Ada Collier, ancient & modern

It is never easy to say something useful about an artist when you have seen very little of their work but the British printmaker Ada Collier (1870 - 1948) is worth the try. I first came across a colour woodcut by her in the mid 1980s, a memorable, misty image of the four horses taken by the Venetians from Constantinople and placed on the facade of St Mark's. It had been bought by a friend from Collier's great niece and was a neat summary of two of Alan's passions, Venice and Byzantium. I tell you this because I think it says something about the way Collier chose her images. Of the seven that I have seen, she depicts the quaysides of the Mediterranean or subjects that are very near to that ancient coastline - St Mark's Cathedral or the sweet market at Tangier, which you can see below. Even so, along with Ian Cheyne, she is the only other British colour woodcut artist, who was anything like a modernist in the end.



I don't want to exaggerate this claim. The three colour images here extend from the rather indeterminate feeling of Edwardian aestheticism in 'Sweet Market, Tangier' (I have Bill Carl at William P Carl Fine Prints to thank for this photo - it is sold) to decorative symbolism equal to Carl Thiemann's in 'Venetian Boat' through to the fauve tendency of 'Martigues Boats'. Keep in mind that she was Cheyne's senior by 25 years and it's more telling to compare her to a contemporary like Ethel Kirkpatrick. She must have started out on her career as a painter of oils and gouache before Batten and Morley Fletcher began to experiment with colour woodcut in the late 1890s and well before the Post Impressionist exhibition that brought the modern movement to Britain. Even so, I think the differences between these three images show an artist learning from prevailing trends. Kirkpatrick could do stupendous reflections but the firm objectivity of Collier's 'Martigues Boats' would have been a step too far. Kirkpatrick descended into craftsmanship. Collier became modern instead. For her, the image, and only the image, counted.

She learned the technique of colour woodcut from that arch Edwardian, William Giles. Certainly a good artist to have as a teacher, she had produced the glorious 'Venetian Boat' by 1917. It combines everything that is good about her: the muted colours, the powerful sense of line, the exact image set off against amorphous and shifting shapes. But even in the Tangier image, the tented structure shading the stalls stands in for masts and sails and the Moroccans in their djellabas become shapes of pure colour. Kandinsky it isn't but she knew what she wanted to do. And this is what I like about her. She has motifs and interests that you can recognise but the complex of colour and form draw you in. For instance, I particularly like the way the furled sails appear to flat above the boats. She plays the realism of her figures and the painted sides of the boats against the irradiating patterns.

As one of her early images of Martigues ( 'Nocturne - Martigues', not shown here) dates from 1918, she must have visited the Provencal town before commercialism set in during the 1920s. Augustus John had arrived in 1910 and this does perhaps place her with some of the more forward-looking artists of the period. By 1924 she was not only making prints of Venice but her work was part of the British exhibit for the Biennale. It's a pity no good image of her horses at St Marks' is available. It's a fine, original and rather odd print - so pale you at first think it might be faded. The great swoop of sail in 'Venetian Boat' reminds me of the mass and line of the horses, which are viewed with complete realism from below. But then the Venetian lugger could just as easily be ferrying an embalmed pharoah down the river Nile. In the same way, the horses lift their hooves with an astonishing sense of both style and history, stepping directly and deliberately across our vision.