Bernard Rice (1900 - 1998): the Bosnian woodcuts

Some artists find the environment that makes them what they are; for Bernard Rice that place was Bosnia. He was born in Innsbruck only 21 year after the occupation of the Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzogovina by Austria-Hungary. His father, also Bernard, was a maker of stained glass and Rice learned the craft of glass-making with him but also attended art school in Innsbruck (1915 - 1918). It was there he began to learn woodcut. (The family were not repatriated untill 1919). Frustratingly, I never met Rice but I now suspect he knew Bosnia before he left Austria. He began his adult training at the Westminster School of Art in London, followed by the Royal Academy Schools. Presumably, he studied drawing and painting because he painted later in life. He left London in 1922 to teach furniture design in a craft school in Bosnia, by then part of the new kingdom of Yugoslavia. For a twenty-two year old, he already had a wide range of skills and he immediately began to put them to use. He settled in the village of Vlasenica in eastern Bosnia some miles to the north-east of Sarajevo and many of his most memorable prints feature the snow-bound village and its inhabitants (fewer than 2,000). Not content with printmaking in this remote little country, he set about making his own blocks. But not just any blocks. For the one below of Travnik (in central Bosnia) he used limewood, a notably soft wood and quite different from the very hard boxwood his English contemporaries were using for their engravings. You can see the typically open, undulating grain of the limewood at the top of the print - he would have had to lower the block very slightly to have achieved that effect. Of course, not only that, he had pinned the planks in such a way that the gaps between showed as unprinted lines. This may have started out to some extent as truth to materials but he was also affected by the strict divisions of images used by stained glass artists. It's this adaptation of the technique that really is the remarkable thing. It shows someoneone with an unconventional imagination, to say the least, and also someone who was quite ready to throw out the rule-book, which I am pretty sure he had off by heart.

The minarets, tower and lines all combine as if the structures are suspended on cotton. At the bottom of the print you can see more of the gentle lowering of surface to achieve, which gives it the feel of mezzotint. Of course, this treatment would require equally individual printing. In fact, block preparation, cutting and printing are combined by Rice into works quite unlike any others in British printmaking. The do-it-yourself ethos is quite close to that of Eric Gill and his followers who began to move to the Sussex village of Ditchling after 1912 but the end result is basically central European. You can see Vlasenica in the woodcut below with its woven fences and haystacks, though cut is not quite the right word because Rice combines cutting and engraving in one and the same print.

The houses are better defined in the print below. You can see here they are made of wood and almost certainly thatched. Nor do I think you could tell that he had broken another cardinal rule here, the print being only a central section of a much larger work. He did this at least three times - in 'Podgorica', 'Vlasenica' and 'Travnik' (you can see a rather over-exposed photo of the big 'Travnik' below). I have to say this is one of my favourite prints. It doesn't have to be great but I have to say again that reproduction doesn't do it any justice. The effect of the printed areas against the wonderful handmade paper is magical - as all good prints need to be. What made me leave this print in the print box at Ayres on Museum St in London, I do not know; inexperience, I should think, and not being quite sure what to make of Rice at the time. Nevertheless, it came into my possession one fine day and many years later. It doesn't try hard, the organisation of black, white and line appears effortless. What he wanted to get across was the place, his numerous skills in the end are quite subordinate to what he obviously thinks is a marvellous subject. But my reaction then was a typical one. If it hadn't been for the writer and printmaker Albert Garret and his very untidy book and the London dealer Jonathan Blond, Rice would have been left disregarded in his Chelsea studio. The print establishment were bemused, or sniffy about his Bosnian woodcuts. Not easy to categorise - and they also probably saw things they just didn't care for.

We come now to my latest acquisition (it arrived two days ago). I am far from beyond making criticisms of Rice. There is often something I find irritating or dubious about his prints - the sketchy Serbian spruce and smoky printing in 'The Mill' (top) is annoying. Some of them I feel entirely dubious about. But this has no faults or far-fetched technique. It is quite different in both feel and scale to the previous one and is the only engraving he made on boxwood hence the small size. The relationship between the buildings, orchards, stacks and surrounding hills is one of considerable intimacy and isolation.

As a dismal addendum to this post, I need to say that only two villages like Vlasenica survived the civil war: Lukomir, which you see below, and another hamlet, are in the mountains to the south of Sarajevo near the boundary of the Federation and Republika Srpska. As you can see many have lost their wooden shingles and don't have the same Ottoman overhangs and plaster. You shouldn't assume that all the buildings are habitations. Some of the smaller ones are a combination of barn and byre (cowshed). I should also say these two places, like Rice's prints, are a precious part of the Bosnian patrimony.

Rice returned to London to study at the Royal College of Art in 1926. (No doubt he was in Malcolm Osborne's etching class). He married in 1927 and returned to Bosnia for another year. There were also exhibitions at the Chenil Gallery (1925) and the St George's Gallery (1926). It is now hard to work out what his reputation was then. He was certainly selling because the prints turn up, especially his images of Travnik. But many of the smaller prints are very scarce. Significantly, some of the prints I own have never been framed, always a big plus, mainly because their condition is so good.

He left for Cairo in 1929 to teach both wood and copper engraving, etching and fresco, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Sometimes I think he had too many skills for his own good. He left Cairo in 1939 and after the second war, taught wood engraving and drawing to sculptors at the Sir John Cass School (1949 - 1952). Work in other mediums does turn up, but not much. He made one very large print called 'Rammuda' on cotton. I even have a tablecloth he designed with Chinese style horses. His darker experiments (not included here) often seem to lack conception and rarely make satisfying images but he probed the ambiguities. The figure studies in particular are certainly not to contemporary taste and I can understand why Rice doesn't appeal to everyone. No matter. For me, there is only one issue: the next print, just around the corner. What else will it say about this rather extraordinary man and his sympathies?