The colour woodcuts of Winifred McKenzie

I heard last week from a reader in Scotland about a proof of Winifred McKenzie's colour woodcut Waterfall (third from top) from 1935 coming up for sale in Edinburgh. Like the rest of McKenzie's colour prints, Waterfall  is rare and shows what kind of work from the 1920s and 1930s is still appearing at auction houses in Scotland. No-one expected it to be cheap but at about £500 it was not expensive either. 

One of the big gains in recent years has been the appearance online of good quality photographs on auction house websites. Online auctions also mean that many images that were sold by means of printed catalogues are also coming up online nowadays. This means it is time for a second look at McKenzie mainly because there is more to show you on this post than the one I put up some years ago.

As with Hans Frank, it will be the earlier woodcuts that will figure in the post. To be honest, I just prefer them. I suspect the early ones show the effect of linocut on her woodcuts while the later woodcuts may be more in line with the wood-engravings she began to make a little later. McKenzie enrolled on the teacher's diploma course at Glasgow School of Art in 1923. Chica MacNab graduated from the same course two years later and was offered a job teaching a relief printmaking class in conjunction with the intalgio class taken by Charles Murray. I am never sure exactly when MacNab resigned. I think it was in 1927, so there must have been a number of students who took her class but McKenzie and Ian Fleming are the only artists I know of for sure.

What is interesting is that Fleming was more influenced by Murray and McKenzie by MacNab. She did not take to Murray (who drank) and I have not seen any monochrome prints from her Glasgow years. A shame because Murray was a good printmaker and Fleming did some exceptional work after studying with him. McKenzie herself made her black-and-white prints after taking MacNab's advice and studying wood-engraving with her brother, Iain, at the Grosvenor School.

So far as I know, there are no colour linocuts surviving by either McKenzie or Fleming but I assume they made use of the medium simply because they adopted a pared-down style for their colour woodcuts. Notably, neither made much use of the keyblock while their work at the time had a lot in common with MacNab's faux naif style. I may of course be wrong about lino. McKenzie complained about the expense of materials for making colour woodcuts and said when her costs were taken into account, she hardly made any money. This may help to explain why there are so few colour prints by her; it doesn't explain why she didn't turn to lino instead.

From the top, the prints are Evening in France, Ben Lui (1933) Waterfall, unknown, Valley of the Dee (1928) Devon valley (1937). Valley of the Dee is the only one I can be sure she made while still a student. It is the most Japanese of the lot but could not be anyone else. Evening in France is reminiscent of MacNab and I assume was also made while McKenzie was at the school of art. Whether the early prints are a bit too samey, may be down to taste. Ben Lui is the one I would go for myself. It has also been remarked that her work has a lot in common with Ian Cheyne's but that may only be because both were influenced by the same range of Japanese prints. It has to be said McKenzie never achieved the same imaginative mastery as Cheyne in work such as Beeches at Glen Lyon.

What she also lacked was Cheyne's sense of place. This is what gives artists like Eric Ravilious and S.G. Boxsius their coherence. What they saw around them remains recognisable to this day. Like McKenzie, neither ever trained on fine art courses but had the kind of unique vision we associate with all good artists. I tend to think she took a wrong turn with wood-engraving. In the end, colour prints of the period (whether on wood or lino) have proved to have greater staying-power and kudos. Ironically, I tend to think the same thing about the engravings of Murray, Fleming and Robert Austin. What McKenzie might have achieved if she had stayed the course, no one now can say.

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Jessie Garrow, Anna Findlay & Chica MacNab

                                                                                         

I have brought these three artists together because all took part in the 1920s printmaking scene in Glasgow that also included Ian Fleming and Ian Cheyne, both of whom have already had posts of their own. Of the three women, it was Chica MacNab (1889 - 1990) who perhaps played the key role. From a colonial background, she was sent home to Scotland for an education, first at Kilmalcolm School, then at Glasgow School of Art. Not that she learned the art of printmaking there because by 1921, before she attended the school of art, she was a founder member of the Glasgow-based Society of Artist Printers. It isn't perhaps surprising that once she had finished her course, she was offered a job and promptly set up a class teaching colour woodcut at the School of Art in 1925. (Her students included Ian Fleming and Alison MacKenzie). Yet for all her significance, I have only ever come across one of her prints, in some ways a rather disappointing colour woodcut called From the Barr Hill. I say disappointing because her style is more in line with the Scottish genre printmakers of the pre-war years. Elizabeth Christie Brown, Jeka Kemp and Thomas Austen Brown are often hard to distinguish one from the other. So much so that some of the unsigned woodcuts attributed to Austen Brown on this blog are almost certainly by his wife. One lives and learns. (And I will add here that Clive Hazell believes she is the better artist). But it is hard to judge MacNab herself. Her woodcut class ran for only two years and her prints are shockingly rare. All the same it seems to me at least that she provided a learning link between the earlier colour woodcut artists like the Browns and Elizabeth York Brunton and the younger ones who went on to reject the genre and historicist styles of their teachers. Even so, York Brunton and Ethel Kirkpatrick exhibited at Glasgow alongside artists like Findlay and Cheyne with their modernist aura. And at the end of the day, it goes to show how much they depended upon those small societies with their joint exhibitions to make a living. (Not that that was ever a problem for Ethel Kirkpatrick).

                                                                                   

Even more frustrating was the career of Jessie Garrow (1899 - 1993). She was also printmaking before the onset of MacNab's class but the one print I have seen by her is the extraordinary colour woodcut called The wave. The three graces have been transformed into stylish young women alarmed by a wave splashing over the sides of a quay and perilously close to their fashionable stockings and shoes. It's both mocking and stylish and it's such a shame I can't dig up a suitable image for you. (I am hoping when lotusgreen reads this, she will locate it in The Studio for me). But what is highly original about this prints is the complete lack of colour for the figures, which are picked out predominantly in outline and stand pale and stylised against grey and mauve backgrounds. How an artist who could come up with such a strikingly original print could now be so little known is, frankly, beyond me. In the 1980s, when she sold what was left of the work from her husband Ian Cheyne's studio, she had not a single piece of her own work left to offer. Not a thing. Like so many women artists of the period, she also went on to work as an illustrator, but even there I have only ever tracked down one title she worked on.

So, very reluctantly, I have been forced to illustrate this post with three prints all by that coolly beautiful artist, Anna Findlay (1885 - 1968). At least, there is a new one here, a telling colour woodcut of Glasgow tenements where you can see her interest in subdued tones and architectural form at an early stage. Needless to say, her work is also shockingly rare and you have not seen this image online before. It really is a lovely link between the soft focus realism of the earlier Scottish woodcut artists and the linocuts that she then went on to make after studying at the Grosvenor School with Claude Flight. She left Glasgow in the late twenties and went down to St Ives in Cornwall where her brother, James, was an active member of the Arts Club. She may well have studied with Flight just before she began to exhibit at St Ives in 1928. She would have certainly known about the Grosvenor School being set up via Chica MacNab (her brother, Iain MacNab was the principal). She moved back to Glasgow in the late thirties, leaving behind this small poetic legacy of linocuts as elegant as other Grosvenor artists were outlandish. And if for no other reason than this, I have faith in Claude Flight's prophecy of the modern.