Let me introduce you to this book. I like looking at pictures, but there has never been one type or school of art that I have been particularly drawn to. But over the last few years I have found myself more and more attracted to British landscape painting of the 20th Century. This started with a special delight in the pictures of Paul Nash and then spread from there to his brother John, their contemporary Eric Ravilious, and a few of their contemporaries. What I found in this book was how little I know of their contemporaries.

A Landmark, L.S. Lowry
Jagged Rocks under Tryfan, John Piper

What you find in this book are short essays on some 20 British painters. Besides the Nash brothers and Ravilious, there are some painters whose work I am reasonably familiar with (Stanley Spencer, David Jones – though mostly as a writer; I have been meaning to read In Parenthesis since I came across the old Faber edition in my teens, though I still haven’t got around to it – and L.S. Lowry – though I know him for his brilliant cityscapes, there is a landscape from 1936, “A Landmark”, reproduced in this book, that I had never seen before and that I find astonishing), and others whose name I recognize without really knowing anything of their work (Walter Sickert, Graham Sutherland, Winifred Nicholson, Edward Burra). But the book is mostly taken up with painters whose names I have never heard and whose work I have never seen (F.L. Griggs, Robin Tanner, Cedric Morris, William Townsend, Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Ivon Hitchens, Mary Potter, David Bomberg), and my immediate and heartfelt response is: why have I never seen these paintings before. There is also one brief essay, “Melancholy and the Limestone Landscape”, that deals with a bunch of artists not otherwise covered, though the essay is not always about melancholy, or about limestone. Given how evocative the other essays are, this left me wanting more: what would it have been like if Neve had written at length about John Craxton or John Piper?

North Devon Landscape, David Bomberg
Aspatria under Snow, Sheila Fell

The essays are short, passionate, poetic, full of a deep love for the artists and their work. Many of them are based on conversations with the painters (Neve seems to have known most of them), but they are not interviews. The voice we hear is Neve’s throughout. He writes about how the paintings were made (Bomberg continuing to paint outside even when it was raining, Eardley perched on a precarious path above the seascape she painted so often, Sheila Fell unable to get away from the Cumberland village of Aspatria where she grew up, Ivon Hitchens crouching down so the scene was viewed through the uprights of grass stalks) and the techniques used. But mostly he talks about how the artists responded to the landscapes they painted, how the viewer responds to the pictures they see, how the choice of colours affected they way they saw things. It is brilliant stuff, you see the paintings as if they are fresh, still wet from the paint brush.

I admit, the first chapter, on Paul Nash who is perhaps the painter I know best in this collection, didn’t really seem to work for me. But the next chapter, on Ravilious, left me almost in tears at the end. And suddenly the language was speaking to me. Suddenly this was the best, perhaps the only way to write about painting.

Bathampton, Walter Sickert
Grey Day, Joan Eardley

What is the use, Alice said, of a book without pictures. Well there are pictures here, nicely reproduced on glossy paper. They are small, of course, because this is only a small paperback book, so the details aren’t always as vivid as they might have been. The extraordinary blotchy and somewhat unnatural colours in Sickert’s late painting of Bathampton, for instance, feel as though they should be massive so that you can drown in the colour. And the dark seas of Joan Eardley’s Catterline are possibly murkier than they might be if you were standing in front of them in a gallery. But my main complaint is that there are only 30-odd of them. Only. There should have been hundreds of them, huge, so that every painting Neve mentions, even in passing, you can see what he sees, feel what he feels.

This is a book to make you want to see paintings, because you’ve never seen them like this before.

Eric and Tirzah and Helen and Diana

27 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in art, Uncategorized

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Andy Friend, Barnett Freedman, Cecelia Dunbar Kilburn, Diana Low, Douglas Percy Bliss, Edward Bawden, Enid Marx, Eric Ravilious, Helen Binyon, John Nash, Paul Nash, Peggy Angus, Percy Horton, Phyllis Bliss, Thomas Hennell, Tirzah Garwood, William Rothenstein

ravilious & coI like the watercolours of Eric Ravilious, there is something both precise and haunting about them. So I was happy to come across Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship by Andy Friend while we were on holiday in Wales. It purports to be a group biography of a bunch of artists who came together at the Royal College of Art just after the First World War under the inspired leadership of Sir William Rothenstein and the teaching of Paul Nash. The core group consisted of Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, Enid Marx, Douglas Percy Bliss, Percy Horton, Peggy Angus and Helen Binyon, with others, notably Tirzah Garwood (who became Tirzah Ravilous), Thomas Hennell, Cecilia Dunbar Kilburn, Diana Low (with Helen Binyon, one of Ravilious’s mistresses), and of course John Nash, taking an increasingly prominent part in the narrative. But in fact it doesn’t really work as a group biography, because they weren’t really a group. They were a very talented generation of artists who came of age at roughly the same time in the fervid post-war world, and who all to some extent fell under the influence of the Nash brothers. They were also to benefit from Rothenstein’s profound belief that commercial art and design were at least as important as fine art, and also from his energetic promotion of their art, putting them forward for murals, posters, book designs and the like. In fact, come to think of it, Rothenstein was the glue that held the group together, and should in some ways have been the central figure in the story, so it is sad that he disappears for the bulk of the book. But then, others that we might expect to be important in a group biography also disappear for much of the time, notably Freedman, Bliss and Horton. Yet this is only to be expected, given that it is obvious that Friend is only really interested in Ravilious, and those who disappear from Ravilious’s immediate circle simply disappear from the narrative. Or mostly; Enid Marx hardly remained close to Ravilious, but Friend keeps switching the story back to her, as if he suspects there might be a more interesting life to pursue here, if only he knew how to do it.

eric ravilious by phyllis bliss

Portrait of Eric Ravilious by Phyllis Bliss

tirzah-garwood by phyllis bliss

Portrait of Tirzah Garwood by Phyllis Bliss

What we have, then, is a biography of Eric Ravilious, with an occasional sideways glance at whoever is in his immediate circle at any particular time. Which is a pity, since some of these were curiously interesting characters. Thomas Hennell, for instance, spent time in a mental hospital, then wrote an extraordinary book about the experience, was encouraged by friends (including Ravilious) to develop his talents as an artist, became a war artist in World War II, notable for his work in France and the Low Countries after D-Day, then went to the Far East “where he was murdered on 5 November 1945 while sketching during civil disturbances in Surabaya,” a throwaway remark that demands a much fuller story.

Before this book I knew about the work of Ravilious and the Nash brothers, and I had heard of Edward Bawden, but the other names meant nothing to me. It may be because they specialized in areas other than fine arts, of course. Enid Marx went into fabric design, and those of us of a certain age probably know her work without knowing it, because she designed the fabrics used in London Underground trains certainly into the 1960s and I think beyond. Barnett Freedman made his name in designing posters, again often for London Underground. Helen Binyon, with her twin sister Margaret, wrote a series of children’s books, and also specialized in puppetry. Douglas Percy Bliss, who, interestingly, worked in camouflage design during the war (another story I’d love to hear more of), went on to be head of the Glasgow School of Art, while Percy Horton was Ruskin Master of Drawing at Oxford University. Illustrious careers all, but not ones likely to have swum into my purview.

tirzah garwood barcombe mill interior

Barcombe Mill Interior by Tirzah Garwood

Of the others, though: how had I not come across Tirzah Garwood? There is a watercolour she did in 1927, “Barcombe Mill Interior”, that is, I think, the equal to any her husband produced, and far superior to the work he was doing at that time. And there were superb woodcuts, every bit the equal of those Ravilious was doing. I find it interesting that some of the most exciting art shown in this book is in the form of

island eric ravilious

Island by Eric Ravilious, which to my mind shows the influence of Paul Nash very clearly.

woodcuts, a form that most of the featured artists took up though they tend not to celebrated elsewhere as much as their paintings were (I don’t remember any woodcuts by Paul Nash in the book about him I read a little while ago, but there are some lovely examples included here.) Of course, Tirzah Garwood, like several other women in this book, had the disadvantage of being female and therefore not getting the attention from the art world that her work deserved. She largely stopped producing art when she married Ravilious, except for paper marbling that she took up at that time; she returned to art only after Ravilious was killed in 1942, with a series of late paintings with an almost fairytale feel, before dying of cancer in 1951.

john nash nocturne bristol docks

Nocturne, Bristol Docks by John Nash

And

Paddle-Steamers-by-Night-Eric Ravilious

Paddle Steamers at Night by Eric Ravilious

then there is Ravilious. There is a remarkably generous selection of his work shown throughout the book, alongside pieces by the rest of the group. What they show, without Friend ever really spelling it out in his text, is how much Ravilious owed to Paul Nash in both his woodcuts and his watercolours. Though later I suspect that John Nash became a somewhat bigger influence on the watercolours, (the two images from Bristol Docks were painted at the same time, the two men sitting side by side), especially when the two men started going on painting trips together. Both, for instance, have an interest in heavy machinery, ships at anchor, abandoned farm machinery and so on. But Friend doesn’t exactly dwell on things like influence or technique, none of the technicalities of the work, although the work that all of these artists chose to pursue was highly technical in nature. The

helen binyon ste cecile cafe

The Ste Cecile Cafe by Helen Binyon

incredibly light and airy copper engravings produced by Helen Binyon set against the darker and heavier copper engraving,

edward_bawden_redcliffe-road

Redcliffe Road by Edward Bawden

“Redcliffe Road”, by Edward Bawden, look like two different media, and a sentence on how their techniques differed would have been very welcome. And there were technical issues with a mural Ravilious painted that meant it had to be retouched not long after it was finished, but we don’t learn in detail what those issues were. Instead, Friend pays more attention to the various sexual infidelities of his cast. This seems to have been the archetypal, often lampooned, artistic milieu of easy virtue. Ravilious was married to Tirzah, but had long-lasting affairs first with Helen Binyon then with Diana Low, neither of which had any enduring effect on the marriage, and the two women remained close friends with Tirzah

Ravilious_Westbury-Horse

The Westbury Horse by Eric Ravilious

throughout. Meanwhile Diana’s husband welcomed Ravilious as a friend and seems to have been happy to invite Ravilious to stay knowing the affair was going on. A curious menage, therefore, but to me rather less interesting than the art. Or maybe that’s just the way Friend writes about it. One of the things I’ve noticed in so many of the art books I’ve been reading over the last few years is how poorly they are written. There’s a flatness of tone even when describing the most glorious of pictures. And the facts of the life, or lives in this case, are recounted in a sort of dull monotone. This is not a book you would read for the pleasure of reading, but oh the pictures.

Greece

28 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in art

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Dirk Bogarde, George Katsimbalis, Gerald Durrell, Henry Miller, John Craxton, Lawrence Durrell, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Niko Ghika, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Nash

Many years ago, not long after Maureen and I had got together, we went up to Edinburgh to visit her friend Moira. At one point, Moira got out a bunch of photographs she had taken while on holiday in Greece some ten years before (in other words, let me be clear, some ten years before I even knew Moira existed). In one photograph, taken on the Acropolis, the central figure, perfectly framed and in sharp focus, striding directly towards the camera, was me.

Somehow, that weird coincidence encapsulates Greece for me. It is a locus made up of coincidences and connections, it is where all things come together.

Greece

Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906–1994), Study for a poster. Tempera on cardboard, 1948. Benaki Museum – Ghika Gallery, Athens. © Benaki Museum 2018.

I first encountered Greece (if that is the right way to put it) through Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, which remains one of the funniest books I know, and also one of the loveliest. This led me inevitably to the work of his brother, Larry, particularly those exquisite travel books, Reflections on a Marine Venus and Bitter Lemons. From Lawrence Durrell I moved on to his friend, Henry Miller, and The Colossus of Marousi, the only one of Miller’s books I’ve been able to read with unalloyed pleasure.

That is one set of connections. Another set sprang also from Durrell, in a way. I developed a taste for travel literature, which I kept up for quite a few years until I OD’d on the stuff while reviewing it for places like The Good Book Guide and British Book News. Along the way I happened upon a book called A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. When, as a result, I grabbed everything I could by Fermor, it was somehow no surprise that this led me back to Greece. (Although it seems only tangential to my literary discovery of Greece, I also devoured anything on TV relating to the country, such as the 1970s series like The Lotus Eaters and Who Pays the Ferryman?, and of course old films such as the Dirk Bogarde wartime adventure, Ill Met By Moonlight which seemed to be on TV endlessly when I was young. And Bogarde, of course, was playing Paddy Leigh Fermor, though it took me a little while to make that connection.)

In truth, the more I read about Leigh Fermor (and I’ve read biographies and letters and the like) the less I think I would have liked him in person. He was an incurable snob who spent much of his life freeloading on the rich and aristocratic types he fawned over. And yet I find him endlessly fascinating: he wrote like a dream, of course, and he had a genuine and admirable gift for friendship. He seemed to know everyone who was anyone in the postwar world of art and letters, and everyone loved Paddy.

ghika craxton fermor

Niko Ghika, John Craxton, Joan Fermor, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Barbara Ghika

Two of his lifelong friendships were with the Greek painter, Niko Ghika, and the English painter, John Craxton. (To give you a glimpse of what a peculiar world this was, Craxton first went to Greece immediately after the Second World War when he was encouraged to do so by the wife of an ambassador, who then gave him a lift in a bomber. “Of course she did,” Maureen commented, when I pointed this story out to her.) Now this triumvirate is the focus of an exhibition at the British Museum. I will probably write about this exhibition at greater length when I’ve had a chance to absorb the substantial catalogue that goes with it. For now, these are a few initial thoughts.

Although Leigh Fermor was clearly the glue binding this group together, he was strangely absent from this exhibition, or at least he was out of the limelight. He was there in photographs, in quotations from some of his books and articles dotted about the place, but the focus, rightly, was on the magnificent paintings by Ghika and particularly Craxton. Though it was amusing to see a handful of Leigh Fermor’s letters on display, all with “IN HASTE” scrawled across the top; that seemed to be the only way he ever wrote anything.

ghikaGhika’s paintings could be, I think, somewhat disturbing. They were crowded with labyrinthine twists and turns in which the more you looked at them the more you seemed to be lost. But they were overgrown with a profusion of plants and leaves and flowers, a riot of colours, as if they were something out of a Jeff VanderMeer novel. And there, among Ghika’s friends, among the regular visitors to his home on Hydra, was George Katsimbalis, who was Henry Miller’s Colossus of Marousi, which brings us back round to tie in another set of connections.

craxtonBut the work we both fell in love with was by John Craxton. Bold lines, often very few colours, and an incredible vigorous sense of life, especially in the numerous paintings of groups of men around cafe tables or performing Greek dances. I’d seen his work before, since he provided the cover illustrations for all of Leigh Fermor’s books from Mani onwards, but I hadn’t realised this until we got to the exhibition. There is something pivotal in his work, we kept catching echoes of Paul Nash in one direction, Picasso in another, and was there something Ruralist or even possibly Preraphaelite in some individual pictures? Certainly I need to see more of his work.

 

2017 in Review

31 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

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Anthony Gottlieb, Arthur C Clarke, Becky Chambers, Benjamin Black, books of the year, Bruce Sterling, C.J. Sansom, China Mieville, Christopher Priest, Colin Greenland, Dave Hutchinson, Edmund Crispin, Emma Chambers, Emma Newman, Gerry Canavan, Gwyneth Jones, Helen MacInnes, Iain Banks, Iain R. MacLeod, Joanna Kavenna, John Banville, John Crowley, John Kessel, John Le Carre, Judith A. Barter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Laurent Binet, Laurie Penny, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, m john harrison, Margery Allingham, Mark Fisher, Matt Ruff, Michael Chabon, nina allan, Octavia Butler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Auster, Paul Nash, Rick Wilber, Rob Latham, Steve Erickson, Stuart Jeffries, Tade Thompson, Tricia Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee

It’s that time of year again, when I dust off this oft-forgotten blog and post a list of my reading through the year, along with other odd comments.

2017 has been, in some respects, a very good year. My first full-length book not composed of previously published material, appeared in May. Iain M. Banks appeared in the series Modern Masters of Science Fiction from Illinois University Press, and has received some generally positive reviews, much to my relief.

Also this year I signed a contract with Gylphi to write a book about Christopher Priest, which is likely to take most if not all of the next year. In addition, I’ve put in a proposal for another volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction; the initial response has been quite good so I’m hoping I’ll have more to report in the new year. So, in work terms, it looks like the next couple of years are pretty much taken care of. Continue reading →

Equivalence for the Landscape

06 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, history of ideas

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Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Giorgio de Chirico, Henry Moore, Keith Roberts, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Paul Nash, Tristram Hillier

He discovered the Hardy novels, and in time the painter Nash; the hills and trees and standing stones, flowers that broke from their moorings to sail the sky, fossils that reared in ghostly anger from the rocks. Suns rolling their millstones of golden grain; and it seemed he heard, far off and far too late, the shock of distant armies.
Keith Roberts, The Chalk Giants, Hutchinson, 1974, p21

Coming across that passage in the mid-1970s would have been the first time I came across the name Nash. Much later, I added a forename, Paul (later still I discovered there was another Nash, John, his brother and also a painter, though I am embarrassingly unfamiliar with his work). But even with a name, I wasn’t sure which Paul Nash I knew about. There were two that seemed to appear, work occasionally glimpsed in magazines or on the television: the weird, surreal artist, and the one who did all those pictures from the First World War. It would be some time before I realised they were the same; it would be even longer before I saw that they were the same. Continue reading →

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