Leonard Beaumont: road to the glacier

                                                                                      
I know it's not as easy for most readers to get up to Sheffield as it is for me, but I wanted to remind anyone who can get there, that the Beaumont exhibition that opened at the Graves Gallery yesterday is worth the trip if it isn't too far. And if that sounds like a qualified judgement, it is. It runs untill next September, so you have plenty of time. Independant they are in Sheffield, but also mean. There is no catalogue and not even a list of prints. (I had to make my own). But back to my doubts.

                                                                                
 There is something unconvincing about his work. At the same time he was making etched capriccios of Alpine subjects like Road to the glacier here, he was also starting out on a quite different road to a modernist Shangri La with linocuts like Mountain Stream. I like them both but I particularly liked the etchings of Switzerland. He denied any attempt to be factual ('I worked mostly from the imagination. I never took photographs or made rough sketches') and this tends to give that side of his work a painstaking, naive quality. It's a kind of higher form of doodle. I don't want to sound snooty when I talk about his lack of training, but I think it shows. Frank Brangwyn, who had even less of an art education than Beaumont, who attended eveniong classes at the School of Art, said that all art schools produced were 'clever imitators'. Ironically, imitation was the name of the game with Beaumont, to some extent. Even so, he was an eloquent and meticulous printmaker and the etchings are so fine, I am far from convinced they are not in fact engravings.

 

Perhaps he merely mimicked the style. Mimickry was certainly a theme for me in both rooms. In his final linocut, the cheeky Nymphs, errant from 1934, he even mimics the stipple effect of lithography and I went round playing the double game of spot the catalogue mistake and spot the influence. From Stanley Anderson to Claude Flight, they are all there. In itself, that is quite some range, and I do think this is where Beaumont falls down. He was never a professional artist so much as a professional designer, and I wonder to what extent he approached his printed work in the way a designer approaches his work, not so much with a consistent style as with a need to communicate. This he certainly did do, albeit in his dry and exact way (see above).

                                                                                  

I thought giving one room over to colour and the other to black-and-white was a mistake. A chronological approach would have provided visitors with the striking differences between his etching and linocuts between about 1929 and 1932. The change-over was pretty remarkable, but because some of the dates given at Sheffield are wrong, the view of his progression is muzzy, anyway.  But, as I said, he didn't let the factual get in the way too much. Like John Hall Thorpe before him, he was trained essentially to meet a deadline. This probably made him a very reliable freelance in the end. No doubt, when he went on his trips to Switzerland and Madeira, he just wanted to let his imagination go its course for a change and if he appears to be as errant as his nymphs, it perhaps also shows a diverse and fertile Yorkshire mind at work. That it is different in Yorkshire, there is no doubt.
                                                                   

                                                                               
                                                                                   
And when he said later in life that no one made any money out of etchings and linocuts in the twenties and thirties, he was strangely at variance with the facts. Untill the Depression set in, some etchers made a good deal, and at two or three guineas linocuts were by no means cheap. It strikes me as unusal that he had a father in a managerial position but went straight to work for the Sheffield Morning Telegraph at sixteen as 'general factotum' before progressing to the art department. He made imagination sound like something you did on holiday.

                                                                             

Leonard Beaumont at the Graves Gallery

22nd December is another necessary date for your diary simply because that's the day an exhibition of prints and drawings by Leonard Beaumont opens at the Graves Gallery in Sheffield. What with the current show of Eric Slater, it does look as if curators at provincial British art galleries are at long last waking up to the boxes and boxes of modern prints they hold and at last letting people see them. Don't think these are just exceptions; I really should start to name and shame. At Sheffield, as with Eastbourne, it's much the same come-on, only this time it's 'unsung Sheffield hero'. It makes you want to slap them. (See December 2012 for a review of the exhibition).

 

There was nothing heroic about being an artist in Sheffield in the twenties and if you are underestimated your linocuts don't go into four figures. Anyone that knows prints of the period will know Beaumont as someone who was not a member of the Chorus (top) but displayed independance all along and stands out from the Grosvenor School students for his 'clarity and elegance' as the Sheffield Telegraph had it. (I also need to say that he never studied with Claude Flight at the school but obviously the influence is there - possibly too much so. I think it's one of the weaknesses of his prints).

                                                                                
These were the qualities that led hin into a career in design, first at the Royal Mail and then at Sainsbury's, in the fifties and sixties. He came up the hard but fairly common way for the times: evening classes at the local art school while he was working at the Telegraph. After serving in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during the first war, he first taught himself etching before moving on to the linocuts, which he is best know for today. Eye-catching and modern as Sainsbury's packaging was during the sixties, they hardly compare with the kind of prints you see here.

That said, Beaumont brings out all the reservations I have about modern linocut. Their repetition leaves them looking very much like design only. To some extent, once you have done one, you have done them all. Fine as they are, the roadmenders (above) may just as well be in the chorus line or yodelling in the Tyrol. As he said himself, he never used a sketchbook or a camera but a combination of memory and imagination. It shows. And as I said elsewhere, the Studio Magazine refused to illustrate Claude Flight and Edith Lawrence's linocuts because they were  design and pointedly showed their designs for furniture and rugs.

 

And just to be perverse, the Swiss landscape below is one of my favourites. The image is from a current auction-house catalogue and it's a pity it's so pale. For some reason Dominic Winter and have a stash of linocuts and books together in one lot. That makes them a gift to the trade. Still, this is Claude Flight less the overprinting and in some ways Beaumont's linocuts are the better for it. Interesting that we don't get Swaledale.

Please note: There is a second post in December, 2012, that reviews the exhibition. It's also worth saying that I'm an independant writer not a curator.