Modern Printmakers

Hobart has a plan: A William Kermode primer

2012-02-23T19:23:00.004Z

No one seems to know exactly when William Kermode (1895 - 1959) left the town of Hobart in Tasmania but by 1914 he was serving in the British Army on the Western Front. He came out of the war with the Military Cross, awarded for gallantry. He apparently began to make small editions of linocut soon afterwards. Interestingly enough there were artists in Germany doing much the same thing from 1919.

The earliest date I have for any work by him is 1924 when he made this uncompromising poster (below) for London Underground. So far as I know, it was the only work he did for Frank Pick. I don't think the rural idyll the Tube wanted to promote what quite what Kermode did at the time. As you see, the main image is starkly modern and the work of a confident, professional artist.

But nearer to his heart at the time were the first two images you see here. These come from a series of linocuts he made about 1928. They formed a long narrative sequence that Kermode felt should have some kind of captions and so he went to JC Squire (who must already have employed him at the London Mercury) to see if he knew of a likely candidate.

The writer he came up with was Henry Williamson, already famous for his book Tarka the Otter, but also a veteran of the Western Front like Kermode. It proved to be an inspired combination. Williamson must have been asked to come because Squire first showed him the linocuts then took him down to the pub next door to meet the artist. (The image below shows, of course, St Paul's Cathedral in London, which is just up the road from the site of the fateful meeting.)

Williamson found the artist 'quickly perceptive' (which is an adverb too many) but was obviously more dubious about his work, which he thought of as more or less caricatures. Nevertheless a few meetings later, Williamson suggested writing a complete book around the sequence. The project began, and then stalled, badly, with the writer only a third of the way through. Someone had given Williamson a copy of 'All quiet on the Western Front' to read and, although he didn't think much of the book, it must obviously thrown him because he didn't finish The Patriot's Progress untill 1929. At that point he found Kermode 'patient and amiable'. This may have caused him some surprise because Williamson had asked the artist to scrub some of his work and produce more. The book was finally published in 1930, not as a joint venture, which it had been, but with illustrations by Kermode. (Arnold Bennett, who had at first 'resented' the pictures, as he called them, came to realise that 'the text illustrated the pictures'. Williamson did have the decency to acknowledge this in his preface).

But Kermode had been far from idle because in the meantime he had improbably enrolled at the Grosvenor School but almost certainly to study wood-engraving with Iain MacNab. At 33 Warwick Square (above) shows one of the rooms used by the students but transformed by a real understanding of MacNab's masterly light-and-shadow dramas. There is another study of the same room and the same chairs with a copy of The London Mercury in the foreground. Kermode may not have been a thorough-going modernist but he was modernist enough to make use of sub-plots and allusions (as he may have done with St Paul's).

Another memorable project were line-engravings for a translation of Mikhail Ilin's Moscow has a plan: a Soviet primer - a title I was quite unable to resist. This came out in 1931, with suitable modernist machines etc.

Not one to turn work down at this point, Kermode also gamely provided illustrations for The Specialist (1931) by Charles Sale. This writer had spent his life as a Vaudeville comedian but had turned his hand to a very British book, with its dubious lavatory humour. It centres round Lem Putt from Illinois who builds privies (outdoor wooden lavatories) and Kermode blithly adapted his style to the content without failing to come up with superb little vignettes, complete with modern geometries and complex angles.

You would be disappointed to hear that he didn't also create more editions and of course he did, amongst them The Fruit of the tree which proves him incapable of resisting satire even when it comes to The Fall. This is a large print - one good reason for using lino - (it is from a private collection and I very much hope the owner forgives me for using his photograph - yet another irresitable image).

I could go on, and may well do at some later point, but I hope you get the flavour of a much-neglected artist. There is quite alot of his illustrated work available for next-to-nothing on Amazon and Bookfinder - I recently bought three books for little more than the postage. You see some of them here; I hope I find some more.

Bernard Rice: works on fabric

2012-02-18T09:18:00.001Z

Another object for Yasser Mongy and one of my luckiest buys ever. I found this tablecloth designed by Bernard Rice just searching on ebay in an idle moment. It's on linen but I have no idea how it was printed but I assume it dates from the post-war period. You can see the influence of Chinese art, which Rice was very attracted to. And of course the Altamira and Lascaux-effect is there as well. It was the kind of thing they sold at Heal's in London. Perhaps not a great design but interesting all the same. And it is typical of Rice in its quirky sense of adventure.

Rice also made a large linocut called Rammuda in black and crimson on fine cotton. The British Museum acquired their proof (using the Shrimpton and Giles Bequest, which is a nice touch) in 1952 so he probably made it not long before that.

A reader remembers seeing this print, along with Bernard Rice, as a boy. He said it was on silk. But if he has a copy, I would be very interested to see an image! Neither the British Museum nor the V&A have images online but it is illustrated at the back of one of John Buckland Wright's books, which I no longer own.

Bernard Rice: rare images

2012-02-17T23:17:00.002Z

A few rare images by the British artist Bernard Rice for a reader in Cairo who is preparing a book on him. Rice moved to Cairo in 1929 where he worked at the School of Fine Art and helped to set up the Graphics Department where my reader now works himself.

All of these images come from this 1996 exhibition catalogue. The main aim of the exhibition was to raise money for Rice's care.

The last image I think is my favourite woodcut by the artist. He made seperate prints using at least two sections of the larger woodcut - you can see one of them here (the image for some reason is reversed). I own another, which you can see on my post 'The Bosnian woodcuts'. I shall be posting more as I sort them out.

William Giles' 'September Moon'

2012-02-16T20:20:00.003Z

Up for sale on British ebay this week is William Giles' print September Moon at the astonishing starting bid of £500 (that's US$790). [NB Gerrie Caspers is quite sure this is a reproduction from Malcolm Salaman's Masters of the Colour Print series. This is why the label is attached as a title. The one you see here is not the one that is for sale].

This was his very first colour woodcut, published in 1901. This was soon after Giles had gained his art master's certificate at University College, Reading, where he had also learned the colour woodcut technique from Frank Morley Fletcher, who was head of the Department of Art.

It is also one of the very first of the colour woodcuts produced by a member of the British school. I have already posted some of the very early Cornish prints by Sydney Lee and also Ethel Kirkpatrick and I include Kirkpatrick's The full moon for comparison.

I think we can safely assume that the artists knew one another. Kirkaptrick studied enamel work at the Central when Fletcher was teaching the colour woodcut class there and she must also haven been one of his students - stay posted. But Giles owes something in this first print of his to his teacher. The delicacy of colour and line are to be found in Fletcher's own early prints Meadowsweet and The flood gates. But Giles was almost thirty when the print came out and it is fascinating to see that he was already his own man and that many of his real interests are already there, namely his interest in the effects of light and the making of an impression (without being Impressionist).

You can see, I think, that Kirkpatrick was always more Japanese than Giles and what is of course important about this work as a first print is that he dispensed with the keyblock. It was experimenting by then and went on to abandon colour woodcut altogether for a while and use zinc plates instead. But at this point, Kirkpatrick and Giles had quite alot in common, including a striking similarity in colour scheme. Both tend use a more a restricted palette than Fletcher and in some ways they were both more strict in their approach to print-making than their teacher was.

I suppose I have to include Fletcher's well-known first print Meadowsweet of 1897. This was the first fully independent British colour woodcut and the effectiveness of Fletcher's teaching and personal example are proven in the considerable quality achieved early on by both of his students.

Katharine Jowett: forbidden city

2012-02-15T19:25:00.003Z

Your visual education has to start somewhere but with the British printmaker Katharine Jowett (1890 - 1965) we do not know where that was. Most readers are probably not familar with the west front of Exeter Cathedral but looking at her prints, they make me think its great carved screen and ornate towers. But then I know that her father was a minister in the town. Even so, almost all her prints are architectural and they have a similar articulate flamboyance.

I can't offhand think of any British artist who achieved such depth of colour in their linocuts. By comparision, some Grosvenor artists look almost insipid. And, of course, this is exactly what she is noted for. How she achieved this is another matter. Because she appears to have left Exeter or Devon in the 1920s when British linocut was was only getting started and went to China where she stayed untill the end of the second war. In that time she made a minimum of about twenty five prints,with variations, and as she was interned by the Japanese during the war, she probably worked for no more than about fifteen years. And for those fifteen years she had one subject only and that was old Pekin.

It was a ready-made subject because she lived there. But it obviously interested her a great deal. She moves from one view to another, almost to the point of monotony. Many of the subjects are similar but some prints are more expressive than others, the viewpoints less conventional, the vigourous use of colour as fauve as any English artist. But she isn't Bloomsbury; she is remarkably free of affectation for a thirties printmaker.

Ironically, this is what I like about her. She apprehends the physical world and renders it with tremendous purity. I have to assume this came about becase she had talent but wasn't trained and stood outside the trends at home. Somewhere she learned to make linocut - quite possibly from one of Claude Flight's books and through another printmaker. (The person she has most in common with is Isabel de B Lockyer who also had Devon connections as it happens and occasionally their architectural views are similar). I am not trying to present her as a naive artist in some way; I just think she was independant. In this she is clearly different from travellers like Elizabeth Keith and Charles Bartlett who both turned their watercolours into prints. Funnily enough, the work you see here by Jowett is more intense and painterly than theirs but basically is conceived in terms of linocut and nothing else. For this, if nothing else, she deserves credit.

One facet of her work that I don't think has been commented on are her cloudscapes. They hark back to the British watercolour tradition but have an emphasis that lets you know she was well-aware of what was happening in the visual arts in 1920s Britain. Equally, the bold shapes, merging colours and pattern-making are just as typical of the period but they never intrude too much on her subject. She isn't a show-off; she loves what she sees and this makes her detachment and control all the more impressive.

Charles W Bartlett: catch a wave

2012-02-09T12:12:00.002Z

From Mabels Royds to Emil Orlik, art and travel have been woven together in their lives of many of the artists I have posted on here. And this was never more true than for the British artist Charles Bartlett (1860 - 1940). He undertook his first long journey after the death of his first wife during childbirth. He and his friend Frank Brangwen found their way across Brittainy and Picardy, the Lowlands and Italy, often on foot. Bartlett had already spent three years at the Academie Julien (1886 - 1889) in Paris after an equally long stint at the Royal Academy in London and he now settled in Holland for a while, making genre portraits that sometimes looked like tempera and sometimes like enamel but always had the ghosts of the old masters and the academy to haunt them. Then he returned home and in 1898 married Catherine Main, the daughter of a Scots shipbuilder.

This was not the impecunious young artist. By the time he had married Kate, he was close to forty and already successful as a watercolourist but in 1913, with financial support from her father, the couple undertook a momentous trip planned to take five years to the East. Travelling across much of British India and then China, they eventually arrived in Japan in 1915. The timing could not have been better for him. He could not have known before he arrived that the canny Tokyo publisher, Shozaburo Wantanabe, had just decided to package his latest commercial enterprise as shin hanga, or new prints. First working with the contemporary Japanese artist Goyo Hashiguchi and then the Austrian watercolourist Fritz Capelari, he had begun to combine good old-fashioned ukiyo-e workshop practice with enough elements of Western art to make them palatable to the US and European markets. It is pretty certain that Bartlett had heard about his work with Capelari because one fine day, portfolio of watercolours in hand, he walked into the print shop in Kyobashi and showed them to Wantanabe.

The publiser's first move was to to give Bartlett a set of Japanese brushes and urge him to practice underpainting. The blocks would be cut and printed by specialist craftsman; it would be Bartlett's job to produce designs showing aspects of his travels in both India and Japan. He had certainly travelled quite some distance from contemporary developments in colour woodcut back home in London where the idea of original colour woodcuts was taking hold in much the same way as it was amongst Japanese artists. But the attractions of ukiyo-e were obvious: he would not have to learn the craft and he could get on with his career. Just like the surfers in Surf riders, Honolulu, he had learned to take opportunities as they came along. This wave was probably one of the biggest of his life. By the following year a set of no less than 22 prints had been published. The first India series of six were almost immediately exhibited in New York.

Khyber Pass belongs to this first set but I think he went on to do more accomplished work and other Indian subjects were published about 1919 and the two great shaded panoramas Silk merchants, India and Peshawar that you see here combine magic and indolence, turbans and camels, in a way that is as unreal as it is irresistable. He combines cliches with sensitivity in a quite breath-taking manner and manages to avoid both the topographical niceties and occasional awkwaradness of the earlier India prints. To my mind the Japanese set are of less interest. Having a Japanese print manner ready to hand, he made use of it. This may well have been Wantanabe's idea but at first glance they could be anyone.

They left Japan in 1917, heading for Honolulu, to open a one-man show of his work. My reading of the situation is that their host proved very persuasive and the Bartlett's put off their departure for the US and eventually England, more than once. They never left. In all a total of 39 woodblocks were produced by Wantanabe from Bartlett's designs up untill 1926. I'm not exactly sure about any later printed works but in 1933, he helped set up Honolulu Printmakers. If some of his watercolour portraits are anything to go by, he became a fairly conventional artist in Hawaii and ended up becoming a hermit even by his own account.

It's a story that isn't unique in British printmaking but it is as striking and original as the prints that were produced. Another, perhaps more forceful British artist was to come along soon and give the wily Wantanabe a better run for his money and also prove to be one of his most loyal artists, particularly after the disastrous earthquake of 1923 when all his blocks were destroyed. I am of course talking about the inimitable Elizabeth Keith.

Tales from ebay: Mabel Royd's 'Knife grinders'

2012-02-08T22:20:00.002Z

And if you fancy a nice Mabel Royds, here is one that is worth buying. It's on US ebay at a buy-it-now price of $595 which is about £375. Not exactly an auction starting price but pretty good for a shop price because this one looks like a little stunner. You have intense colours set off against her decadent pale green. It's too much on the drawings but subtle here. The pale pink background is particualrly well-judged. And, as I've said before, Royd's surfaces can be stunning and this one looks forward to the outburst of brilliance that was her flower prints. The small boy standing in for the viewer is such a nice touch. Charles Bartlett, move over.

Return of the native: EA Verpilleux

2012-02-07T12:29:00.001Z

Much as I love the via Maqueda in Palermo, a seedy internet joint at the end towards the station wasn't the best place for me to do justice to Gerrie Casper's series of posts about Emile Antoine Verpilleux and related topics on The Linosaurus recently gerrie-thefriendlyghost.blogspot.com/. So now, I try to make amends.

Not very suprisingly, Gerrie promoted Verpilleux as Belgian, backing this up with his views on the Antwerp school of printmaking that centred around the two wood-engravers Edward Vermorcken and Edward Pellens. Verpilleux was of course born in London (as many Belgians are) and from there he was sent for part of his education to France and eventually to the Flemish city of Antwerp to study at the School of Fine Art there. (We have no dates but I think it's likely Vermorcken was in charge at the time.) And to underline his cosmopolitan background, he then married Caroline Putnam, an artist from Haden, Connecticut. I say all this to assert my own view, namely, that like Palermo, Verpilleux was a hybrid and like Palermo that is exactly what makes him interesting. He may not have been great but he was different.

Basically, Vermorcken and Pellens belonged to a school of monochrome wood-engraving whereas Verpilleux was essentially a painter who used both engraving and woodcut techniques on large blocks to gain his well-known atmospheric effects. So far as I know there are no monchrome prints by Verpilleux extant and this probably means he never made any. He wasn't the small-scale kind of artist. Some of his blocks were engraved, others were cut. The tonal effect for his skies were achieved by using both. Unlike almost all his British contemporaries, he uses a heavy paper and printing ink that he must have learned to use in Antwerp and he could not afford to be purist. In fact, he needed all the flexibility he could muster and his wide variety of cuts, soaring perspectivist buildings and raw black crowds all helped make his prints distinctive. They had none of the deliciousness of Allen Seaby's surfaces, they were not intended to be pored over by connoiosseurs, they are not the kinds of print you want to look at very closely The very subjects remain the favourites of tourists to this day: St Paul's Cathedral (top) Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, the British Museum. We can now add the long forgotten St Pancras Station to the list (above).

But look at his crowds, with their furs and large hats and shopping. They are much the same as the people LH Jungnickel showed in the Schonbrunner Park in Vienna at the same time. And this is what is most remarkable about Verpilleux: he had cast his net quite widely and around 1912 seemed to spring fully formed on the London art world. There is nothing hesitant or experimental about these early prints. They change; they become less painterly, but they are already well-judged composites. It even makes you wonder whether he met Jungnickel while he was at work in Brussels on the murals for the palais Stoclet (1905 - 1911), and whether they learned one from the other. But his crowds are gentrified Londoners, busy and blase, paying no attention to their aloof surrounding monuments, preoccupied with culture, travel, getting home, the shops. Occasionally, an umbrella is used to indicate some point of interest but the people rarely engage with their surroundings but in general they are too insouciant and elegant to bother.

This may be partly because Verpilleux was in the habit of superimposing a heavy keyblock, with its contingent crowds, vans, brollies and parcels, directly on top of the main subject, and unlike Jungnickel in his Schonbrunner print (if you image search LH Jungnickel on Google, you will find his design for the print, from this blog) avoiding any depth and development of space. Paradoxically, this makes him look more modern. It's only after you take a closer look that you pick out the Edwardian details. Which is a shame. He is too well-known for his effects and not well-known enough for his observation. And observant he was. For these are real Londoners, as chic as anyone in Laboureur. And it's easy to deride this use of the keyblock as hammy and habitual but he does vary things as you can see in the British Museum print and he is less prone to dependency on the busy keyblock later on. But then in his 1920s prints like Winter Evening (below) he adopts another mannerism. And this time it is light and colour, and light and colour often of the most sensational kind.

Gertrude Brodie & the lamps of Settle

2012-02-03T13:11:00.002Z

I have always been intrigued by Gertrude Brodie's use of the small lamp symbol beside her signature because it suggests a conscious artistic identity for someone who is now very obscure indeed. Although there seems to be one book that she illustrated, she made her living as an art teacher, first at Settle Girls High School and then Giggleswick School, also in the town. (For people outside the UK, Settle is a market town in the North Craven district of Yorkshire in the north of England.)

I've owned this conte crayon and gouache drawing by her for many years but it's only recently come back into my possession and set me off thinking about her again. Part of the original appeal was that her work had a good graphic quality and I would be surprised to learn that she didn't know the colour woodcuts made by Jack B Yeats for the Cuala Press in Ireland. Her work has a similar reliance on dark outlines and a similar vigour and fluidity - the figures are very Yeats - and I place Brodie in the company of colour woodcut artists for this reason.

The building you can see on the right is The Folly, a large C17th century house that now houses a museum. I now learn from their website that Brodie produced a series of drawings of the town which confirms my earlier suspicions that here was an artist with a tendency. Two are called 'The lamps of Settle and I think we can assume her lamp symbol sits alongside that arts and crafts signature of hers. I think we can also take it as read that the pictures included one of the street lamps that you see to the left.

What I like about the picture is its tone and the subtlety of the colours.The narrow street running up into the centre is rather awkard in the way it disappears and the truncated building is odd but she obviously wanted to concentrate our attention on the two-way traffic of rural and urban in a town like Settle. Having just returned from the old town of Girokastra in Albania I know exactly what she means. She isn't only subtle in her colours, she is perceptive about place. The lamps would have had such a modernising effect in a town like Settle. I think she was conscious of the disparity between the wooded hill and the lamps; there is a sense of small-town drama here.

Jessie Garrow, Anna Findlay & Chica MacNab

2012-01-30T21:55:00.001Z

I have brought these three artists together because all took part in the 1920s printmaking scene in Glasgow that also included Ian Fleming and Ian Cheyne, both of whom have already had posts of their own. Of the three women, it was Chica MacNab (1889 - 1990) who perhaps played the key role. From a colonial background, she was sent home to Scotland for an education, first at Kilmalcolm School, then at Glasgow School of Art. Not that she learned the art of printmaking there because by 1921, before she attended the school of art, she was a founder member of the Glasgow-based Society of Artist Printers. It isn't perhaps surprising that once she had finished her course, she was offered a job and promptly set up a class teaching colour woodcut at the School of Art in 1925. (Her students included Ian Fleming and Alison MacKenzie). Yet for all her significance, I have only ever come across one of her prints, in some ways a rather disappointing colour woodcut called From the Barr Hill. I say disappointing because her style is more in line with the Scottish genre printmakers of the pre-war years. Elizabeth Christie Brown, Jeka Kemp and Thomas Austen Brown are often hard to distinguish one from the other. So much so that some of the unsigned woodcuts attributed to Austen Brown on this blog are almost certainly by his wife. One lives and learns. (And I will add here that Clive Hazell believes she is the better artist). But it is hard to judge MacNab herself. Her woodcut class ran for only two years and her prints are shockingly rare. All the same it seems to me at least that she provided a learning link between the earlier colour woodcut artists like the Browns and Elizabeth York Brunton and the younger ones who went on to reject the genre and historicist styles of their teachers. Even so, York Brunton and Ethel Kirkpatrick exhibited at Glasgow alongside artists like Findlay and Cheyne with their modernist aura. And at the end of the day, it goes to show how much they depended upon those small societies with their joint exhibitions to make a living. (Not that that was ever a problem for Ethel Kirkpatrick).

Even more frustrating was the career of Jessie Garrow (1899 - 1993). She was also printmaking before the onset of MacNab's class but the one print I have seen by her is the extraordinary colour woodcut called The wave. The three graces have been transformed into stylish young women alarmed by a wave splashing over the sides of a quay and perilously close to their fashionable stockings and shoes. It's both mocking and stylish and it's such a shame I can't dig up a suitable image for you. (I am hoping when lotusgreen reads this, she will locate it in The Studio for me). But what is highly original about this prints is the complete lack of colour for the figures, which are picked out predominantly in outline and stand pale and stylised against grey and mauve backgrounds. How an artist who could come up with such a strikingly original print could now be so little known is, frankly, beyond me. In the 1980s, when she sold what was left of the work from her husband Ian Cheyne's studio, she had not a single piece of her own work left to offer. Not a thing. Like so many women artists of the period, she also went on to work as an illustrator, but even there I have only ever tracked down one title she worked on.

So, very reluctantly, I have been forced to illustrate this post with three prints all by that coolly beautiful artist, Anna Findlay (1885 - 1968). At least, there is a new one here, a telling colour woodcut of Glasgow tenements where you can see her interest in subdued tones and architectural form at an early stage. Needless to say, her work is also shockingly rare and you have not seen this image online before. It really is a lovely link between the soft focus realism of the earlier Scottish woodcut artists and the linocuts that she then went on to make after studying at the Grosvenor School with Claude Flight. She left Glasgow in the late twenties and went down to St Ives in Cornwall where her brother, James, was an active member of the Arts Club. She may well have studied with Flight just before she began to exhibit at St Ives in 1928. She would have certainly known about the Grosvenor School being set up via Chica MacNab (her brother, Iain MacNab was the principal). She moved back to Glasgow in the late thirties, leaving behind this small poetic legacy of linocuts as elegant as other Grosvenor artists were outlandish. And if for no other reason than this, I have faith in Claude Flight's prophecy of the modern.

Walter Phillips' 'Rundle'

2011-12-20T21:27:00.001Z

Here at last is your chance to own a Walter Phillips colour woodcut without breaking the bank. It's up for sale on UK ebay for another eight days and stands at £51 though I doubt it will stay there longer.

I hasten to add this is not the image used on ebay but one I have edited from elsewhere. I am certain it will look alot better when you see it and if I hadn't been going away I might have considered it myself. Phillips is quite masterly though whether he actually learned how to make colour woodcuts on his own and without reference to Frank Morley Fletcher as he once claimed is another matter. He was brought up in Britain but first moved to South Africa for a couple of years before settling in Winnepeg where he led the colour woodcut movement.

But there is nothing very British about him and our loss was Canada's gain.

Christmas holidays 2011

2011-12-19T03:48:00.000Z

The patchwork quilt by Mabel Royds comes with best wishes from me to all readers for a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year. I shall be away from Wednesday untill 28th January so there will be no posts untill early February. A special thanks to all the people who have sent in information and images like this one. I looked forward to a renewed effort on the colour woodcut front during 2012.

Bruges by night: Frank Brangwyn & Yoshijiro Urushibara

2011-12-16T18:41:00.001Z

Many years ago I was on a visit to Leed Gallery of Art with a friend (who had trained at the Royal College of Art in the Hockney days) and he began to mock the technique used by Frank Brangwyn (1867 - 1956). 'He puts black lines round everything,' he said. When I pointed out that van Gogh had done the same, he only replied, 'That was different.' Well, Brangwyn was different and that's for sure.

He was born in the old Belgian city of Bruges where his father worked on church architecture. After an early childhood spent there, he went back to Britain and was sent to copy things at the old Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and received precious little in the way of formal education. Eventually, he was taken on at William Morris's workshops in Walthamstow so his background was to some extent a practical one, in the arts and crafts tradition.

He may have left Bruges but Bruges did not leave him and at some point during the first war, with Belgium overrun by the German army, he had the idea of translating designs of the city where he had spent his childhood into colour woodcut and the folio he produced with the Japanese woodblock maker Yoshijiro Urushibara (1888 - 1953) turned out to be one of the most personal responses to the terrible events of that war.

The mere choice of the medium was a very interesting one. It shows to what extent colour woodcut was regarded as belonging to the arts and crafts movement by an artist who had after all initially trained under the aegis of the great man himself. More than that the project exemplified the arts and crafts approach to co-operation and their attempt to break down barriers beween disciplines. The woodcuts acted as illustrations to six poems by the writer and scholar, Laurence Binyon. Now, untill 1915 Binyon had been head of the new sub department of oriental prints and drawings at the British Museum where Urushibra had been working as a conservator of prints and scrolls since 1912. Binyon was given leave to volunteer as an orderly in military hospitals so he was the only one of the three men with experience of the war. He returned to the museum in 1918 and this symptomatic folio itself was published the following year.

Symptomatic because I wonder whether Brangwyn already realised that he was going out of fashion, a process that would end in the derision of the sixties. It did happen; he became unfashionable in the way that Augustus John did. He didn't have a good war, as they say, and I think colour woodcut looked sufficiently stylish for him to make a come-back. He had caused outrage in both this country and Germany when he produced a propaganda poster showing a terrified German soldier about to be bayonetted. So much so Kaiser Wilhelm had vowed to have his head. These night pieces of Bruges are about as far as you can get from the eighty war posters he produced in all.

Different and yet not so unlike the posters that designers in the arts and crafts mould like F Gregory Brown were starting to make. Brangwyn approached almost everything he touched with bravura. What Urushibara finally offered him was subtlety.

Before he came to Europe, Urushibara had worked at the publisher Shimbi Shoin who specialised
in fine reproductions of Japanese woodblock prints so he was ideally suited not just to interpret Brangwyn's work but to get a very good likeness. What he added was the kind of trance effect we were later to see when he made prints like Moonlight, Bournemouth.

What is so utterly remarkable about the work of the Japanese artist was the way in which he was able to be true to both Brangwyn and to himself. I know this sounds like an allusion to what we as Westerners see as oriental self-effacement but I am not sure what other term we can use when faced with what to us is a strange displacement of the ego.

I've not really said anything about the individual prints as I would usually do. Perhaps this is because there is only one print and this is also the Urushibara effect. He brings everything together into an overall mood; the differences between these lamplit, evening images is less than what they have in common. I don't think I could really judge without seeing all of them together alongside the poems by Binyon and I still haven't read those nor have I come across all the images in a format suitable for the blog. So, this post must be as partial as Brangwyn was himself.

Sydney Lee: colour woodcuts

2011-12-14T17:54:00.004Z

Sydney Lee (1866 - 1949) is the kind of artist that often interests me because they don't seem to quite fit in with the general pattern of things. And I always find there's something rather maladroit about his work, which also seems to go with the individualist trend. He was brought up in Prestwich in Manchester and went to the school of art there (where I think Walter Crane was principal) and then made the move that was almost inevitable for people of his generation: he went to Paris. He trained at Colarossi's and once back in England, he became a habitue of art colonies in true European style: Walberswick, Staithes and, as you can see here, St Ives, in Cornwall.

I think we can safely assume that The Sloop Inn shows a building in St Ives. He spent alot of time in St Ives in the mid/late 1890s but this print dates from 1904 and is presumably based on a watercolour sketch. 1904, in fact, is a very early date for a British colour woodcut of this kind. Teaching of the Japanese method had only begun seven years before he made this print - and there are others, like the one at the bottom, that look like earlier work than this - so this places Lee at the beginning of the colour woodcut movement, before Seaby and Giles. He was certainly no slouch.

As images go, it is classic Lee: a night scene that gives him the opportuniy to make use of muted colours. It looks pretty straightfotrward but the perspective is handled with considerable subtley and nothing is aloowed to disrupt the intriguing mood. And I am quite sure, looking at this and other colour prints by Lee, that his skills and lyricism were recognised by Sylvan Boxsius who used the same combination of blues and pale orange light for his linocut Winter. (Boxsius also adapted Lee's print of Whitby - and improved on it, as you have to do).

Boatbuilding, St Ives is less successful as an image but it certainly lets us know he knew the work of Henri Riviere. There is the same deliberately naive draughtsmanship which comes across as sophisticated in the Frenchman but slightly duff here. All the same there is a lovely balance of tone and colours and no sign of his favourite colour - blue. And this also is a subject that another artist also tackled. In this case it was Ethel Kirkpatrick. (See The definitive Ethel Kirkpatrick). She would certainly have known Lee through their mutual visits to St Ives and also as habitues of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Kirkpatrick took part in the first student exhibition after the founding of the school in 1897 and I strongly suspect that both Kirkpatrick and Lee attended Frank Morley Fletcher's trailblazing classes there. Fletcher moved on to Edinburgh in 1907, fatefully handing the class over to Lee. It may well be that he continued to teach colour woodcut in the Japanese manner but by the time Noel Rooke took over from Lee a few years later, the class was set to become thecrucible for modern British wood-engraving and Lee himself is primarily known as wood-engraver today. Like Emil Orlik and LH Jungnickel he gave up making colour woodcuts. Certainly by the time the Society of Graver Printers in Colour was set up in 1910, Lee was not amongst the founding members, whilst Fletcher, Giles and Seaby all joined a few months later.

The final image also looks like the earliest. It's by far the most French of the three and not the kind of image many colour woodcutters would go on to make. It doesn't quite work as image for the medium in the same way that John Dixon Batten's choice of subject almost always seem inappropriate for printmaking. The use of blue here also very reminiscent of early Batten and I wonder whether the figure of the half-submerged boy had found its way into the woodcut from Seurat's Bathers, Asnieres in the National Gallery. Needless to say I am deeply grateful to Robert Meyrick who sent me this fascinating print. (All three belong to him and anyone who missed the two St Ives images at auction in Germany earlier this year will probably never get the chance again). Mabel Royds was the only colour woodcut artist that went on to tackle male figure subjects with any seriousness and this woodcut of Lee's is as rare as any of them get.

Robert Gibbings: early colour woodcuts

2011-12-06T18:31:00.006Z

Robert Gibbings (1889 - 1958) came from the Irish city of Cork and if Retreat from Serbia, 1916 (above) doesn't look very much like the Venice of the West, I am pretty sure his interest in bridges comes at least in part from the memorable limestone bridges that cross the river Lee there. After making very little headway as a medical student in his home city, he persuaded his father to subsidise lessons with a local painter before taking off to London and the Slade School in 1912. Two years later he volunteered for the Royal Munster Fusiliers. Commissioned at the rank of lieutenant, he was shot in the neck leading his men against Ottoman defences during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. He drew on the time he spent recuperating, first in Salonica and then Malta to produce a small group of eloquent and unusual little colour prints - as eloquent and unusual as the man himself.

In January, 1916, he had opened the pages of a British illustrated newspaper to find a series of photographs showing first the disastrous retreat of the Serbian army through Albania, followed by more photographs of Britsh transports at anchor at Salonica. These ships had arrived as a relief force but too late, the intention being also to hold Salonica if they could not capture Constantinople. Gibbings had seen the slaughter and later read of the withdrawal from the Gallipoli Peninsula. Now, there was a powerful photo of yet another wholesale withdrawal. He merely cropped the photo and cut the images from chestnut planks. The result was as simple as it is sedcutive. We look at this print today and think, 'What is happening here?' Now you know. [The photo comes from ebay.]

He sailed from Salonica in the hospital ship you see here in Shipboard, the Llandovery castle,1918. As it happens this is a wood engraving. Gibbings had also enrolled in the etching class at the Central School but at the suggestion of Noel Rooke, he tried wood-engraving instead. The same dramatic use of keyblock and shadow is there but used with greater sophistication. What we see on the decks of the Llandovery Castle is the tedium that can effect troops; what we see in The retreat from Serbia is the way imagination can override a lack experience and produce a haunting work of distillation. Each of the images here somehow slips free of the mundane.

There is also a sophisticated interest in structure and light and shadow in the print. Gibbings was well able to ring the changes between the finesse of engraving and the more direct expressiveness of woodcut. Evening at Gaza, 1918, manages to combine the two. (He spent a month in Alexandria I think before the Gallipoli landings). Here he uses the simple silhouette and keyblock with a gradation of one colour on a second block. This is as far away from the Japanese method as you can get and when these works were praised in 1919, there was an immediate response from William Seaby. All the same, it has the glamour we require of the best colour woodcuts. Even so, by the time he used the method for the lst time in Albert Bridge, Chelsea, 1919, he was already tiring of its obvious limitations. He had outgrown colour woodcut as he had outgrown Cork. Here is the Irishman, full of immediacy, restlessness and flair.

Jean Armitage: tangled up in blue

2011-11-18T18:02:00.002Z

There is still not alot known about the British printmaker Jean Armitage (1895 - 1988). I even hesitate to give these dates for her but they do look about right if you consider her training and her surprisingly long career. I think she must have been a Londoner as she lived in Camberley in the twenties and thirties. She trained at the Byam Shaw School, a private London art school for drawing and painting, which had been set up in 1910, but is best known today for colour woodcuts.

She may also be almost unique for having learned to make colour woodcuts from John Dickson Batten (1860 - 1932) a pioneer of the use of the Japanese method of printmaking back in the 1890s. From being a revivalist of the colour print, he went on to being a revivalist of the use of tempera, and this may have been how Armitage came to know him. Ironically, I think she may have been more influenced by Mary Batten (b 1873).

A gilder and woodcarver, I think it's safe to assume she learned the Japanese method of woodblock printing from her husband. Unlike him, she also adopted subject and style from the Japanese. Her Fritillaries owe a great deal to Hokusai's Large Flowers portfolio of the 1830s and I think the same can be said for many of Armitages flower prints. Unlike Batten, she interprets Hokusai with tremendous delicacy. That her style veers towards 1930s whimsy at times, is a part of the deal, I'm afraid. She had to sell prints.

She is certainly far less well-known for her landscapes but Loch Linnhe shows the same subtle use of blues and greys as the meconopsis at the top. This looks more Japanese to us partly because of the positioning of a single plant against a neutral background. But, as you can see by comparing the two prints, her sensibilty follows through. And this is what I like about her work. It doesn't matter really very much if the third image of long-tailed tits looks twee. A subtle use of colour and fine detailing are common to all three woodcuts. And the same craftsmanship is there.

And I would not be at all surprised to learn that it was Armitage's prints that Claude Flight complained about when he made his criticism that colour woodcut mimicked watercolour. It may have mimicked watercolour but I can tell Claude Flight this: these artists' prints were almost always better than their watercolours. Artists like Armitage had found a successful medium for themselves and fortunately her work is still something we can all afford, unlike Flight's contraptions.

I should add that I am grateful to Hilary Chapman for Loch Linnhe and William P Carl for Blue Poppies. Neither print is now for sale. I'm not in the least surprised.

Tales from ebay: Julia Mavrogordato

2011-11-11T18:25:00.002Z

Back in October, 2010, there was a post about the menu cards that had colour linocut designs by the British artist Julia Mavrogordato on the front. They were produced for the Orient Line that sailed between London and Sydney from the 1930s to the 1950s. Now two more designs have turned up on ebay. [ Please note that since this post went up, they have been sold - to a reader of this blog]. They have been put up by a dealer in Brisbane at the reasonable starting bid of $25 and although I am not a huge fan of Mavrogordato, I still think any discriminating collection of modern British linocuts should contain work by her. So, here is your chance to acquire one or two without breaking the bank.

I was fortunate enough to inherit mine but I would nevertheless prefer to have the group of robins at the top here. I like the blue that Mavrogordato used on this one. I think it's livelier than some of the others as a result. I also suspect now that the colours on the ones I own may be a touch faded. The ones you see here are more recent (from the fifties) and that may explain why they look brighter to me. It's going to be interesting to see how many of these images appear, anyway. I have no idea how many designs she made but you really can't go wrong with any of them. You will find them easily by doing a search on UK ebay.

The other Allen Seaby

2011-10-30T12:08:00.002Z

It may seem paradoxical (I might even go say far as to say perverse) to devote a post to monochrome, or more-or-less monochrome, prints by an artist was was one of the most unashamed colourists of them all. Allen Seaby (1867 - 1953) was a great apostle of the colour print. Like both William Giles and St Paul, he was considerably more brazen than the master. He took to colour with conviction. It is rarely subordinate to draughtsmanship as it became in the hands of John Platt. Bright or subtle, it often washes across the paper in large and unrestricted areas, accompanied by his signature brushwork. From the beginning he had given this treatment, by and large, to wild birds but some time around the first war, he turned his attention to a small number of domestic animals that he portrayed with both restraint and sympathy. And, really, this provide the reason behind the post.

Nor are there many of them. He gives us a pair of foxhounds in a yard, two pigs rooting, rabbits in a hutch and ponies with a foal. They are the kind of animals he saw around him while at work in his hut in the New Forest. Three of them are so similar in style, they form a group. He is considering other possibilities. Plainly, this line of work was not something he could continue with but even so they look forward to the many drawings he made as illustrations for his own books for children. (The rabbits, ponies and pigs were all made by 1922). So they do provide a link forward to later work.

Call me a sentimentalist but I like this prints and also find them interesting. They hint at what Seaby may have recognised as the limitations to his work so far, in all its rainbow glory.

The pair of hounds with a bowl stand in fair contrast to the same subject I posted recently by Walther Klemm. (See 'The studio at Liboc' October, 2011). So much so, I can't help but feel Seaby knew Klemm's work. But while Klemm typically goes for psychology, with his dogs half-cowering, half-creeping towards their bowl of food, Seaby places them on the ground, ignoring the contents of the earthernware dish. He also sees them totally from outside; there is no inwardness here. There is breeding, yes, an understated nobility, perhaps, but that is all. It is all as English as the shires.

And this is one point I want to make. Seaby the naturalist offers us habitat. On one occasion there are swans in a classical park but the actual environments he depicts are academic ones: Eton College; Magdalen College, Oxford; St Andrews in Scotland. (All this was important to Seaby who had become Professor of Fine Art at University College, Reading, in 1920 at the age of fifty three). Even Porlock suggests the poet Coleridge. But the contexts he gives us in these prints are decidedly downbeat - the farmyard, the common. Beyond that, the concern is more subtle. It is England.

It is also the world of confinement. The ring against the wall and the dish on the ground define the space for the pair of hounds. And because of them, we immediately understand the purpose of these dogs. Before dawn the next day, they will be responding to the huntsman's horn, just as much as the pigs will be in the pan, the rabbits in the stew. It is the ordinary human world they inhabit, not the natural one. The ponies are native breeds, their survival threatened by lack of use, and Seaby was to go to plead their cause for many years through his pony stories for children. But it is the native British element that is crucial for him.

In removing colour from the equation, he was able to look harder at the subject. Beyond what I have said so far, is the dappled play of light. He selects his animals with care. The markings of both the rabbits and the pigs allow for a subtle change in reflected light. (The glint in the eye of both rabbits is nicely done). In this way he builds up shape. These animals, especially the rabbits, are palpable; they breathe, they digest. The colourful codes of aestheticism are some way behind him.

It is one of the problems with trying to understand Seaby that he never dated his work. There are various ways his prints can be put into order but I would say he was responding to circumstances in this group of woodcuts. Where he uses colour, with the pair of hounds, the patterning of their markings and the way they link up to each other in the composition, is carefully done. There is none of the striving for effect of a Bresslern Roth when she approached the same subject (by way of Walther Klemm). One thing I will say about Seaby, he is never trite. It is almost as if he had suddenly become ashamed of his peacock ways. He has become literal instead, propagandist even - not rabidly - but even so, the Englishman is there.

Walther Klemm's book of birds: a prototype, perhaps?

2011-10-25T19:02:00.002+01:00

Readers may remember that back in November, 2010, there was a post on Walther Klemm's Vogelbuch, or Book of birds. This was in fact a portfolio of six colour woodcuts in an edition of only forty, published in Germany in 1912. At that point Klemm was still a member, along with his friend Carl Thiemann, of the artists' colony at Dachau near Munich.

The impression I get is that complete sets are rare and predictably some of them do come up as single prints without any reference (so far as I know) to the original project. But now I find that he seems to have begun the project as early as 1909 because I have recently come across two further colour woodcuts in exactly the same format but much closer to the Vienna Secession style he was using during his stay at Liboc near Prague. Ducks diving, above, is very similar to his print of underwater ducks in the Vogelbuch, likewise a study in monochrome but considerably more subdued. Personally I think the 1909 print is alot more attractive. I don't think he was every quite so devil-may-care decorative as this. His ability to flip styles is one of the things I admire most about Klemm even if he was soon to change to styles I find less congenial. The subtle integration of greys and blues is really so masterly, it may as well be an object lesson.

Not surprisingly the swan doesn't have a corollary in the second Vogelbuch. It's considerably less successful. I don't know why the project appears to have been abandonned. I can hardly believe it was because no one liked what he had done. I am very smitten with his virtuoso ducks. It is almost post-modern in its playful awareness of form and pattern and appearances. Here is the artist who not only studied under Kolo Moser but studied history of art as well. And here is the accomplished awareness that led him only four years later (at the age of only thirty) to his professorship at Weimar, the image an apt metaphor for Klemm's own performance: agile, delving, disappearing, deft.

And if you click on to gerrie-thefriendlyghost.blogspot.com/2011/10/emil-pottner-feathers.html  you will see that, just like Klemm and Thiemman, Gerrie and I are laying in the same barn.

The studio in Liboc: Walther Klemm & Carl Thiemann

2011-10-23T21:08:00.008+01:00

Of these two friends, the one to leave their home-town of Karlsbad first was Walther Klemm (1883 - 1957). Somewhere along the way, he met and made friends with the gregarious Prague artist Emil Orlik. One German sources says it was Orlik that encouraged Klemm to enrol at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna; another believes that Klemm studied there between 1901 and 1904. Only one of these statements can be true because Orlik didn't return from Japan untill 1902. Nonetheless, Klemm certainly studied at the school of applied arts and in Kolo Moser he had a teacher who was the quintessential Secessionist designer, well-connected, stylish and urbane. And my hunch is that it was Moser that may have made the fateful introduction to Emil Orlik.

Orlik had barely established himself in Vienna than he had set sail for Japan. He stayed for eighteen months, training in printmakers workshops there. This was something completely new. He was the first European ever to study there and Klemm was fortunate enough to learn the techniques of woodcut making directly from him when he came home. The window of opportunity was relatively small; Orlik was not to keep up his interest in woodcut anymore than Klemm was. Ironically it was Carl Thiemman (1881 - 1966) who was to be the greatest beneficiary. And all this says a good deal about the kind of person Klemm was. Simultaneous with his studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule, he had taken classes in art history at the university. As I've said before, Klemm's prints appeal as much to the mind as they do to the eye. This keen interest in both the techniques and ideas that inform art shows what kind of an artist he was. I think he was attracted to ideas; you only need to compare these first two prints (Thiemman at the top, Klemm below) which were made probably less than a year apart, to see that really he was nothing at all like Carl Thiemann. A common birthplace and common interest brought them both together. Klemm made his first woodcuts while still a student in 1903 ie about a year after Orlik's return, and by 1904 was exhibiting with the established artists of the Vienna Secession. This was early success but all the same he left for Prague.

The connection may have been Orlik again. Although based in Vienna, he had kept on a studio in the city and by this point Thiemann was sutdying at the Academy. He had left Karlsbad where he had had to support his widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters while he worked in business, to study painting and etching but all this was rather sidelined by the arrival of Klemm. Some sources have them down as school friends. Klemm was now 23, two years younger than Thiemann himself, but with indirect access via Orlik to the great studios and workshops of Japan. Imagine the excitement of these two young men as they took on their own studio in the village of Liboc just outside Prague. They were to spend only four years there but in that time together they went on to produce some of the most sensitive and articulate prints of the period. The second irony is this: they were both young enough to take the lessons of the Secession to heart; Orlik probably was not. Just take one look at Thiemann's glorious cockeral to see what I mean. Orlik never displayed such bravura.

Nor, for that matter, did the hapless Klemm. By 1906, when he made his woodcut of two turkeys, he had developped his own style, straightforward subjects from the countryside around Liboc that were themselves subject to that analytical eye of his. The square, bold images of the Secession comes out into the fresh air. The canny Thiemann merely lifts the idea from his friend - the pair of birds, the trees connecting the high horizon to the keyblock - and turns it from interesting to irresistible. His woodcut is as opulent as Klimt but wisely dispenses with the self-absorption (and substitutes a sense of humour).

Klemm's Haymaking, also from 1906, finds him in another mood. This interest in people's livelihoods is just as close to Orlik as the more obvious japonisme. It's easy to forget the strong appeal of European naturalism to these artists and the way that the kind of realism they came across in Japanese art only served to bring things one step forward. Here is Klemm almost in popular print mode and he certainly didn't give up these descriptions of country people when he left Liboc; it's just that he has become better known for his clever and appealing animals in much the same way that Thiemann got himself stuck with birch trees.

But then that is in the nature of printmaking where you have multiple images. The two artists co-operated on two joint ventures, at least. I don't know the date of their Old Prague portfolio, or volume. I have only ever been able to track down one image that I can be fairly sure comes from this work. Klemm's rough-and-ready study of light and shadow in Empty Street I think must come from the work. I don't think I can be quite so sure about Thiemann's back street below. At least one rather unreliable source has it down as Lubeck. In a way, it doesn't matter because they certainly stand comparison. Possibly Thiemann never quite got the same cramped sense of narrative again. The washing, the steps, the washing-basket suggests the workaday life he had left behind in Karlsbad. He substitutes Klemm's seller of clothes for the lifeless washing; the open window is also there, but no source of light. The second project was a calendar for the year 1907. They would certainly have known the famous square calendar with contributions from members of the Vienna Secession, including Moser, made for the year 1904. They produced six images each for their own. This was reproduced in facsimile by Thiemann's widow after his death - one to look out for but a quick search turned up nothing so far. [I am am indebted to Klaus (who lives near to Dachau) for the information about the calendar, which I knew nothing about].

But the play of light is everywhere in Birches (1907(. [I couldn't find the auction-house image so I had to content myself with the Art Value lettering and their impudent copyright]. And with this print we come to the Carl Thiemann that everybody knows: the sense of pattern, the vigour, the stylishness. The play-off of the leaf shapes, the markings of the birch tree and the undisguised cutting to suggest the movement of the grass is already quite masterly. Compare this to the over-excited work of some Grosvenor School artists and you will see how simple-minded they actually were. And I think he also recognised his own success (or someone else saw this for him) because a year later his more famous image Birken im Herbst was being mechanically reproduced in Vienna. (I am also pretty certain that this grouping of trees would be known to Norbertine Bresslern Roth).

Normally, I would have edited the printed letters out but the handwritten display of Original Holzschnitt Handdruck 6/30 with central title and his full name says a great deal about his salesmanship. This was all part of the contemporary trend of distinguishing colour woodcut from the mechanics of C19th lithography and giving their work a personal feel. Although he describes the second print as an original colour woodcut, it is only signed in the block. There was nothing new about offering prints of different qulaity but this move into mechanical reproduction funnily enough precedes their own move to the long-established artists colony at Dachau near Munich. Klemm was to stay for only five years before moving on to the post of professor at Weimar; typically, Thiemann was to make the best of it - build himself and his family a house, and stay forever.

I includes Klemm's print of puppies at a bowl and Thiemann's early version of his swans as a postscript to their time together at Liboc. They may or may not have been produced there in 1908 but in some ways, it doesn't matter too much. Klemm proves himself to be the realist. The composition is almost wilfully inelegant. Ironically, Thiemann plays the Orlik game just as his friend had. In some respects, he is is less good at it than Klemm was. But in failing to connect with Orlik he finds his own voice.

Klemm's exquisite monochrome disquisitions on line and shape - his herons and flamingos that echo Ohara Koson - become a decorative little masterpiece in the hands of Thiemann. The bold arch of the neck and the flare of feathers behind sum up his peculiar intensity. It goes beyond the decorative formalities of the Secession to something delicate, impersonal, grave, unique.

A M Shrimpton's 'Almond blossom in Appennines'

2011-10-21T17:26:00.001+01:00

As Gerrie Caspers brought up the subject of the techniques that both Ada Shrimpton and William Giles used for their printed work, I thought I ought to say something about the Giles method and what happened to it. Giles made no woodcuts between 1911 and 1926. Instead he used acid to etch zinc plates which were then printed progressively in the same way as a colour woodcut, to build up the final image.

I don't know offhand what medium he used for his own prints but when he came to issue the final edition of his Colour Print Magazine in 1926 (the year after Shrimpton died) he used the original five etched plates with watercolour to produce the image you see above, which is quite different from the effect achieved by his wife (see previous post). This is an original posthumous print, the paper being tipped onto the page of the magazine. [I am grateful to Paul Ritscher for the image.]

The artists made a significant bequest of prints, plates and notes on the method to the V&A in London, which now has the best collection of their work as a result. But the method effectively died with Ada Shrimpton as did the magazine. She had provided the funds and quite possibly some of the motivation to develop the method. After all, it was well-suited to someone who had come to printmaking as a painter.

I deliberately avoided saying anything about the methods they used in the main post only because I thought it would complicate matters when I wanted to concentrate on a joint achievement. In fact, I was wrong to do so because the methods they both developped were as much a part of their achievement as the prints they made. Giles went on making woodcuts after Ada Shrimpton's death but he eventually left the King's Road in Chelsea to live in Essex. That says it all.

Mr & Mrs: Ada Shrimpton & William Giles

2011-10-18T20:00:00.004+01:00

From what I can see this colour woodcut by the British artist Ada Shrimpton (1856 - 1925) suggests a good deal about the nature of her marriage to her artist-husband, William Giles (1872 - 1939). The complex image of the ageing tree overcome with spring blossom that shelters a pair of saints beside an Italian church door is both subtle and affecting. [The image is courtesy of Annex Galleries]. The wedding itself took place at the British Consulate at Venice on 7th September, 1907. The bride was already 51, the groom only 33. So, from the beginning it was hardly a conventional partnership.

It's the tone of their prints that says so much of how closely they affected one another. (You could never have said this about the etchings of Ernest Lumsden and the colour woodcuts of Mabel Royds who had also married beyond their twenties). Shrimpton was also a painter and this comes across strongly in the freedom of handling that she adopts in her prints; despite his often sparing use of the keyblock, he is always more graphic. But the colours they use speak to one another without a doubt. (You can tell the artists from one another by the monogram Giles always uses).

His peahen exists as a singleton in a preliminary study but it becomes far more interesting once shadowed by the exhuberantly coloured peacock. That Shrimpton did adopt something of his colour system and manner for her own prints seems pretty clear to me (though it is hard to find many examples of her earlier paintings). The pairings and intertwinings they both use are a constant source of interest. It's less easy to identify some of the subjects. For instance, I can't say for sure that the seaside couple are Shrimpton and Giles or whether the sea itself is the Adriactic. But Italy meant a good deal to both of them and images from a small area of Umbria are some of their most lyrical and telling.

Here is Shrimpton with her view of Norcia, clean and bright in a very modern way. They had begun to perfect between them the art of the colour print. One after the other, these shimmering landscapes are as much manifestos as anything produced by the avant garde. They were very much of the age they lived in with their agendas and proselytising and with her financial support Giles was able to start publishing his 'Colour Print Magazine'.

I assume that Almond blossom in Appenines is in Umbria, too. (Shrimpton also produced an image of Spoleto in the same area). It's strikingly similar to some of the work of Gustave Baumann but with none of his arch, deco-ish mannerisms. That splattering of blossom across the brilliant Italian sky has more in common with the attitudes of DH Lawrence. (And if you think the grass is too bright a green, then you must compare it with photos of springtime in Umbria).

Still nearby, we have Giles now at The source of the Clitumnus. (The rather young willow trees were only planted in the C19th). And he may have been the younger partner by eighteen years but he nevertheless adopts the classical name of the river Clituno. He is the more pedantic of the pair, she the more carefree one and funnily enough the more modern one as a result. There is something of the teacher in him, something in her of the student who outshone her master.

Tales from ebay: John Hall Thorpe's Dawn

2011-10-12T21:13:00.001+01:00

Well, here's a neat coincidence. Readers who recall the recent post 'A day on the Thames' may also recognise the red sails of a Thames sailing barge in this print by the well-known Australian purveyor of colour woodcuts, John Hall Thorpe. This feeble sub-Germanic effort of his comes up soon on British ebay and just goes to show he couldn't draw and couldn't compose a picture. Readers only have to compare Ethel Kirkpatrick's woodcut of the same subject to see what I am talking about. No matter. The seller is quite right to be confident this will go and has started it off at next-to-nothing. It's also a fair and wise approach to something both weak and unusual. I am only disappointed that they don't seem to having been paying attention. No matter. There are three bids in already on what is after all a collector's print. And this is not to decry Hall Thorpe as a decorative printmaker either. I loved having his Marigolds above the fireplace in the 1970s. It suited the times to a T but it disappeared and I have never been able to bring myself to fork out the going rate just to replace it. He is the Clarice Cliff of the colour woodcut and nothing wrong with that, specially if you had picked Marigolds up at Mrs Treasure's (dealers names don't come better than that) for all of £1.25 (just over €1). And it will certainly be interesting to see whether good sense prevails over vanity, cupidity and all the rest. And I very much doubt that it will.

Siegfried Berndt, north & south

2011-10-09T10:35:00.001+01:00

Last night a reader in Germany put me onto a number of proofs by Siegfried Berndt in a Berlin auction house catalogue. I need to say first off not all of the prints you see here are for sale at Hauff & Auvermann kunstauktionen-berlin.de and also need to thank Klaus for what turned out to be a very good tip.

Because a number of the prints for sale use the expressionst style that Berndt adopted soon after the end of the war - if not before. His earlier Japanese-influenced woodcuts come up on Google but other work stays secluded in catalogues ignored even by universal search engines. Not that Berndt dropped his earlier style altogether because he was still making prints from his Auf de Rehde block in full Hiroshige mode as late as 1925. Like his beloved sailing-boats, I think Berndt tacked with the wind.

The first print is Nordischer Hafen (northern harbour) from 1919. It comes in at least three versions, the red one at the top being the one for sale at Hauff & Auvermann. And before you rush off to put in a bid, the work you see here is properly valued in Berlin and does not come cheap. Mind you, hardcore expressionists will cost alot more.

The monochrome woodcut, above, is Suedlicher Hafen, also from 1919. Which southern harbour it is remains a mystery to me. Eight o' clock in the morning over a mug of tea is not the best time for infallible research but having turned up variants of Nordischer Hafen, I am going to assume that Berndt did much the same thing for its companion print. During his career, Berndt tried his hand at many things, working his way through studios and styles with considerable gusto. It says a great deal that an artist working in Dresden should be so taken with boats and the sea.

It was a long-term interest, as Segelboote (above) from 1909 shows. It's habits like these - using the same types of image and making prints in colour - that set him against the general trend of early modernist prints in Germany. By 1909, this woodcut would have seemed almost conventional when set against Karl Schmidt-Rottluff or Erich Heckel. Schmidt-Rottluff in particular had looked to west African carving as an examplar. Nothing could have been less use to him than the craftsmanship of Hokusai. The catalogues at Hauff & Auvermann suggest that Berndt had just as many problems with printing on japan as Sylvan Boxsius did in Britain. Like Boxsius, the work comes complete with printing creases (Knitterspuren vom Druck). This helps to explain why some prints aren't signed. He tried hard to get it right. You can adopt a new style more easily than a fresh attitude.

But the much bolder cutting and the flattened perspective are lessons he had learned from the younger printmakers. But, to be honest, one of the problems with this work is that it seems weaker than their work does, which is a shame, because he was prolific and made many good images. Which is another way of saying you haven't seen the last of Siegfried Berndt.

Tales from ebay: Siegfried Berndt's 'Auf der Rehde'

2011-10-07T21:42:00.001+01:00

It is somehow rewarding to see a print that has been recently featured on the blog come up for sale on ebay. I'm not suggesting there is a connection but from Germany we have Siegfried Berndt's first version of the colour woodcut Auf der Rehde from 1911. This is the ebay print above; I have added, below, the proof that I used on the post, for comparison.

I'm never sure why it is that sellers don't get the image square but it doesn't always fill me with confidence. But one important thing included, all the same, is the full paper size, which shows the deckle edge at the bottom. But the image isn't signed and so far there has only been one bid so that it stands right now at €1 only. Unfortunately, the dealer also adds Blatt im unteren linken Teil etwas knittrig, as you can see below:

Now, this creasing detracts but I don't want to go on about the disadvantages because, etwas knittrig or not, this is a fine print, romantic and well-expressed, and well worth having depending on how you feel about creases. I've bought unsigned and imperfect images of German work in the past because they are interesting to have and can be expensive otherwise. As for the change in the colours you can see, his version from 1925 (see August post) is radically different. He experiemented, as I said in the post. This is one of the most attractive things about Berndt. He never really stayed the same. And if you already have one version of this print, it may be wise to buy another. I am only waiting now for a deluge of versions. Go!

A tour of Scotland

2011-10-06T21:04:00.001+01:00

It's not very often that Modern Printmakers features artists from north America but Norma Bassett Hall's 'A Highland croft' was impossible to resist. Quite simply, it is one of the finest woodcut images of Scotland from between the wars and even though the mountains have an American sense of grandeur (that blue is just too talkative for Scotland) she does do the country justice. She went there specifically to train with Mabel Royds who had returned to Edinburgh College of Art in 1919. I believe, though, the tuition was private. I don't think Hall enrolled as a student.

I have to say I am disappointed by the general failure of the English staff at the college to come up with more images of Scotland. Royd's own Edinburgh Castle is a fine piece of work but hardly original as a subject. Better is John Platt's The scrum (see the recent post on Platt) which I think must show a match at Murrayfield in Edinburgh, with the Scotland team in blue-striped jerseys. Different again is Royd's work for the chancel ceiling at St Mary the Virgin in Hamilton in South Lanarkshire.

It is sometimes unnerving to see other work by an artist when you have praised their printmaking. In this case, though, Royd's bringing the conventions of church imagery up-to-date is fascinating. Bold and twenties and even art deco in feel and no worse than similar work produced down in Sussex by Vanessa Bell, but Eric Gill it isn't.

I also had no option when it came to including the work of another of her students. Helen Stevenson's Loch Shiel (on the coast of Argyll) will be the least well-known of her colour woodcuts that appears online. Less well-known (and not so good) is Arabella Rankin. But Afterglow on Mull, with its very William Giles title, gives a feel for the other prints being produced in Scotland at the time. All that I know about her is she was born in 1871 and also worked at Porthleven in Cornwall.

And I have to say the same about Ann Alexander. This is her Road to Taynuilt by Connel and I already have to excuse myself for posting so many lochs-and-heather images. But that is what there is. You can look elsewhere on the blog for Ian Fleming's Glasgow but work showing urban Scotland - or not the popular Highlands and Islands - is uncommon. It's a shame but this does say alot about the market for colour prints at the time. I'm also uncertain whether Anna Findlay's linocut The paper mill (1934) is an image of Scotland.

Which brings me to a far more sophisticated work - Ian Cheyne's Loch Duich from 1934. It shows a sea-loch on the west coast, very much part of the area that attracted Stevenson. I don't think the reproduction gets across the subtlety of Cheyne's work but you only have to look at the dramatic viewpoint and the dancing lines to see what kind of an artist we are dealing with. He was in his prime when doing this kind of work in the thirties and although he trades in the same kind of imagery as Rankin and Alexander, his view of things is so original and fresh, he takes you with him. Like Emma Bormann, he takes you into the subject; he doesn't stand back from it.

Probably less well-known to readers will be Robert Scott Irvine (1906 - 1988). Essentially a painter, here we have a linocut from 1923. He was a student at Edinburgh College of Art between 1922 and 1927 but even so didn't appear to succumb to Mabel Royds or the colour woodcut, surprising because both the prints I came across are strong, and his paintings are modern, graphic and lyrical. This linocut, with its drama and attenuated figures and deer could easily be Emma Schlangenhausen.

And to round out the picture, a wood-engraving by one of Irvine's teachers of painting, Adam Bruce Thomson (1885 - 1976).

By comparison, Allen Seaby's woodcut Shetland ponies begins to look dated in the way it carries on the pre-war, painterly tradition of colour printmaking. I used to own this print and the effect of the orangey-brown spots of lichen combined with bits of foxing was very disconcerting. It just shows that even Seaby didn't always get it right; the twigs of heather and the lichen didn't quite seem to belong to the print. Even so, I now regret selling it (to a friend). It was laid down. This I never like.

Seaby may well have stopped off for nine holes on his way up to Shetland - I am assuming that he did go that far. As I've said elsewhere on the blog, Seaby was a great fan of British ponies and no doubt he would have taken the long trip to Shetland to see the ponies for himself. But this second print, St Andrews, shows the home of golf, in Fife. In many ways, I think Steven Hutchins actually improved on this nice but rather stolid image.

Preferable is this second image by Ian Cheyne, Helmsdale, 1933. The town is on the east coast of Sutherland, as I've said before. I include this colour woodcut again for two reasons: I thought this was an especially good photo and also because you can buy the thing. You will need $1,300 but Ian Cheyne colour woodcuts are just plain rare, this looks like a good proof and - hey! you only live once. Just look at those greens and pinks. You will also note that it is signed, something very important for any Cheyne print. Nor am I working on commission here! But if you are interested arnoldkleingallery.com is the place you want. Rare, and just plain bloody brilliant, if you ask me.

Tales from ebay: Krebs in close-up plus an Adolf Kunst

2011-10-05T22:31:00.000+01:00

As there has been more interest than expected in Otto Krebs, here is an image of the Schneider bookplate with more detail. The work is so well-printed, I begin to wonder all over again whether he had the help of a printer. One thing that makes me think this is an image by the German architect and printmaker, Adolf Kunst, which shows a man using a printing press. I think I own one of these though I'm not sure. But below, a full size colour woodcut by Kunst. This came up for sale recently on ebay and went for the bargain price of €23. Apparently, it's in alot better condition than one I have. During the 1920s Kunst adopted a fairly raw technique which I sometimes feel uneasy about in his prints but like alot in the bookplates. He made alot of these and one or two are well worth buying.

During the twenties, Kunst adopted a rather more raw style of cutting. These images can be a touch crude (his training comes out in his choice of subject) but when his prints are in good condition, the colours jump off the paper as fresh as the day they were printed. And this is something people who are sniffy about ex libris should consider: although bookplate collectors had some nasty habits when it came to mounting their bookplates (dabbing them down with glue, trimming the margins, sticking them onto backing card - all details sellers can somehow omit in their descriptions), the prints themselves are often clean and bright simply because they have been kept away from the light. I'm glad I bought a few when I could.

Tales from ebay: Otto Krebs

2011-10-03T22:28:00.002+01:00

Out of interest, a couple of small colour woodcuts by the Swiss maker of ex libris, Otto Krebs (1870 - 1955). There were one or two artists making bookplates using colour woodcut in Switzerland early in C20th. All of them were pretty good but I have to admit Krebs work hadn't made much of an impression untill now. The Dutch dealer sur-sum, who has these two prints for sale, nevertheless can come up with some fairly impressive prices - but then these works are for specialist collectors. (That isn't to say that sur-sum isn't affordable and I have had one or two nice things from him). But the Schneider plate has an asking price of about £50 (it's in US dollars). The Goldman is about £28 which is not such a bad price for what is, after all, a subtle piece of work - the varying greens are striking. That said, the Schneider is just as good as some British colour printers (if not better) - Phillip Needell images of Chateau Gaillard and Corfe Castle come to mind and even some of Isabel de B Lockyer's landscapes. The seller has these down as circa 1910 and I know he is knowledgeable about these things. But for most of us these images will actually be just too small for all their skill.

What lets them down are two things: the borders and the lettering. They in no way compare to Alfred Peter's borders which are as good as the images themselves and are always well-integrated. I have one treasured little piece where the image is surrounded by large feathers. With Peter, less is also more. Perhaps Krebs felt the need to set off the complex landscapes with rather severe and uncompromising surrounds. It's when artists make good use of simple devices and three or four colours, as both Peter and Fritz Mock did, that you know just how good they are. But here, for Herr Schneider, it's the detail, of course, that appeals.

John Platt: art & the engineer

2011-09-28T21:30:00.001+01:00

You are a first year engineering student at the university of Manchester. One day a lecturer suggests you become an architect because you draw so well. But you drop architecture and decide on the life of an artist instead. Look at this wonderful photograph of IK Brunel and J Scott Russell taken at the launch of the SS Great Eastern at Millwall in 1858 and you will see the heroic image of the Victorian engineer. Was John Platt (1886 - 1967) just an imaginative young man who someone recognised would never be one of them?

He trained from 1903 to 1909, eventually graduating from the Royal College of Art. He had also become a fellow of the national society of art masters and we have to assume he had always intended to become a teacher. Even more interesting is this: he made no colour woodcuts untill his time in the army (1914 - 1918). In Derbyshire, near Matlock (1917) was only his third. It isn't any easier to try and work out how an officer in the British army began to make exceptional prints as it is to identify exactly where he found this view. But it is recognisably Platt in its love of detail and the distance.

By the time he came to cut The Giant Stride in 1918, he was taking one of the biggest steps in modern British printmaking. Here, at only his fourth attempt, he made one of the most memorable and dramatic images of all. Almost everything went into it: his own children, his tremendous draughtsmanship, his fascination for dynamics, his love of the sea and boats. (The image is poor but that's a sailing ship and a steam ship in the distance.) It's one of those seminal works that artist's create from time to time: an image of the creative act itself.

It took him another two years to come up with Snow in springtime (1920). There was a print called Dawn in 1918 but with few proofs printed. His prints were a success but he was hardly prolific. He is very far from the modern artist knocking off bold, experimental images. All his printmaking life he remained true to the ideals of craftsmanship. But he also had to make a living as a teacher, moving from one art college to another: Harrogate, Derby then to Edinburgh in 1920.

This was a bold enough move in itself because Frank Morley Fletcher appointed him to the part-time post of head of applied arts, partly on the strength of two very good prints. His training was wide but his experience actually strikes me as limited. No matter, he was there in Edinburgh alongside two of the best contemporary printmakers - Mabel Royds and Fletcher himself. It's this woodcut, The Scrum (1921) that convinces me that it was the heroic that captivated his imagination. There is already a strong feel for it in the exhuberance of children's play. But here we have the ancient Greek hero, controposto and all, turned out in a Scotland team jersey. The image comes from the time he spent in Edinburgh and this must show a game there, against either England or Wales, I assume - there is always more to Platt than meets the eye. He thought about his images with care. It's also highly original. Try and imagine Siegfried Berndt sketching at Murrayfield while he was studying in Scotland. But at least Berndt made three woodcuts of Scotland. What Platt gives us, though, isn't the Scottish landscape; it's the Scottish people (and their neighbours).

With Staithes, Yorkshire (1927) we are on woodcut number sixteen only. Six of those, including this one, take boats and harbours as their subject. The first was The jetty, Sennen Cove from December, 1921, the same year as The scrum. Most are humble fishing boats and trawlers, though there are also more exotic craft at St Tropez. What we never get is the sheer obvious love of it all so apparent in the work of Ethel Kirkpatrick and Siccard Redl. This image is a module, a set of interrelationships between form, colour and perspective. I chose this image, which is well-known, because heroism is still implied in the life of the people who live and work at Staithes. With Platt we are captivated by his sheer skill but should not forget there is also a teacher at work.

Teacher, and also father, because I wonder if the young woman shown here in The fruit harvest adopting a truly classical and heroic pose, is his daughter, Anthea. She would have been seventeen when he produced this copper engraving in November, 1929. Few artists, as I've said before, master both relief and intalgio methods. Platt did, but I think the engravings give away some of the weaknesses less apparent in his colour woodcuts. And I mean something of a well-made but sterile feel you find so often in the work of artists who are also teachers. The young woman stares away from us much like the young rugby player but is more impersonal than him. She is as absorbed in herself as the children were. Platt, like the smaller children, looks on - and makes us look, too.

I must acknowledge a considerable debt to Hilary Chapman's The colour woodcuts of John Edgar Platt (1999) and also credit Annex Galleries for In Derbyshire, near Matlock.

Two tales from ebay: Katsunori Hamanishi

2011-09-27T22:39:00.000+01:00

And as we were talking about the Japanese mezzotint artist, Katsunori Hamanishi, here are two smallish bookplates by him up for sale on Dutch ebay. I'm afraid I was unable to enlarge the images onsite so this was the best I could do. He a master, fastidious and compelling, and this is an opportunity at a starting bid of €19.50 - not too bad because I think I paid about £17 for one. All his ex libris are signed. No bids as yet but the auction finishes about 8.30 pm tomorrow.There are two others. If you aren't familiar with his work, there are lots of images online.

Tales from ebay: Ohara Koson

2011-09-26T23:16:00.000+01:00

And as if by magic a photograph so poor I had to check the signature against my own prints. But to me this looks like Ohara Koson. It's on ebay in Germany, comes up, I think, on Wednesday and still stands at €1, believe it or not. The drawback? As ever with German sellers, he doesn't take PayPal. (You try to explain to them my bank charges £25 for an international money order but to no effect).

Meryl Watts, John Platt & Blackheath School of Art

2011-09-25T16:35:00.006+01:00

John Platt (1886 - 1967) arrived at his last teaching job in 1929 when he was forty-three. Before he came to Blackheath, he had held senior positions at Edinburgh College of Art as head of applied arts (1920 - 1923) and at Leicester College of Art as principal (1923 - 1929). It was the part-time position at Blackheath that attracted him, probably as it had done at Edinburgh. He had begun to make colour woodcuts in 1916 but had produced only seventeen by the time he settled into his top-floor studio, smock and all, in south London.

He wasn't prolific; he was meticulous instead. He had started out training as an engineer at Manchester University but was persuaded to go for the art option on the strength of his drawing - and please bear in mind that this was technical drawing, he wasn't at the Slade or anywhere. I say all this so you can get a feel for the kind of regime that Meryl Watts (1910 - 1992) found herself in when she enrolled. When this was, I don't know for sure - about 1930. She was good enough by 1933 to be accepted as a member of the Society of Graver-Printers in Colour.

My hunch is that the fuzzy snow-scene you can see above was her first version of the school building. It has something rather strict in common with this kitchen interior, below, and another woodcut she made of a flower seller. Both of these prints rely heavily on the keylock for definition. The interesting thing about her view of the school is that the keyblock is only used to frame the print. This must be the influence of Platt himself. Also interesting is the way she simplifies the facade, removing the brick arches above the first and second floor windows but then adding pediments on the top floor windows. (The image is reversed). Nor does she differentiate between the two types of brick.

Platt had gradually begun to abandon the use of the keyblock between 1927 and 1932 and in the top image you can see the effect on his student in her use of planes of flat colour and recession to build up the picture. I also think that the collage, below, was work produced by her as a student under Platt's instruction. Though I have no proof of this it is her work.

A number of these tissue collages her by exist, all using the muted greens and brows that became so prevalent in the 1930s. (This one is remarkably similar to his woodcut Sails, 1933). We might see a more subtle sign of his influence in the way she made three versions of her woodcut of the school building. This was very much in line with Platt's own method. It took him so long to produce prints, it's no wonder he then made alternative versions. But her own print is so simple by comparision, in some ways it hardly merits that kind of attention.

I don't want to disparage Watts too much by drawing attention to this parental figure. All the same, it's striking that 1930 was quite late in the day to start learning colour woodcut. (And I don't know of anyone else who was taught the technique by Platt at this time). Having said that, I like the blue image, which ignores alot of the architectural detail, the best. You have to work out for yourself if it is the third one she made.

But was the influence all one way? Platt's approach had begun to change before he arrived at Blackheath and I've already suggested that it was Charles Paine's use of animal imagery that had a decisive influence on Platt. We have no way of knowing really what he learned from his student's work. But by the time Watt's came to make her Chestnut Seller she could make an image just as striking as Platt's - and, let's face it, he did make some of the most memorable images in British printmaking. It's hardly any wonder she stayed so long in his shadow. Her own father owned a printing works nearby. She wasn't one to stray too far from home. As I said, I would think all these images are local to her.

Even her pelican was nearby. She only had to go to St James Park in London to find them on the lake. Platt or no Platt, this is a fine image, with a lovely use of the grain of the wood at the bottom. Subtle, modern, modulated, beautifully modelled, she has got into her stride. I think it is just a shame that as she moved on to north Wales, the oddness of her images starts to prevail. Flounder I like less.

It is less modern that it looks. It's a pretty picture rather than analysis. To me, her later work shows she never really understood the modernist outlook - or that she just abandoned it, the way one abandons the keyblock. The print is also the work of a modeller. (She studied under the sculptor, James Woodford).

In some ways she was the permanent student and once away from the institution, she loses direction. These two later prints of the Welsh landscape, for all their skill, are a touch stilted and fussy. I wonder also whether Flounder shows the influence of yet another of her teachers, the designer of stained glass, Charles Paine? Who knows? It is a refractory work nonetheless; everything shines through.

Tales from ebay: The Vitava at Prague

2011-09-22T19:27:00.001+01:00

I wouldn't want to give anyone the idea that I have a down on seller's on ebay because I don't. And here is a post about the downside to selling prints on the site. I hasten to add the proof above, The Vitava at Prague (1928), a colour woodcut by John Platt, was not for sale on ebay. This one was sold by the well-known Oxfordshire dealer, Elizabeth Harvey Lee, to HM Government in 1995 and it now hangs on the walls of our embassy in Prague. The proof that was sold last week on ebay is the one you see below.

I think we can take it as given that buyers for the British Government collection do not go looking for bargains on ebay. They will go to dealers like Lee for unframed prints in very good condition and expect to pay her much higher prices. This in itself must be pretty galling for the recent seller, stiveshouseart, (and I hope they don't mind me using their image). The seller put the print in at the reasonable starting bid of £60. It sold for the bargain price of only £75. I must admit I was surprised - I certainly thought it would go higher and I expect stiveshouseart were pretty disappointed. Platt is a very good printmaker and it should have fetched more. So what happened?

As I have found out for myself, taking photos of subtle works on paper like this woodcut is by no means a simple thing to do. To start with, you would need the patience of Job and a very steady hand (and a good deal of luck) to get the image perfectly square. But when it comes to the tones of the work - they are almost impossible to reproduce. I assume the government image is the work of a professional and that the colours are close to the original - but I don't know. By comparison, the ebay image is too green and the distortion is offputting. I also know from experience that any little creases or defects on japan of the kind you can see bottom right are certainly exaggerated by the camera. But their photo also gives some very important information: it shows the deckle edge on the right, which lets us know the margins are the ones that Platt intended. (Artists tened to leave the deckle edge margin deeper).

To sell a work, the image needs to be good. I remember Clive buying his Source of the Clitumnus by William Giles and saying afterwards it was the ropey photograph that gave him a bargain buy. The one here is better but I think you can see the difficulties. This wasn't a specialist print dealer; it was someone who wanted to sell and was rather unlucky. Whoever bought it probably knew the full impact of Platt's image - and no amount of sales talk is going to get that over. As I've said earlier this week, I don't admire the kind of seller who expects the buyer to take all the risks by putting a print in at an inflated starting price. I learned the ropes at Arthur Johnson's auction house down at the cattle market in Nottingham. It was known as a place where the trade would place gear they couldn't shift elsewhere. Ebay can be like that, too.

A day on the Thames with Ethel Kirkpatrick & Sylvan Boxsius

2011-09-21T19:30:00.005+01:00

I wouldn't blame you for thinking these two artists have very little in common. The one adapted the plein air marine tradition to woodcut in the Japanese manner, the other was a teacher and master of faux-naif linocut of considerable sophistication. But they have an unexpected subject in common simply because they were probably born less than a mile from one another. The Cornwall artists index have Kirkpatrick born at Coldbath Fields Prison in Clerkenwell (although the only record I have seen says she was born in Holborn). Either way, the Boxsius family lived nearby in the City and I assume that Sylvan Boxsius that he was born there too. This helps to explain why we have this strange-looking boat that looks marooned.

It's a Thames sailing barge, something both artists must have been familar with. Boxsius spent much of his life in London and for a number of years worked at Bolt Court in Fleet St only a few hundred yards from the river. Although Kirkpatrick left London when she was young, she returned from St Ives in 1906 to live at the family house at Harrow-on-the-Hill - not exactly London but near enough. And I use this photograph partly to show you just how well Boxsius picked up both the colours of the boats and those of the riverbank.

Kirkpatrick made this image of the river Thames in 1911, at a time when it was a busy port and the red-sailed barges were still familar. I suspect that the approach that Boxsius took was a little more complex. He is very much an artist of distance and memory. His barge looks landlocked. They were at use on canals as well as along the coast but this one looks like a museum piece. This isn't a lively image of the river he knows so much as the one that he remembers.

This is the William and Ann taken about 1884. Boxsius would have been very familar with what you see here. He was eight years old the day this barge sailed up the Thames (Kirkpatrick was fourteen) but his linocut of the barge must certainly date from the mid 1920s, over forty years later.

Even so, there are very few identifiable views of the river by Boxsius. Here is Kew Bridge. I never noticed untill I prepared for this post that there is a barge moored beside the bridge. It is classic Boxsius, with its rather reticent use of colour and recession. You only have to compare a print like this with the contemporary work of Claude Flight to see there were credible alternatives to the Grosvenor School.

I assume that these sharper images belong to the 1930s. Evening on the water may well show the Thames estuary. The woodcut below has been described as showing both the Thames and the Clyde but as these are sailing barges, I now tend to think we are looking across the Thames but I just don't know that area well enough to really say.

Either way, you can compare this photo with Kirkpatrick's woodcut. For all her stylisation, both in form and colour, she remains true to the boats. She merely adapts them, the way she adapts the trees in the foreground, to her own style. But then that is what I like about both of them as artists - the balance between style and observation. I would like to say definitely that that is the Greenwich Observatory you can see on the hill but I can't commit myself quite so far, not just yet.

More tales from ebay

2011-09-20T19:27:00.007+01:00

I thought I may as well go on with my recent trawl through British ebay with this image by Hans Frank with the far-fetched starting bid of £150 (or as Clive would say delusional starting bid). I will tell you all now, the University of Wales offloaded this hapless woodcut some time last year for quite alot less. And I would do the same with the one that I own but I can't be bothered to go through the rigmarole. I have tried over the years to like this print and failed. As Hans Frank goes, it's pretty tedious. It did serve as a model for Arthur Rigden Read's Stormy Seas, which is about the best thing I can say for it - and that isn't much. This print was sold in the British provinces and is pretty common here. Mine originally came from George Nobel in Nottingham who sold alot nicer things by Frank to the Castle Museum but theirs have succumbed to the Frank foxing. [To my utter astonishment, it sold for £150 - to an Austrian buyer, I think. He could have had mine for half the price.]

I wouldn't normally have included the Morton twin's Spring Rhapsody here but, as it happens, the dealer has seen fit to include a helpful photo of The Nottingham Journal which had been used by Boots the Framers to back the thing. Goodness knows why but I think we can safely conclude that Nobel's flogged this print as well. Today, on ebay? £99 is the starting bid. A mild improvement on Frank but not much. These are exactly the kinds of colour woodcuts that were churned out, are pretty common by comparison with, say, Kenneth Broad or Ada Collier, who were just so much better. Incidentally, look carefully at those photographs of Concord and Cavendish. I am pretty sure the paper has been well trimmed. This would decrease the value enormously.

Shall we start at twenty-five? OK, ten. [Unsold. But it's back].

I also must add Julia Mavrogordato's Autumn at an eye-watering start of £180 with a description that implies she was a Grosvenor School artist. Who are these people trying to kid? No one, the seller included, has any idea whether Mavrogordato had even heard of the Grosvenor School, let alone studied with Flight. First you try and suggest an artist has been missed and then whack on a starting bid of £180? Plus it has been framed. It's about as Grosvenor School as I am. [Even so, it did sell, as Clive predicted it would - £190.]

Tales from ebay: Dorothy Woollard

2011-09-19T20:11:00.002+01:00

Dorothy Woollard (1886 - 1986) is the kind of artist who has a website all to herself and for reasons best known only to the person who set it up. There she is described with wild inaccuracy as 'a forgotten star of the etching revival'. She was never a star and almost everyone from that wonderful period was forgotten for quite a few years as Gerrie, Clive and myself have all but constantly pointed out. But then quite alot about her is improbable - especially her dates.

But today, we have a much less common colour woodcut that I finally could resist no longer. It appears for a second time on British ebay at the very hopeful starting bid of £125. It is easy to mock, of course, but the Woollard website did point out that her colour woodcuts were made in collaboration with an old favourite of ours, Eric Hesketh Hubbard. This polymath, after his move to Ringwold in Hampshire, set up the Forest Press with Frank Whittington. I believe Whittington sometimes did the printing; he certainly sometimes signed the works with Hubbard. Theirs was a collaboration which I admire but which never quite succeeded in going beyond the popular, quirky, rustic and antiquarian.

This woodcut by Woollard is pretty much in line with Hubbard's rather extraordinary set of colour woodcuts showing the gates to Salisbury Cathedral Close in considerable detail. I have one, of course; and I like it. But the woodcut we have here is so much like them - even down to the sudden and inexplicable use of green - I am dubious. Hubbard's woodcuts were all intended to be affordable. The set I am talking about was produced in no less than three qualities. The most flabberghasting thing about these Forest Press prints nowadays is how much people dare ask for them, though. I leave you to decide for yourselves. It would be interesting to have alongside my Hubbard in a portfolio but frankly £125 worth of interest it does not have.

The boats of Venice

2011-09-17T20:48:00.005+01:00

So many printmakers working in Venice or on the Adriatic coast in the 1920s have been recently mentioned, I thought it was time to offer a general survey, so far as I could. Even more interestingly, I notice that since the posts about Josephine Siccard Redl went up, at least one print new to me has come up for sale - wrongly described, but more of that later. So, if those posts have caused confusion, here and now, a short course on the old boats of Venice - and the artists who went there and fell for them.

I begin with Siccard Redl's superb image Harbour of Lauranna, Italy. She went to live in the town some time after the Istrian peninsula became a part of Italy in 1919. The boat is a trabaccolo, a small coastal vessel, which was also capable of crossing the Adriatic. (I am sticking with the spelling on an Italian site rather than the one Siccard Redl used.) The image above by the British artist, Ada Collier, is also a trabaccolo. I don't know exactly when she visited Venice but it was most likely also in the twenties.

This wonderful photograph of a largish trabaccolo wasn't taken anywhere near Venice but at Manfredonia in Puglia. All the same, it gives a good idea of just how accurate both Siccard Redl and Collier were in their very different representations of that type of vessel. It's this accuracy that fascinates me. If you look at artists as diverse as Frank Brangwyn and Carl Thiemann, you find they are not really interested in the boats themselves so much as the atmosphere they help to create.

And here we find Maud Sherwood making a strict distinction as well. Because this boat is a bragozzo, a smaller, single-masted fishing boat that was only used in the lagoon. Because of the shallows, they necessarily rode higher in the water. The trabaccoli also needed careful positioning of the masts (and sails) to deal with the sudden squalls that arise in the Mediterranean.

The bragozzi were, of course, well known for their brightly-coloured sails and Helen Tupke Grande made the best of them in what is probably her most well-known colour woodcut. The markings on the sails varied but the triangular areas at the top of the sail and large spots were common.

None of the markings are obvious in this photograph of a bragozzo taken, I think, at Venice. It's interesting to see how closely the mooring posts resemble the ones shown by Collier. I think you can see that it is basically a smaller version of a trabaccolo.

I think it is also pretty clear that there is more than one sail. And although the image by Siccard Redl, above, has been described as being two boats, I suspect it is only one. I make no claim to expertise but Siccard Redl knew what she was doing. The only artist to differentiate as much as she did between different types of boat was Ethel Kirkpatrick herself.

Which brings us to this classic image of a trabaccolo with its sails lowered by Sicard Redl. For comparison, I include this tremendous photograph of a trabaccolo at sea. It looks as if the man in front of the mast is lowering the sail.

And even if Kirkpatrick doesn't quite fit in with these women artists of the 1920s, it was necessary all the same to include this small woodcut by her to show the way she also knew and loved her boats. For this is a topo, a small fishing boat with a shallow draught, ideal for the waters of the lagoon. (There are also prints by Siccard Redl of this type of boat). I very much like the way she is quite clear about the water the boat is navigating, with its sandbanks and bouys. This is the work of a marine artist as much as that of an imagist.

And last, but not least, the two main types of boats docked side by side, with the broad bottom and deeper draught of the trabaccolo an obvious contrast to the lighter fishing boats. And, just in case you were wondering, Siccard Redl's image of the bragozzo is for sale at heatons-of-tisbury.co.uk/ even though they describe it as a trabaccolo. My fault, to some extent, for not doing my own research alot sooner. Even so, when I come to cross the Adriatic in January, from Vlore in Albania to Brindisi, I sincerely hope it will be in neither of them.

Astrid Meyer

2011-09-16T21:09:00.004+01:00

As an antidote to the chic modernism of the Grosvenor School and just to prove that anything as advanced as linocut could take a realistic turn, a print by Astrid Meyer. The Brooklyn Museum have her down as an Australian artist and this could well be true. But this kitchen interior doesn't look like Australia (not to me, at least). The asymetrical modernist framing device sets the tone for the print and I love the details she provides: the glimpse of face in the mirror, the butcher's block covered in newspaper with loaf and teapot, the red quarry tiles on the sill, the single tap of cold water. She is closest to the woodcuts of Janet Fisher, with her clogs and stew-pots, but Meyer comes over as better informed and less sentimental than those early genre woodblocks. I also like the way she includes so much wood on this linocut. The array of lines and angles she uses, coupled with the round shapes of plates and mirror, are subtle. She doesn't try too hard. But it is the absorption of the figure, in her skivvie's uniform, that is most telling, the way we look in on her. This back-view, with the crossed apron straps, is unusual but throws our attention onto all those details that tell us what her working life is like.

The nice mix of modernism and the domestic continues in this chalk drawing of tulips in a glass vase. As do the unassertive colours. It is very thirties and of course the only date for her work that I've come across is 1931. She also made at least one woodcut of a fishing village and there is another linocut called Waiting for the train. It sounds as though they all left from the same station. Again, I'm sorry about the terrible reflections but I leave it to readers to sort out Meyer's modernism from chance images of what looks like an auction house bay. Ah, well. It's the best I could do.

Maud Sherwood: Mediterranean life

2011-09-14T18:20:00.181+01:00

Here is a photograph of Maud Sherwood (1880 - 1956) taken in January, 1912, soon after her arrival in London. Behind her was a teaching post at Wellington Technical College and a career as an artist in far-off New Zealand; in front of her, the studios of Paris, a painting trip in southern England, including a stay in St Ives. (Like Ethel Kirkpatrick, she was a watercolourist, though Kirkpatrick had almost certainly left St Ives before she arrived). Eventually she made her way to the real plein air McCoy, Concarneau in Brittainy. She was not to stay.

In 1913, she took the boat for Sydney, got married, her marriage lasted three years, and with a divorce settlement agreed, in 1926 she once again left for Europe. But this time things were very different. She was no longer the colonial with her certificate and prizes from the South Kensington School. She ignored England and disembarked at Naples, making straight for a villa on Capri owned by American friends. This time, Maud Sherwood was cosmopolitan.

Just how sophisticated she had become, you can judge by this watercolour drawing of Bagno Vicenzo on Capri. If there are elements of the British humourist W Heath Robinson, it is confident, witty and chic. This is what makes that first colour print of hers, the Venetian fishing boats, of so much value. Some time soon after her arrival, someone had showed her how to make woodcuts. I don't know who but her boats are very much like the work of Ada Collier. It's been described as both linocut and woodcut and dated to both 1926 and 1927. It may be a first print but it is one that I would buy without hesitation. She uses her new technique with the spontaneity and vigour that is typical of all of her best work.

Look at the ragged cutting of the shutters and masonry in Cafe du Pont. It is fully 3-dimensional in conception, with a blatant sense of light and shadow. It might at first glance look quite conventional but she has gone about it in a way that disregards both teaching and convention. She takes her subject by storm. I think it's 5 from an edition of 75.

I wonder how many she finally sold. Because by 1927, her ex-husband was already writing from Sydney to say his health was poor and business wasn't good ie she was a long way away and he wasn't paying her allowance. So far as I know, she had made no prints before she left Australia (and she made very few when she eventually returned) and I have to conclude they were an economic fact. She had to diversify and make some money. Her subjects, if they aren't saleable vases of flowers, are local colour and differ from the landscapes and beach picnics that make up ther main body of her work in watercolour.

The potentially Fauve direction she could have taken after Venetian fishing boats, she doesn't exactly follow through. Two flowers in a vase makes me think of William Nicholson if he had only gone art deco. And I like it very much. Beautifully realised, even the subtle mauve-grey of the keyblock works with the dominant greens and pinks. She may have been new to it all but she knew she didn't have to be satisfied with black.

She was quite prepared to try other techniques. Spanish buildings, the dynamic and dramatic work above is a monotype. Not my favourite technique I have to say (so much so I am even dubious about the description) but this is a terrific work, with the same ragged effects of light and shade we saw in Cafe du Pont. Less stylised than Brangwen and not as languid as Sergeant, I find it quite incredible that she could make a montype look like an etching. Which brings me to this ambiguous print called The dancer.

Now, I didn't take to this at first but I think it is a subtle variation on what is the primary subject of her prints (and quite often her other work). I mean women, of course. There certainly are elements here of Toulouse Lautrec that makes it look like a 1960s work and you may draw your own conclusions. The ambiguities don't rest there because the work has been described as an aquatint. It has the tone and texture of one but I haven't come across her using the etching proces anywhere else, the signature is too close to the image to allow for a platemark and you can see overprinting at the top left. So, I think it must be a relief print, which makes it all the more original.

Both of these prints Spanish market woman and Seated peasant (I do begin to wonder about these titles) have both been described as linocuts. The top one is certainly hand-coloured and I assume the same is true of the one below. Sometimes the same image occurs both in monochrome and with colouring. Presumably, one cost more than the other. Either way, the cutting isn't so very far away from Raoul Dufy, especially the flowers and also the baskets. Again, it may strike you as fairly conventional but the method is dynamic, so it's frustrating that I have only been able to come up with three fully conceived colour prints as opposed to this type that depend heavily on the keyblock, which she could hand colour. There are other subjects, dated untill 1930 (she finally left Europe for good in 1933) but I have to asume they are basically monochrome from the titles (Three men watching bowls, Seller of fried chillies etc). It all depends how many made their way back to Australia where her mother and sister had moved to. And how many she left behind her here.

Helen Ogilvie: the 1930s

2011-09-11T19:03:00.003+01:00

It's a shame that Helen Ogilvie (1902 - 1993) didn't make more linoccuts like The white evening dress. I think it's a small classic, a beguiling subject approached with a Vienna Secession sense of space and detachment. It's also mildly sinister, the kind of work Arthur Rigden Read might have produced if he had walked out of the Dower House in Winchelsea, Sussex, only to spend days on end lost in the bush. But this wish of mine for more figure subjects goes counter to what interested Ogilvie as an artist.

To show you what I mean, I have teamed the linocut with her wood-engraving The crab. Both have a similar sense of predatory creepiness that allows the subject to work its way across the picture plane; and both have the same vivid sense of light and dark. (When she does white, it is spectacular). The shawl hanging down from the woman's left arm has become an extension to herself, like the legs of the crab.

Like the crab, she achieves her ends by gradual means. Chooks in the straw uses a classic combination of violet, white and black, with smaller areas of red to create, amongst other things, this wonderful white. Even on a pc monitor, you can see the whites of the birds are graded so that it darkens as it gets closer to the violet-grey behind them.

Even though her name sounds thoroughly Scottish, she grew up in rural Australia, at Corowa, New South Wales. The only formal training she received were three years at the National Gallery School in Melbourne (1922 to 1925). Apart from the seven years in London, she spent the rest of her adult life there, in Melbourne. Even so, as far as I know, the city never appears in her prints. All of her work, the paintings and the prints, take the Australia of pioneer shacks and Victorian wrought iron, the plants of the bush and sometimes the animals of the farm, as their subject. The glamour of the evening dress is little more than a blip.

What she liked about printmaking was the immediacy of the cutting process; she felt there was an intimacy between the activities of her brain and her hand. All the same, satisfaction was far from easy to achieve. Just like Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, she read about the technique in Claude Flight's Lino-Cut, first published in 1927. Unlike them, she had to content herself with the book. As she tried to teach herself, she said, 'I became very worked up about it and had no way of learning'. Her own Flight turned out to be someone closer to home, another Melbourne artist, the painter and printmaker, Eric Thake (1904 - 1982).

Thake showed her how to use her improvised tools. All this says alot about her attitude and the art she was to produce. This co-operation between artists in Melbourne reminds me of the early days of woodcut and then linocut in both Vienna and London between 1900 and 1925. And I think it was this process that eventually gave her prints the vigour and freshness they have. Although she placed herself in the British white line tradition, it was the great individualists amongst them that she mentions - Thomas Bewick (1753 - 1828), Edward Calvert (1799 - 1883) and Eric Gill (1882 - 1940). Again, her only access to their work was through illustrations in books. There was no Noel Rooke to go off to at the Central School in London. Essentially, like Calvert and Gill, she was on her own and she was the better for it.

She used linocut first but the earliest exhibtions I've come across were in 1933. (She exhibited untill 1939). By the time she made this first image of Banksia about 1938, she had made a virtue of rough-and-ready methods. There is no attempt to disguise the activities of cutting and printing and this is where she comes closer to the powerful expressiveness of the Die Brucke group of artists in Germany than Flight and his followers. She may or may not have known the work of the pre-war German artists but, like them, she made her own discoveries; in this way she emulated the pioneers in their little wooden houses.

I have had to stretch the usual definition of the 1930s to include this second image of Banksia made about 1942. By now she casts light and dark around with the panache of a Gertrude Hermes but with far less of the refinement. Both her cutting and her use of the picture plane make me think much more of German artists, especially the architect and printmaker Adolf Kunst (1883 - 1937) and Walther Klemm (1883 - 1957). The final little landscape is so much like Kunst's later linocuts, I would have thought it was one of his for sure. But what they have in common is this: a lack of formal training in printmaking. All three of them could be refined (as we have already seen from the large colour prints of Ogilvie's) but you can just as often see all of them rolling up their sleeves as well.

The old weather bureau may well be in Melbourne, after all. It was made about 1935 but could almost be the work of a British engraver of the 1980s revival. There is the same sense of care both for the craft and about the past. I think in this she was also a kindred spirit with Eric Thake. You also see a growing interest in form in these last two engravings. The clouds are a nice, witty touch.

These two images, the linocut Kangaroo Paws and another Banksia engraving (circa 1935) show just how much she uses the two mediums in different ways. Like Mabel Royds, she makes no real attempt to suggest depth in the colour print, it is about colour and surface. The engraving approaches light and depth head on. Her cutting is never reduced to fantasy as it can be in Hermes. And the very fact that I can confidently make that comparison shows just how far Ogilvie had come since the day she first opened Lino-Cut in the late 1920s. It is a very good print indeed and one I wish I owned.

And here at last is a little landscape, stony and brown in the foreground, with low grey hills in the distance. All the other prints included here show enclosed spaces or objects without background. Like Kunst's work, this one has a childlike simplicity of image and cutting. Here is someone who was confident about what she wanted to do with any one particularly print. And she got on with it.

Eileen Mayo & Linoland

2011-09-07T20:23:00.001+01:00

To read what some curators and auction houses say about Eileen Mayo (1906 - 1994) in the Antipodes, you would think she was some kind of multinational. But all the linocuts here (except for the last one) date from the time she spent in Britain before she left in 1953. Isabel de B Lockyer dated all of hers and most of these are dateable, too. To me, this suggests something interesting about the attitude of these artists to their linocuts - that it is art and not craft. Following on from Claude Flight, they make claims for a medium often seen as suitable for children. (Franz Cizek (1865 - 1946) at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna had pioneered its use for children and in 1925 Alan Seaby had this to say about his work 'it has been found that a child... can deal with linoleum with ease'). And, of course, Turkish Bath (1927ish) wilfully contradicts all this professorial wisdom. Its steamy abandon is hardly general viewing.

Morning tea, with its sexual ambiguity, is even less so. Here is an artist who had trained with a modern vengeance at a series of London art schools: the Slade, the Central School, Chelsea Polytechnic. But it all went out the window with her very first print. She famously got on the phone to Claude Flight for instruction in linocut. The sumptuous art deco of Turkish Bath was the lurid result. It's outrageous, of course, and a lark. And it also got her included in the 'The first exhibition of British Linocut' that Flight organised in 1929. (I am going by Osborne Samuel's date for this - it seems to waver). She was a true printmaker at that point; an artist who was using print to try out new ideas. By Morning tea her lifelong use of bold colour and repetitive, sinuous line is already well to the fore.

She was an admirer of Eric Gill's work but in those first two prints she come across as far more fresh and contemporary than Gill ever did (and I admire his work, too). If Black Swan sees her moving towards an interest in natural history, Cats in the trees displays the same wit and decorative elan we saw in her figure subjects. The skill of her work is beyond doubt. She was highly trained. The growing formalism of her work during the thirties is fairly typical of the times, which were less than easy. She perhaps wasn't going to make a living out of jazz-age linocuts but personally I would have liked to see more.

These two next prints, with their flat figures, simplified colours and sense of recording popular life, would not be out of place in a King Penguin book about British folk art. The Doric Dairy cart is quite some way from the sensuousness of the turkish baths, or waking up. There we had what I find very attractive, a woman artist taking women as her subject - not women in a domestic setting but in pleasurable ones. With ice-cream vendors and milk carts, we move back to a simplified world of linocut childhood. They certainly look like illustrations rather than manifestos.

But this is not a linocut artist, not like, say, Sybil Andrews or Claude Flight. All I have done is look at one aspect of Mayo's work that I like and that starts off very early in her career. She made wood-engravings, lithographs, screen prints, too, sometimes of the same image but never with quite the same sense of verve that she achieved early on.

But everything still went into the mix. This later linocut, which she made in Australia, has elements of both surrealism and abstraction. It's a glorious thing but you can see the teacher in her. In that resepect she is like Bormann and Klemm and Orlik, exemplary in what she does but somehow there is still something missing. I think you can tell by now which of these works I prefer.

Art & the Aesthete update

2011-09-06T18:19:00.000+01:00

Just in case readers of both this blog and Clive's haven't read his latest comment, the blog is back online as a resource only.

Helen G Stevenson & Argyll

2011-09-04T19:16:00.003+01:00

Helen Stevenson has always presented me with a dilemna for as long as I can remember, and no more so than today, with the shocking news from Art and the Aesthete. For here is a post about an artist that Clive researched with such persistence, it now feels less like a celebration and more like a wake. I'm only relieved I was able to nab an image of Clive's own print The hen wife before it went forever. I am also pleased to be able to say the first time he came across her work was when he saw my own print of Gylen Castle, Kerrera so it provides some consolation, at least. Where I came across the print was in Ayres old shop on Museum Street in London. I went in asking after colour woodcuts and, to my astonishment, the assistant went into the basement and brought up two - both by Stevenson,with the lot numbers still stuck to the glass. She was completely forgotten by then and I took so long over the decison, Christina began to lose patience with me (not for the last time) but I opted for the landscape in the end. But the most surprising twist to the story is this: I never went back and bought the other one.

To console you all I have a new image of Loch Shiel that displays the purity of colour that is so typical of Stevenson. She was an Edinburgh artist (and trained at the College of Art in the days when Morley Fletcher was principal and John Platt head of applied arts) but I have yet to come across any urban subjects let alone woodcuts of her home city. Many of the woodcuts here are of places in Argyll on the west coast of Scotland, or very near. Mallaig, which used to be in the county of Inverness, is only a few miles north of Loch Shiel, and the Appin peninsula only a few miles to the south. Kerrera is a small island just off the coast. I think we can safely assume that both Campers and The hen wife also both show Argyll. Possibly she used to stay in the area or had family there, but the places I mention are all relatively close one to the other.

You will notice how well she makes use of the limitations of modern colour woodcut byher use of subtle colour and expressive brushwork. Clive told me how remarkable the ultramarine is in The hen wife. I know from my own print just what depth of colour she achieves not just describing the sea but the grass along the cliff top. I always thought this was the most remarkable aspect to the print. The designs are fairly conventional but she is quietly original - no more so than when she is using the convention of the keyblock. Whereas other colour woodcut artists went on to lessen their reliance on the keyblock, Stevenson made a virtue of it. The ruins of Gylen Castle and the rocks around them are almost virtuose in their use of the keyblock. And this print has been dated 1937, pretty late by British colour woodcut standards.

This is what makes me think Clive's own print might belong to this rather later period. There is the same vigour and boldness in the description of the thatch, trees and hens. You can also see the emphatic use of outline around the print with the attractive use of uneven line and rounded corners. Some of these prints like Evening, Mallaig (above) and Rain over Appin (at the bottom) have a Celtic Twilight delicacy about both their colouring and conception. I once saw another one for sale - a view of heather-clad hillsides from across a loch and again there was the same intensity of colour combined with bold design. I won't go into the reasons why I failed to buy that one but they are almost always unedifying. That said, I think the price tag of £250 may have had something to do with it - and it was quite a few years ago.

She became art teacher at St Andrew's Cottage School in Edinburgh as soon as she finished her course in 1924. If the dates we have are right, she was still exhibiting colour woodcuts as late as 1937. It was only the true diehards like Platt and Ian Cheyne who went on that long (and to some extent after the war). But it's not just this fact that suggests to me a true love both of her chosen medium, and of Argyll - it's the work itself. There is nothing inessential about it. It has the sure touch that gives lasting value, as I have found out.

Art & the Aesthete

2011-09-04T13:27:00.001+01:00

I've not long ago seen the rather sad news that Clive seems to have closed his blog down. I have only found the beginning of a message saying he didn't have the time to dedicate to 'Art & the Aesthete' and what a wonderful time he'd had. To my surprise, the blog doesn't appear to be on the server anymore. But I want to say how grateful I am to Clive for help and support - and of course for the infectious enthusiasm for which he was well-known. The blog was often fascinating and rewarding. I'm sure many readers were aware he had been thinking about his move for a while but I wish him well on the collecting front and I'm only sorry we won't have a permanent reminder and resource online. For me, at least, it's the end of an era.

Steven Hutchins

2011-09-02T20:17:00.002+01:00

I first saw this colour woodcut Egglestone Abbey by Steven Hutchins around about 1983. A friend had been on one of his search-and-spend visits to Portobello Road in London and popped in to see Steven Hutchins at his stall as part of the exercise. Now, Steven was a dealer in Japanese woodblock but occasionally sold European woodblock artists. (I bought my treasured Paul Leschhorn from him). But on this occasion he had a woodcut by an artist none of us had ever come across: it was Steven Hutchins himself. And he had done something remarkable.

We knew about the handbook called Woodblock Printing that Frank Morley Fletcher had first published in 1916 but neither us suspected that anyone had used the book to teach themselves how to make woodcuts in the Japanese manner as late as the 1980s. But Steven Hutchins had. You can judge for yourself how successful you think he was but for me he did a good job even though when he asked me if I knew this artist when he showed me a woodcut one day, I failed to buy. (No reason why they should have been cheap but they weren't). Anyway, I wanted readers to see these prints just to show what people can achieve with application. You may also note that Steven worked strictly within the British topographical tradition in these two prints at least. (I include a photograph to show just how strictly). Eggleston Abbey is in Co Durham, Lynton on the rocky coast of north Devon. Incidentally, I haven't seen him since the eighties. It was a great time of shared rediscovery but unfortunately the print dealers with flair like Steven Hutchins all moved on. Hail, and farewell.

Egglestone Abbey is for sale at Era Woodblock Prints erawoodblockprints.com/ in Toronto, Castle Rock, Lynton at annexgalleries.com/ in Santa Rosa. My thanks are due to them.

Isabel de B Lockyer

2011-08-31T19:48:00.007+01:00

I used to know someone who would say 'Isabel de B Lockyer' so grandly I got it into my head that, of all the forgotten artists, she must be the most glamorous, the most desirable. So when I eventually found a linocut of hers in a shop in Camden Passage, Islington, I was inevitably confused. It was called The striped sail; it was quite small; it was rather abstract. It had none of the bravura I liked to associate with colour woodcut or linocut and I left it there in the shop. I have never seen another one since.

But, if I was wrong to leave The striped sail down in Islington, my other instincts were proved correct. There is chic and glamour in these early landscapes - the little temple screened by trees in Near Vevey (1924), the Italian coast, above, in Rapallo (1926) and the stylish The lagoon, Corfu (1928). They all make me think of house-parties in the country and holidays abroad. And indeed I think she chose as mentor an artist with the most glamorous light of them all. I mean William Giles (see WG: modern printmaker, March, 2011). There is no record that he actively taught her anything but we only have to look at Near Vevey to see that she knew his work very well. But this is Giles without any pretence at realistic lighting. He went to extremes to get that kind of pink; I don't think Switzerland is quite so northern lights as that.

As I said 'Ada Collier, ancient and modern' (March, 2011), we do know that Giles taught Collier and this does suggest to me that other artists may have gone to him for tuition. We not only find the same improbable colours in her linocuts, she also goes in for his precision. She is not only exact about titles, at times she goes in for describing the light the way he does. But in almost all other respects, there the tutorship ends. Although they may look like colour woodcuts because of the water-based inks she uses, all these prints were made from linoblocks. The works from the twenties are also landscapes, very much in line with many British colour woodcutters of that period, including Ian Cheyne and Helen Stevenson. By 1930, though, there is a change.

The shop window from 1930 is typical - schematic and with more of an interest in the human figure. Inevitably, again, it hard to really know what these changes mean without knowing more about her or seeing more of her work. I've deliberately placed these prints in chronological order (she always dated her work) but we only have a run of eleven years here, which isn't very much to go on. What I do think we can see is the influence of the Grosvenor School, especially when she chooses social or popular activities like shopping or picnics as her subjects. Bear in mind that both Giles and Claude Flight were the kind of men who very much wanted to show what could be done with their chosen mediums. So far as Isabel de Bohun Lockyer went, it seems that work had its effect.

Which brings us to Wembury Church (1933). The Lockyers came from Plymouth and one of them bought Wembury House in the early C19th. He later moved to Australia with the British Army but the family connection clearly took Lockyer to south Devon to produce this rather unsual offshore print. (It's been pointed out that you could have only see the church this way from a boat). The de Bohun bit of her name is something of a mystery. So far as I can see, the de Bohuns only had a residual Devon connection and my own feeling is that this rather grand addition to her name was made by Lockyer herself. It makes her name as complex as one of Giles' titles.

I like the name, as I said; and what I do like very much about her work is the variety. She uses a wide range of colours but usually doesn't let her interest in them predominate - one of Giles' failings. If she has no interest in natural light (even at its Giles' weirdest) she does have a strong sense of the social world around her. I suspect her early voguish landscapes suggest a social milieu as much as the portrait etchings of Emil Orlik do. These are very specific types of places she is recording. It a view of them as pleasurable with their isolated old buildings. The fur coats, the cloche hats, the Japanese sun shade only add to the general feeling of fashionable exclusivity. [It would also be wrong of me not to credit joseflebovicgallery.com/ in Sydney for five of these prints.]

The Grosvenor School of Modern Art

2011-08-27T21:25:00.020+01:00

The Grosvenor School is the sort of place where you would like to walk to Warwick Square, wander in and speak to Miss Andrews in the office, to enquire whether you could look in on Mr Flight's class so you find out just what they were all up to. I suspect it was the kind of place that had as much in common with the community of artist-converts at Ditchling in Sussex as it did with the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Claude Flight (1881 - 1955) was a linocut evangelist and everyone, including the staff, attended his classes. It's no wonder they all made so many.

It was set up in this rambling old house in 1925 by three men who had all come to art and print later rather than sooner. Flight had tried out various things, including bee-keeping, untill he hit on modernism and, in particular linocut, as the answer. As you see from his Swiss Mountains from c1934, he was an enthusiast. He had begun making linocuts in 1919 and taught students to use separate blocks for each colour. In 1929 he organised 'The first exhibition of British linocuts' and even if his name is almost synonymous with linocut today, his enthusiasm for the Grosvenor School was short-lived. He taught there for only four years, from 1926 untill 1930, when he transferred his already informal classes to a cave above the river Seine.

Flight had studied at Heatherley's School of Fine Art in London both before the war and then after. Cyril Power (1872 - 1951) didn't enrol at Heatherley's untill 1925 when he was already 53. He had been a successful architect but turned his mind to art. He had met Sybil Andrews in 1921 and she duly became school secretary. (See Sybil Andrews: the rural year, February, 2011). It's not hard to see his interest in both architectural design and form in general in The Tube staircase, 1929. It shows the stairs at Russell Square underground station in London, an exact location for a dynamic print. If their modernism is at times far-fetched, this linocut does put me in mind of Marcel Duchamp.

Power gaves classes on architecture and ornament (he had already published a three-volume book) but the only one of the trio with any prior experience of teaching at all was Iain MacNab (1890 - 1967) - and that wasn't much. If I also tell you he spent a year at Glasgow School of Art in 1917 before also moving to Heatherley's in 1918, you will begin to see the pattern. The brave idea of a school dedicated to modern art may well have begun with their joint experience of a London private art school. (I'm not suggesting the experience was bad because MacNab became joint-principal of Heatherley's in 1919 and didn't relenquish his post of director of art studies untill as late as 1953.) But in 1925, even with his limited experience, MacNab took on the job of principal at the Grosvenor and certainly stuck at it longer than Flight.

MacNab was also one of the finest British wood-engravers of C20th. The effect of prints like Corsican Landscape on his students of wood-engraving is clear; it may be less obvious with the students that practised other forms of printmaking but it there nevetheless. As for the students themeselves, I started the post off with French Porters by the most talented one them all, the Swiss printmaker, Lill Tschudi (1911 - 2004). She came across the linocuts of that albatross-around-my-neck, Norbertine von Bresslern Roth, while still at school in Switzerland. She saw the school adverts in The Studio and attended between 1929 and 1930 when Flight was still teaching there. Like some of the other students she also trained with the French cubist Andre Lhote. It wasn't a matter of this being their only brush with modernism; some the students could obviously afford to pick and choose.

The Australian artist, Ethel Spowers (1890 - 1947) was one. She had studied art in Melbourne then moved to Europe in 1921 and, just to let you know what their first prints could be like, I include Spowers woodcut Eglise de Grace, Paris made during her first year in Europe. As you see, it isn't up to very much at all. Tug of War she produced in 1933, after her return to Australia, and is a fine piece of work without having the modernist thoroughness of Tschudi. Spowers only spent part of 1929 at the Grosvenor but it had a great effect. Linocuts she produced before that time were stronger than her early woodcut effort but conventional untill Claude Flight showed her how.

Eveline Syme had been at school with Spowers in Melbourne but went on to study classics at Cambridge. She turned her mind to painting and France in the early twenties but it was the discovery of Flight's book Lino-Cut that led Syme and her friend Ethel Spowers to enrol at Pimlico in 1929. I like the way they all went back home and turned the technique on Australia. It has of course helped to make their name. But that process only began in the 1970s, with the vogue for all things Deco. Nowadays a dealer on ebay only has to add the illustrious words 'Grosvenor School' to some linocut or other to prove that linocuts will never be affordable or democratic again. The idea had been to show the modern age they lived in - what everyone else was doing when they were making linocuts - in a modern way.

Wattle tree is by Dorrit Black (1891 - 1951). I think she is the weakest of the three Australian artists but this does show what they were about. She studied in Melbourne before heading for London in 1927 when she spent a mere three months at the Grosvenor School. It wasn't long but it was clearly enough. The British artist Gwenda Morgan (1908 - 1991) studied there far longer - between 1930 and 1936. This almost certainly couldn't have been a full-time arrangement. She had already spoent the years 1926 to 1929 across the river Thames at Goldsmith's, after all. But the example MacNab gave shines through much of her fine body of work. These wood-engravings may not be as thrilling as those linocuts but her work stays in the mind a long time after excitements have washed over it.

Ronald Grierson (1901 - 1992) was another student of MacNab's. Mainly known as a designer of textiles, he had also first studied elsewhere (at Hammersmith School of Art) before spending time at the Grosvenor. Alison MacKenzie (1907 - 1982) didn't arrive untill the 1930s (with her sister Winifred, see July, 2011). Both had studied woodcut with MacNab's sister, Chica, at Glasgow School of Art. It was a small, quite short-lived world for many of them, I imagine, far from the formal disciplines of many art schools and more in line with the progressive independent schools that were being opened up - but far more dependent than they were on the trends.

Mary Macrae White goes to Fez

2011-08-24T13:47:00.020+01:00

Here is yet another colour print by a forgotten Scottish artist - this time Mary Macrae White, with a subject that is just as striking as the medium she is using. Her subject first. I am pretty confident that this is Morocco and fairly certain that her woodcut depicts the old city of Fez. Admittedly, it could be Tetouan or another of the Andalucian towns of northern Morocco but I think the tower you can see is the minaret of the Kairouine mosque and the green she uses suggests the tiles that decorate the corners. There are also still open spaces in the valley below the mosque and mules are commonly used as transport. To beef up the Moroccan connection, Macrae White came from Aberdeen. The link may be the etcher, James McBey (1883 - 1959) who was born in Aberdeenshire but spent a good deal of time in Morocco from 1912 onwards. In fact, he died in Tangier and I'm including one of his watercolours of the fine northern city of Tetouan, which obviously fascinated McBey.

You probably have to know Morocco and its colours to realise how observant an artist she was. I have her down as the same plein air generation as Ethel Kirkpatrick. Like her, Macrae White began as a watercolourist though I wouldn't say there was the same attempt to capture the effects of light that we find in Kirkpatrick. All the same, the dominant colours of the print - the cedar green and ginger on the mule - are commonly used for dyes in Morocco, like many other earth colours. (It was a common ploy for C19th painters to use a combination of turquoise and terracotta to signify the East). She is certainly interested in the effect of light and shadow, as you can see around the horses, so much so she must have made watercolours of the subject. But the artist she reminds me of most is SG Boxsius. The use of planes of colour is very much like him (although her reliance on the keyblock to articulate objects also puts me in mind of Frank Brangwyn). Nevertheless, I think we have here a trained artist who knew what she was about by the time she made this quite powerful colour woodcut. There is a refreshing lack of artiness about the print. It does tend to make me think of a C19th watercolour sketch but it's beautifully realised nevertheless - not something so easy to achieve in this demanding medium. I am just surprised we don't know of more prints by her. At some point she began to teach at the Greenwich House pottery in Greenwich Village, New York (presumably as a painter) but always kept a base for herself in Surrey, Kent or Sussex. She died aged 80 - I would have thought in about 1955.

I couldn't resist including this extraordinary photograph from 1916. It's a good example of the way cheaply-produced postcards often had more to tell about Morocco than fine etchings by artists like McBey - as much as he obviously liked both the country and its people. The men in the coarse djellabas and turbans on the left are countrymen, the ones in dark cloaks and fezzes are Jewish. So much work by Europeans tends to avoid real identity. Veiled or hooded figures are all too common. It gives local colour. I will say this for Macrae White: in this woodcut, at least, she does north Africa better justice than many do. There is an awareness and objectivity about her print that makes me feel it comes from the 1920s. The clothing, of course, offers no clues. But then everything surrounding this woodcut is generally frustrating! [I almost forgot to add that I lifted the Macrae White from Steven Bishop's blog. It may well be for sale at his site meridiangallery.co.uk/. I only wish I'd found it first.]

Ian Fleming, Ian Cheyne & Laboureur

2011-08-21T20:11:00.011+01:00

I have to admit that for a long time I looked on the Scottish artist Ian Fleming (1906 - 1994) as an also-ran. I first came across his colour woodcuts at an exhibition way back in 1986 and I should think I was too shocked by the prices being asked to take in anything else about the show. In my defence, I've only had monochrome catalogue illustrations between then and now. But that really is no excuse and, to be fair to him, colour woodcut wasn't Fleming's stock-in-trade, anyway. I know of only five colour woodcuts - the two I have posted here and three others, called Aspidistra, Road to the valley and Mist in the valley. OK, he wasn't good on titles, but I am going to assume all his woodcuts date from early on in his career. He produced the lyrical Parkscape, with its subtle modernity, in 1928 while still a student at Glasgow School of Art.

Or, to be more exact, he appears to have produced a very humble edition of three to begin with. Parkscape. Sunshine & rain was less snappy than the abruptly modernist Parkscape but that was its first title. As you see the second edition ran into a modest twenty-five. Glasgow tenement window (I am sorry to say only in monochrome) is equally subtle, framing the three yards and adopting the high viewpoint that became such a strong feature of his work. This print adopts a restricted view, later work does not, and perhaps behind it are the limitations placed upon student work. His teacher of woodcut at Glasgow was the influential Chica MacNab. To my intense frustration, I've been unable to turn up even one image by MacNab to show just how her work might have affected printmakers like Fleming and Winifred MacKenzie (another of her students). What these two have in common in their early work is the modern manner and I shall assume they learned that from MacNab.

But, in the end, it was his teacher of engraving, Charles Murray (1994 - 1954) who was to have the more enduring effect. Murray had himself been a student at Glasgow and is credited with reviving the art of copper engraving before even innovators like Robert Austin who taught at the RCA in London. Murray was something of a renegade who first fought with the White Army, then won the Prix de Rome before travelling, settling down again at his old art school and eventually hitting the bottle. Fleming wisely exchanged Murray's fine but mannered style for the urbane and voguish approach of the Breton engraver Jean-Emile Laboureur (1877 - 1943). Like Murray, Laboureur also got around but there was less of Iceland and Russia and more of Paris, London and New York. And in some ways this neatly sums up the appeal of Fleming's own work: there are the lyrical incidents of gardens and the Galloway and Dumfries countryside (as you will see below in Laboureur) but he never forgets his home town. Glasgow was his convincing subject, and no more so than in his wonderful engraving of 1930, Botanic Gardens, Glasgow.

The same is true of the incisive Modern suburbia from 1929. This was the year he left art school (he first attended in 1924) and the youthful wish to take a modern view of things is evident in the title. But for everything he seems to have learned from Laboureur - the strong contrast of light and shadow, the linear, descriptive approach - he is already his own man. I also have to admit that I prefer these early works. There's a freshness of vision here and a strong desire to show aspects of the world he lived in. Ironically, he is a realist in a way that the man from Nantes never is. He has taken the lessons of Laboureur about the complexities of modern lives to heart but he never sinks to pastiche.

Nor does Ian Cheyne (1895 - 1955). I am unashamedly re-posting my own Summer Picnic and his masterly Campers just to show how brave Ian Fleming was. Fleming never achieved work with this panache. By comparison, he looks almost antiquarian. But he was an engraver first and foremost and I always have the greatest admiration for printmakers who can make both convincing woodcuts and intalgio prints. Laboureur tried both but his woodcuts tend to look like pattern-making. Cheyne started off as a painter. He was eleven years older than Fleming but didn't attend Glasgow School of Art untill 1921 - 1923. He may have trained first at another school, or the war may have interrupted his studies. I don't know. Whatever the case, somewhere along the way, he meshed the contemporary impact of Laboureur with the mastery of Hokusai to come up with something utterly unique and deeply desirable.

He was brought up in the seaside town of Broughty Ferry, on the east coast of Scotland, near Dundee, but all we really know about him are the colour woodcuts that have set a standard for all those productions of the 1920s and 1930s. I have already posted as many as I can (well, there are one or two more). As for Laboureur himself, I leave you with two copper engravings from 1916 and the early twenties, and two woodcuts from a similar period. Just compare, if you will, the shapes of the trees on the hill in Le Printemps with the trees on the left in Fleming's Botanic Gardens, Glasgow or the meshes of the fishermens' nets with the meshing of the rain and light in Parkscape. Cheyne's frothy trees and cubist tents are more obvious loans but we take them as they were intended, with great good humour. And although there is no record of Fleming and Cheyne meeting, it's pretty certain that they did know one another through exhibiting with fellow Scots (and Englishmen) at the Society of Artist-Printmakers (Cheyne was treasurer). The 1930s market for prints held up better in Scotland than in England and this attracted English printmakers like Edgar Holloway to show with them. He knew both Cheyne and Fleming and exchanged Cheyne's West Highland Loch for one of his own etchings. Which shows just how much they learned from one another.

Seeing double with Engelbert Lap

2011-08-19T19:50:00.002+01:00

Here is the print that I talked about buying in Sheffield with the same print but with a different colourway below. My photograph is too pale. The colours are richer than this. All the same it suggests the image must have sold well at the time to warrant a second edition. I haven't found any others that Lap approached in this way. Not that many Austrian and German printmakers went in for numbered editions at the time. I can't make out the title of the work and mine only has a signature. This suggests to me that it was the second version. Gerrie Caspers described the blue one as his best print and of the ones I have seen, I tend to agree. But then you need to see the work in front of you and in this country, at least, we don't get that much of an opportunity to see woodcuts by Lap. I was fortunate when I bought this. No one used to be able decipher the signatures of Austrian or German artists. In those days access to Thieme-Baecker, with their list of monograms and signatures, was necessary to even identify someone like Carl Thiemann. I don't think you would even find one now.

Engelbert Lap

2011-08-17T19:22:00.001+01:00

A few years ago someone I know put me onto a shop on West Street in Sheffield. It was the kind of place that had a happy mix of second-hand books and C20th century paintings and prints, the kind of place that had a well-selected stock that appealed to a bookish crowd, the kind of place that time has tidied away. That particular afternoon I stopped to look in the window where I saw the colour woodcut you can see above. Or, at least, not that woodcut but one with a different set of colours. I went in; it was £110. I didn't hesitate. Neither the owner of the shop, nor I, had any idea who it was by or where it was from. But it was, of course, the Austrian printmaker, Engelbert Lap (1886 - 1970). And it was love at first sight.

As it happens, I now prefer the blues and greens of the one you can see to the browns and blues and golds of the one I own. And this says more than enough about the Engelbert Lap who was destined from an early age to join the Austrian army. From a military secondary school, he went on to the Theresian Military Academy in Vienna then joined the Tyrolean Kaiserjaeger as a lieutenant in 1907. He fought on the Galician and Dolomites fronts during the first war, retiring in 1923.

Being an artist in post-war Austria probably wouldn't have been the easiest way of making a living unless you had married an aristocrat like Norbertine von Bresslern Roth. Carl Rotky was a doctor; Emma Schlangenhausen painted frescoes; Emma Bormann had her academic job; Lap had his army pension but, so far as I can see, no training whatsoever as a professional artist. This is what makes the immaculate printing of the work I have propped up on a chair beside me so remarkable. Much less remarkable is the drawing of the church in the print above. It's insipid. You only have to compare Siccard Redl's unforgettable little woodcut of a chapel in the Tyrol (see Jospehine Siccard Redl: lost images of a lost province, February, 2011) and the way she integrates the building into the style of the picture to understand Lap's limitations and weaknesses - and the way he understood his strengths.

There are two points I want to make here: it was necessary for him to make a living and he obviously wished to do a good job. He had started off as a watercolour painter and progressed to woodcut. The days of the Secession, with its enthusiams and rejection of specialisms, were long gone. Unlike Carl Moll who had been painting away merrily for years untill he took it into his head to make a few faintly peculiar woodcuts around 1905, once Lap had hit on colour woodcuts, he stayed with them. Truth to nature? Plein air? Do me a favour. He could change the colourways of a print as it suited him, as he had done with mine, without concerning himself with the actual shade of either the mountains or the sky. This is about as far from the approach taken by Ethel Kirkpatrick as you can get.

As I said at the start, Lap has immediate appeal. The fact that this wears off once you have seen dozens of them is by the by. The work of artists like Emil Orlik, Emma Bormann and Walther Klemm that appeals to the mind as well as the eye, was by the kind of people who could go off and get secure jobs in universities. Decorative printmakers like Carl Thiemann, Hans Frank and Lap had no other option but to try and make sure their works sold. This is exactly why I found his work such a long way from the Tyrol. Try finding a Bormann or an Orlik in Yorkshire. I don't think you ever will.

He made prints of the farm below from all angles! Some prints look as if they have just been reversed. The same range of peaks appears in one woodcut after another. Sometimes these alpine farms are buried in snow, sometimes they are just buried. You have to admire his chutzpah. And this is exactly the approach that appeals to certain collectors. The variations, once you start to notice them, become a sort a game that makes you feel quite clever. All the same, every collection needs to have one. I can guarantee the pleasure; I cannot guarantee the price.

Adventures at the Vienna zoo

2011-08-15T21:38:00.000+01:00

Here is the perfect excuse to post two very recent finds - what I hope is a cleaner image of LH Jungnickel's Tigerkopf from 1909 and yet another of his unpredictable maccaws. The excuse was provided today by Neil's very welcome article about the merits of another Austrian printmaker, Norbertine von Bresslern Roth. I was disappointed that no one really took isssue with me at the time, so please look at adventuresintheprinttrade.blogspot.com. I have also changed the second image for a better one that I am happy to admit I have just this minute stolen from Lily's seminal blog Japonisme lotusgreenfotos.blogspot.com. It is also very annoying to find that Lily posted an LHJ tiger image three years ago! That's a double dose of humility for me in one day.

I should also add that the second woodcut is a proof. That's why there are marks and no signature. There are at least two versions, one with a blue macaw, one with a grey-blue one. It may be that he produced different versions for different editions. I think I shall be unable to resist eventually putting together a post dealing with this and Jungnickel's working methods. Stand by.

The Vale of Pewsey by Edward Loxton Knight

2011-08-14T08:06:00.000+01:00

I thought this was a rare enough colour woodcut by the British artist Edward Loxton Knight to be worth a quick post. It's just come up for sale on British ebay from Jubilee Galleries at the kind of 'Buy it now' price it might go for at auction in Nottingham without exactly being his most stylish work. He adopted a pretty Arnesby-Brownish manner later on and I don't think The Vale of Pewsey is as period as some of the work on my Loxton Knight post (September, 2011). In its favour, it's subtle and ambitious. It's the first out of an edition of 35, I think, still in the original frame and mount, so it is hard to say what the actual condition is - and at that kind of price, it matters. If his earlier work tends to look like colour-by-numbers, then this one is too much like a conventional landscape painting to be that interesting as a print. He just can't win, can he?

Here is a replacement image that I've found with help (see comments) which may show altered colours, I'll put it like that. It will come from a photograph from a catalogue because that's where all these art sites find their images - that or on ebay.  I had this one down as The Trent Valley, which is probably wrong as the Trent valley isn't so heavily wooded. You have to ask yourself if this is just another version or is it just that the top print has faded. I tend to think Loxton Knight was correcting a misjudgement by darkening the foreground in the lower print because the blue of the valley in the upper print is too pronounced and makes it float upwards. Darkening the clouds had the same effect. I think the improvements work and that number two is the better print. It goes to show what care Loxton Knight took with his woodcuts.

The reputation of Karl Johne

2011-08-13T21:30:00.000+01:00

I just want to recommend a post by Gerbrand Caspers at The Linosarus. The fine Czech printmaker, Karl Johne, should now be better known. His post includes some subtle woodcuts and Gerrie has done a good job getting as much information together as he can about Johne. Few artists worked in that style in Bohemia/Czechoslovakia so this is something of a first. As they say, enjoy!

gerrie-thefriendlyghost.blogspot.com

5 proofs by Thomas Austen Brown

2011-08-12T20:21:00.000+01:00

Some instructive and attractive proofs by the Scots painter and printmaker Thomas Austen Brown (1857 - 1924) for you to look at here. And serendipity on a grand scale. But the proofs first. They have only just come up on ebay and I emphasise, before anyone goes rushing off to bid, that these are attribitions - unsigned proofs from the studio that didn't satisfy the artist for one reason or another. You can see all five of them in a large format to make any errors obvious, I hope. In their favour are the bright, fresh images, without the fading and dirt that comes from framing work on paper. They are the way prints ought to look. The vivid colours and varying shades of the same colour on 'Bridge with cows' are exactly what we miss out on in so many of the old, tired prints we come across. This woodcut also shows just how free his approach was. So, as you see, I shall be talking as if they were by Brown.

The most common fault is poor printing of the block itself but misregistration is most obvious on the tree trunks in print 4. The child with geese above is of special interest because the block containing the red for her cuffs has been incorrectly placed so far as I can see. And it just goes to show how difficult these woodblocks were to print (the dealer has more than one proof of some of them for sale).

Brown was brought up in Edinburgh and trained at the Royal Scottish Academy and I have to say he is a better painter than he is a printmaker. Regular readers may also note that he was born just outside the period that Modern Printmakers usually covers. That said, we have seen early work by both Mabel Royds and certainly by Ethel Kirkpatrick, which is just as genre as the prints you see here. Even so these aren't bad at all. More than that, I am taken with the top one. The sky and trees in the image above is too reminiscent of woodcuts by another Scot, Thomas Todd Blaylock, for me to be easy with it. Brown, anyway, is a more subtle and less wilfull colourist than Blaylock. But the most striking comparison I want to make is between Brown and the younger Edinburgh printmaker, Helen Stevenson. The clean colours and irregular shapes in the top print are features I am fairly sure she must have liked and learned from. (I think there's also more than a touch of the American Norman Basset Hall who studied in Scotland, though I have to add I don't know much about her work).

Something else that interests me is the choice of Scottish subject matter. The one-storey thatched houses are the most obvious features but the red cows and innumerable sheep are just as true of Scotland as cottages of stone and cement. But what intrigues me even more is, believe it or not, a Dresden connection. Now, if you have looked at the previous post you will know that Siegfried Berndt left Dresden to study for a time in Scotland; the seller on ebay also pointed out that Brown had exhibited in Dresden where he won a medal. I have no idea what he exhibited, whether it was paintings or prints, but it makes you wonder. ( I also must add that Clive at Art and the Aesthete made the very astute comment that Brown's work reminded him of Berndt, probably without Clive knowing that the German printmaker had studied in Scotland!) I must admit I've not tried checking out which exhibition it was but I suppose these proofs must date from between 1905 and 1910. To his credit, Brown had tackled what was a relatively new medium for a man in his forties. It may, of course, have helped that the younger artist Elizabeth Christie Austen Brown (1869 - 1942) was also a maker of colour woodcuts. And perhaps the better one as well.

Siegfried Berndt

2011-08-10T20:00:00.000+01:00

If Emil Orlik went all the way to Japan to learn the art of woodcut, then Siegfried Berndt (1880 - 1946) did the next best thing: he went to Scotland. He was born in Goerlitz in the far south-east of Germany in 1880. If he had been born in 1889 as some people seem to think, he would have been nine years old when he entered the Academy of Fine Art in Dresden and although he came out as a prizewinner, even Berndt wasn't that sort of prodigy.

I've started this post off with two versions of Auf der Rehde (the topmost is from 1925, the one below from 1911) to try and give some idea of what kind of an artist we are dealing with here: someone willing to try out new ideas and someone who was willing to learn. At Dresden between 1899 and 1906, a leading student of the landscape painter Eugen Bracht (1842 - 1921), he had also managed to become an accomplished printmaker. My hunch is that, like Orlik, he had to pick things up where he could. Winning a travel scholarship in 1907 certainly gave him the chance to study far away from the academy.

Paris was an essential stop-off on the itinerary and Bruckenlandscahft von St Cloud shows an artist who has not only learned from Japanese woodblock but an artist who was well-aware of the lessons of French impression. But what strikes me most about this work is the freedom of his handling. This is still a painter's work, with none of the graphic qualities we associate with C19th Japanese printmaking. In fact, I will say this now: I think talk of the influence of Japanese art on Berndt has been overdone. I don't know if this print was made in France or when he returned to Germany. He also visited Belgium.

But Scotland is far more intriguing. I certainly can't think of any German or Austrian printmaker that made Scotland the subject of one print let alone two. In Hafen von Stranraer he moves sideways into the spare, muted territory of the German printmaker Wilhelm Laage. Unfortunately, I was unable to track down an image of Brucke uber der Firth of Forth but Edinburgh is nearer to home. The idea that fascinates me is this one: Frank Morley Fletcher has become director of the Edinburgh College of Art in 1906 and I am guessing this is what took Berndt as far as Scotland. He wanted to learn from someone who was working in the Japanese manner. (By then Orlik was not). I also think that Orlik's Japanese prints were too literal for what Berndt wanted.

This woodcut is seriously Japanese but is seriously German as well. The sketchiness of the details also remind me of Fletcher. The glorious print below does not. This makes me think of Ponte degli Alpini by a Scotsman, Charles Hodge Mackie (1862 - 1920). What I suppose I am saying is that Berndt was somewhere between magpie and chamaeleon. It's another way of saying he was modern.

I am also going to say now that I am a late convert to the work of Siegfried Berndt despite the nice noises I have made elsewhere online. (Look if you dare). I thought his prints were hesitant and amateurish but there is nothing like the kind of photographs you get on ebay to give the worst impression possible of any artist let alone a more experimental one like Berndt. So I didn't look farther.

It would be very easy to play spot-the-artist with Berndt. It's a temptation I'm going to resist. What I will say is that he must surely have known the work of the impressionists as well as Cezanne and Van Gogh. The three cows are starker than Walther Klemm would have done them but I think he knew Klemm's early woodcuts. (Klemm taught in Weimar from 1913 onwards). The strong colours and high horizon are Klemm with the Vienna Secession removed. The use of other artists is a key to his prolific printmaking - remember that he was also painting.

I am going to leave you to make up your own minds about the rest of these strong and varied prints. Yes, he often does boats and water but he is far less susceptible to the old standby of snow. (I held a snow scene back, partly because the image was murky). I don't really know a great deal about his life or career after he returned to Dresden. He married and between 1932 and 1941 taught at Waldorfschule. There must be other written sources in German somewhere and his prints are still available. A commercial Berlin gallery held an exhibition of his woodcuts from 1905 to 1945 only last August.

I know he came to monchrome woodcuts after the first war, surely influenced by the contemporary work first of Die Brucke and then the Expressionists. This says alot about his willingness to adapt. But true to form, he amalgamates with aplomb. Because there is Cezanne and van Gogh in the mix as well as art deco. (Those two artists I have to say come over more in his oil paintings). And with facility like that, it's no wonder he won prizes. [I forgot to say I nned to credit Annex Galleries for the 1925 version of Auf der Ruhe.]

James Woodford

2011-08-07T20:15:00.000+01:00

Still in the Blackheath area, we now come to James Woodford (1893 - 1976). Not someone who was known for his prints, the first two images you see here are the actual boxwood blocks he made, both of them well in line with the kind of wood-engravings the sculptor and printmaker Eric Gill was producing in the 1920s. I don't whether there were editions or even whether he sold any but he must have made proofs. But this post isn't so much about his printmaking as the play-off between the different media he used - drawing, engraving, modelling and relief sculpture.

Like me, he was brought up in Nottingham, the son of a lace designer. After studies at the local school of art, interrupted by war-time service, he went on to the RCA in London (where he might have got to know Charles Paine). 1922 saw him with a three-year scholarship to study sculpture at the British School in Rome. You can see him below two years later in this wonderful study by Robert Austin - Woodfood posed for the figure on the right - where the large crucifix brings in the requisite Catholic note. (Eric Gill, whose work he must have known, was a convert).

It's certainly interesting to note the unnerving mix of religion and eroticism for which poor Gill has become so notorious. Obviously it's quite hard to judge their effectiveness as prints when all we see is the block. The real print you see below, I think is ungainly. The interests of the sculptor in form and carving are uppermost. What matters, though, is the effort he put into producing work that would be flat.

You only have to compare Austin's subtle draughtsmanship with Woodford's stark, anatomical description of this cow, to see just how different their priorties were. Even so, I think it was his approach to modelling and structure that had an impact on his colleagues. Because by about 1930 Woodford was at Blackheath school of art, alongside Charles Paine and John Platt. (All three men were certainly there some time between 1932 and 1935).

This bronze relief for a series at Norwich City Hall especially reminds me of the woodcut of a bull that Platt produced in March, 1932. The position of the animal is almost exactly the same. I have no way of knowing exactly what interaction existed between staff and students at the school. Norwich City Hall was opened in 1938 but Woodford must have been working on his panels well before that. All I want to suggest is the way these artists and teachers were open to new ways of doing things. Both Platt and Paine changed their style in the 1930s. I don't think this is just something you dream up on your own or on a whim. You only need to scroll back to Paine's Welwyn squirrel to see the way he analyses structure in a new and envigorating way. Woodford's bull may well be a compliment to his friend, John Platt. Platt mentions both men as friends in his Authors' Note to Colour Woodcuts of 1937. We are not talking about up-and-coming artists here; these were all succesful men. It was in 1937 that Woodford was elected associate of the Royal Academy. You can see him seated third from the left with the-great-and-the-not-so-good of the selection committee. Woodford, Platt and Paine may not have been modernists but all of them, to their credit, were affected by the modern spirit - and made it new. [I must add here that I am grateful to Liss Fine Art for all the images here apart from the RA photo, the Austin, which is Abbot & Holder's, and the bronze relief.]

Charles Paine: Edinburgh connections

2011-08-06T19:46:00.000+01:00

The British designer Charles Paine (1895 - 1967) is my lead-in to the next post on the work of staff and students at Blackheath art school in the 1930s. Alot like F Gregory Brown, Paine began work as the arts and crafts movement was coming to an end. Apprenticed as a stained glass designer in his home town of Salford, Lancashire, he went on to train in Manchester, followed by the RCA in London. As studies were interrupted by service in the armed forces, he didn't finally graduate untill 1919. I wonder if he was astute enough by then to recognise the opportunities that work in Edinburgh was to offer him. I suspect that he was.

Edinburgh College of Art already had two of the best British printmakers at work. Not only was its director Frank Morley Fletcher but Mabel Royds also returned to work there about the same time Paine took up his post in the department of applied arts. This field of work was dear to Morley Fletcher's heart and it was not long before he appointed yet another important printmaker to be Charles Paine's immediate boss. This was John Platt. Paine could not have known just how useful this was all to prove. He left Edinburgh fairly soon afterwards (I'm not sure exactly when) to work in stained glass for the Glasgow firm of Guthrie and Wells. But Edinburgh hadn't left him. As early as 1921, he received his first breakthrough commission to design posters for London Underground.

It's impossible to say whether it was Platt who put him onto Frank Pick at the Underground. Platt was noted for his genorosity towards people and my hunch is that it was Platt who made the introduction. As it happens, 1922 also saw Platt designing his one-and-only poster for the Tube - his chamaeleon design, too clever and too complicated. Unlike Platt and Gregory Brown, Paine wasn't a painter and was rarely tempted into picture-making when he designed. Paine's training in stained glass led him to concentrate on strong colours and simplified images. In his most effective work, he did exactly that.

But he also made a move that we would now take for granted in advertising but which must have been alot less obvious at the time. Instead of relating his imagery to the subject in a literal way, he often chose an image for what it suggested. What have fish in a river to do with Uxbridge? Very little other than suggest the countryside that lies just beyond the end of the line. Even bolder was his poster for the 1921 boat race - nothing more than a stylised wake and the ripples left by the oars. He understands that he only has to attract attention, that he doesn't have to represent anything to get a message across.

And looking at this end-paper above and his advertising for Sundour fabrics, no one could accuse Paine and sticking to a formula. One of the remarkable things about him is his ability to match his manner to the job. Whether this meant falling back on historical pastiche or picking up the latest design trend, didn't matter. (Nor do I want to suggest he was only involved in graphics from the twenties onwards but I've been unable to turn up a single textile or stained glass design by him).

I don't know when Paine made his move to California, but in 1924 Morley Fletcher was appointed first director of the new Santa Barbara School of Arts. I am pretty sure it must have been his old boss at Edinburgh who motivated him but I don't know whether his job as head of applied arts at the Community Arts School was under Morley Fletcher's supervision. But he didn't stay, anyway. It's clear that artists like Fletcher recognised his ability but it strikes me that teaching wasn't something he felt committed to - unlike Fletcher and Platt.

But one thing that does remain constant during the period was his use of animal imagery, specially where no animals are really called for. Their appeal to children is strong, their appeal to adults through children even stronger. Around 1930 he was living in Welwyn Garden City, a new garden suburb in rural Hertfordshire, where he was commissioned by the development company to design posters for use on London underground. The choice of the four seasons as their subject emphasised its all-year-round appeal. Not that Paine went for the obvious option. No charming houses and lovely countryside for him. Instead he produced four remarkably modern animal images: a lamb and snowdrops for spring (which frankly was pushing it) insects round what looks like a daffodill for summer, hares in the snow and a chaffinch for winter, and this tremendous red squirrel for the autumn. Yes, they are standard ideas but the execution implies an educated audience. The appeal is both muted, up-to-date and subtle. (Unfortunately, some misguided individual at Welwyn Hatfield borough council has chosen to bung SAMPLE across the other three images - the only ones available to a world-wide audience. I only hope the culprit reads this.) And what else was Paine doing while designing posters for the Welwyn estate? Well, he was back to teaching, this time at Blackheath school of art in London. And who was he working for now? It was John Platt, of course.

Tales from ebay: Leslie Moffat Ward

2011-08-04T18:22:00.000+01:00

Readers will know I don't generally hand out tips on ebay items up for sale and this post is no exception. But it is a cautionary tale of just how badly things can go wrong if you don't pay almost constant attention to our favourite website. There is no point being occasional about ebay; you must be unremitting. And this is why. The colour print you see above is by the British artist Leslie Moffat Ward (1888 - 1978). Perhaps not exciting but an artist I've liked for a long time without ever finding anything decent by him ie one of his better landscape etchings from the 1920s. This rare woodcut is from the same period, I would say, and looks very much like a steal from SG Boxsius' Autumn. Some few weeks back it came up on ebay with the far-fetched starting price of £90. Having failed to sell, it came back a week or two later, now starting at a more reasonable £75. Even so, no one was biting. So, finally the vendor put it in at £50. And what happened? Two charlies slogged it out, bid after bid, and took the price to £156! I mean I like Ward but I don't want to make a fool of myself. You couldn't make it up.