Alice Coates & John Platt at Shrewsbury

 

This is a very late alert about a timed sale by Hall's of Shrewsbury. It has been open for about two weeks and closes at 4pm on 31st October. Tomorrow is still not to late to snap up some very choice work bought by a surgeon from Hilary Chapman in 2003 and 2004. There is also an interest modern colour woodcut 'The sower' by John Petts and a wildly misconceived colour linocut by the irreproachable Gertrude Hermes.

There are six epic colour woodcuts by John Platt and a rare and sublime colour linocut by Alice Coates called The signpost. It is England at a crossroads and I am never sure whether it represents Staffordshire or Worcestershire though in a way it hardly matters. No one but Coates would have seen the West Midlands as a hothouse, half-French, half-Grosvenor, the signpost at the foot of the slope subtly lets us know the countryside near Handsworth had found its own poet who unfortunately did not stay the course. She is closest in feel to her great Scottish contemporary, Ian Cheyne, perhaps not surprising because she has Scottish ancestry herself. But her great love was botany and she went on to work at botanical illustration until arthritis forced her to stop. So if you can't buy the print, you can buy one of her books. 

I love Coates' work but I can only admire John Platt's. That said there is plenty to admire in this small but judicious collection of the complete range of his oeuvre. From the scintillating The goat stride to the late dark masterpiece 'Sails' to make the very best of this auction, you will have to buy all six. You may never again get the chance to pick up such a good range of what Platt could do.

I have to say my own personal favourites are his wide angle beach scenes. 'Pilchard boats, Cornwall' is an elegant tour-de-force from his middle period when he took note of everything he saw like a masterful surveyor of British leisure and life. Let no one tell you this dynamic vision originated with the colour linocutters of the Grosvenor School as some would have us believe; it originated here, with John Platt, and derived from sound schooling at the Royal College of Art.

I have never been a big fan of Platt's later work. He tended to take a good idea like a rock guitarist and then do it to death. I mean you either love Led Zep or you can take two or three minutes of them and I think it is something like that with Platt. He had done all those flitting swallows years before on the walls of All Saints at Leek and no amount of appealing to Hokusai could redeem. It is an exercise in aerial effect. 'Sails' on the other hand is hard to explain. Although it derives from his torn paper method which he used with students, he transformed the harbour at Brixham into a seascape of Germanic half-abstraction. 

Platt was very much a man of his time. While some modern artists wanted to expunge the narrative and literary elements from their work, others like Platt took the academic and literary and made it into a new form of modern art which disappeared from view at the outbreak of war and did not reappear until young artists like David Hockney were being trained in the sixties at the Royal College of Art.

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