A long time ago I put up a post about Chris Wormell's work for Adnam's brewery at Southwold. (He also did package designs for Waitrose which I regret not keeping). I remember picking up a copy of his book An alphabet of animals at Tate Britain around about that time and thinking it would be a good idea to have one of the linocuts. But I never saw one. Not until today, when I came across the front page of the book up for auction on 8th March at Dominic Winter. And a fine piece of work it is though it is more like a chap-book illustration than an L.H. Jungnickel beast.
By an odd co-incidence, I had an email from a reader this morning where he mentioned a colour woodcut by P.G. Needell and, as it happens, there is a batch of paintings by the same artist, including Mill Hill, Autumn (above) in the sale at Cirencester. It is pure Needell. I am not sure how Dominic Winter came to think it is acrylic. Needell does not strike me as an acrylic sort of chap, but there you are. Stranger things happen. Anyway, judge for yourself.
W.J. Phillips' Jim King's Wharf, Alert Bay, BC from 1927 has the classic colour woodcut manner. It is a well-known image and going by the estimate, the auctioneers must expect to attract attention from buyers in Canada and the United States. The Americans tend to know a good thing when they see one and have been right about colour woodcut all along. To be honest, I cannot share their enthusiasm for Phillips, but they have always been prepared to pay the necessary dollars for class. And a class act Phillips certainly is.
While we are on class, Edouard Manet's Le chanteur espagnol from 1861 is in this surprising mix of prints. Manet took European art on a trip it has never got over and here he is, at the onset of the etching revival, showing the way the modern artist handles a print. Immediacy is the byword. He uses etching primarily for its expressive and dramatic potential. What we are meant to hear is the clamour of flamenco. Yet for all its vitality, this etching is steeped in the past in a way that only the work of an artist with as original and broad a sensibility as Manet could be.
I agree with you about Water Phillips. In his lifetime he was a bit of a whinger about the state of Canadian art and used his constant complaining to make his own art more widely. Mr Phillips was for Mr Phillips and was not afraid to let anyone in Canada know. I am not as dazzled by his printmaking but Canadian seem to have been hypnotized. I have personally seen many of his prints and one painting and I wouldn't consider him a great but again....the Canadian government has been snapping up his work which in turn has driven up the prices. It's all very odd.
ReplyDeletePhillips also had the benefit of a newspaper column where he was not afraid to let his readers know he was in with the the London art world. But he was a good writer and was not taken in by hype.
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