Helene Mass: four more woodcuts

Four more colour woodcuts by the German artist Helene Mass, along with some others for comparison. Above is an image already posted but in a different colourway. I think this must be a second version because I assume the shrubs are lilac. Or unlike the Kaiser perhaps she just liked blue trees! You be the judge. But below is the other version.

The one below of parkland horse chestnuts has already been posted as well but I came across an image which I understand is by Carl Thiemann. The two are remarkably similar in conception and, in fact, fellow members of the Berlin Secession were visitors to Dachau. I very much doubt Mass wouldn't know Thiemann's work.

Interesting, anyway. Perhaps Thiemman even took leaf out of Mass' book and took a a stroll through the Tiergarten. His print is the more conventional work.

I assume the next print is a later work and finds Mass in Frank Morley Fletcher mode. Again, I would doubt looking at this she wasn't familiar with his work. Of course it's freer than Frank and is more a felt landscape than he would go in for. Really quite a lovely image and one that came up on ebay not so long ago.

Finally, two prints in rustic mode and which I assume are earlier. I like the geraniums ranged around the garden table. It's personal and has genuine charm. Only four colours used here but already her tendency to put canopies over her prints is there.

Finally, a rural image which she actually doesn't do as much as you might think. The Mass trees and clouds are present. A bit awkward and perhaps too readily descriptive but I like the flowering bush tumbling over the fence. She obviously delights in that kind of thing.

Bernard Rice (1900 - 1998): the Bosnian woodcuts

Some artists find the environment that makes them what they are; for Bernard Rice that place was Bosnia. He was born in Innsbruck only 21 year after the occupation of the Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzogovina by Austria-Hungary. His father, also Bernard, was a maker of stained glass and Rice learned the craft of glass-making with him but also attended art school in Innsbruck (1915 - 1918). It was there he began to learn woodcut. (The family were not repatriated untill 1919). Frustratingly, I never met Rice but I now suspect he knew Bosnia before he left Austria. He began his adult training at the Westminster School of Art in London, followed by the Royal Academy Schools. Presumably, he studied drawing and painting because he painted later in life. He left London in 1922 to teach furniture design in a craft school in Bosnia, by then part of the new kingdom of Yugoslavia. For a twenty-two year old, he already had a wide range of skills and he immediately began to put them to use. He settled in the village of Vlasenica in eastern Bosnia some miles to the north-east of Sarajevo and many of his most memorable prints feature the snow-bound village and its inhabitants (fewer than 2,000). Not content with printmaking in this remote little country, he set about making his own blocks. But not just any blocks. For the one below of Travnik (in central Bosnia) he used limewood, a notably soft wood and quite different from the very hard boxwood his English contemporaries were using for their engravings. You can see the typically open, undulating grain of the limewood at the top of the print - he would have had to lower the block very slightly to have achieved that effect. Of course, not only that, he had pinned the planks in such a way that the gaps between showed as unprinted lines. This may have started out to some extent as truth to materials but he was also affected by the strict divisions of images used by stained glass artists. It's this adaptation of the technique that really is the remarkable thing. It shows someoneone with an unconventional imagination, to say the least, and also someone who was quite ready to throw out the rule-book, which I am pretty sure he had off by heart.

The minarets, tower and lines all combine as if the structures are suspended on cotton. At the bottom of the print you can see more of the gentle lowering of surface to achieve, which gives it the feel of mezzotint. Of course, this treatment would require equally individual printing. In fact, block preparation, cutting and printing are combined by Rice into works quite unlike any others in British printmaking. The do-it-yourself ethos is quite close to that of Eric Gill and his followers who began to move to the Sussex village of Ditchling after 1912 but the end result is basically central European. You can see Vlasenica in the woodcut below with its woven fences and haystacks, though cut is not quite the right word because Rice combines cutting and engraving in one and the same print.

The houses are better defined in the print below. You can see here they are made of wood and almost certainly thatched. Nor do I think you could tell that he had broken another cardinal rule here, the print being only a central section of a much larger work. He did this at least three times - in 'Podgorica', 'Vlasenica' and 'Travnik' (you can see a rather over-exposed photo of the big 'Travnik' below). I have to say this is one of my favourite prints. It doesn't have to be great but I have to say again that reproduction doesn't do it any justice. The effect of the printed areas against the wonderful handmade paper is magical - as all good prints need to be. What made me leave this print in the print box at Ayres on Museum St in London, I do not know; inexperience, I should think, and not being quite sure what to make of Rice at the time. Nevertheless, it came into my possession one fine day and many years later. It doesn't try hard, the organisation of black, white and line appears effortless. What he wanted to get across was the place, his numerous skills in the end are quite subordinate to what he obviously thinks is a marvellous subject. But my reaction then was a typical one. If it hadn't been for the writer and printmaker Albert Garret and his very untidy book and the London dealer Jonathan Blond, Rice would have been left disregarded in his Chelsea studio. The print establishment were bemused, or sniffy about his Bosnian woodcuts. Not easy to categorise - and they also probably saw things they just didn't care for.

We come now to my latest acquisition (it arrived two days ago). I am far from beyond making criticisms of Rice. There is often something I find irritating or dubious about his prints - the sketchy Serbian spruce and smoky printing in 'The Mill' (top) is annoying. Some of them I feel entirely dubious about. But this has no faults or far-fetched technique. It is quite different in both feel and scale to the previous one and is the only engraving he made on boxwood hence the small size. The relationship between the buildings, orchards, stacks and surrounding hills is one of considerable intimacy and isolation.

As a dismal addendum to this post, I need to say that only two villages like Vlasenica survived the civil war: Lukomir, which you see below, and another hamlet, are in the mountains to the south of Sarajevo near the boundary of the Federation and Republika Srpska. As you can see many have lost their wooden shingles and don't have the same Ottoman overhangs and plaster. You shouldn't assume that all the buildings are habitations. Some of the smaller ones are a combination of barn and byre (cowshed). I should also say these two places, like Rice's prints, are a precious part of the Bosnian patrimony.

Rice returned to London to study at the Royal College of Art in 1926. (No doubt he was in Malcolm Osborne's etching class). He married in 1927 and returned to Bosnia for another year. There were also exhibitions at the Chenil Gallery (1925) and the St George's Gallery (1926). It is now hard to work out what his reputation was then. He was certainly selling because the prints turn up, especially his images of Travnik. But many of the smaller prints are very scarce. Significantly, some of the prints I own have never been framed, always a big plus, mainly because their condition is so good.

He left for Cairo in 1929 to teach both wood and copper engraving, etching and fresco, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Sometimes I think he had too many skills for his own good. He left Cairo in 1939 and after the second war, taught wood engraving and drawing to sculptors at the Sir John Cass School (1949 - 1952). Work in other mediums does turn up, but not much. He made one very large print called 'Rammuda' on cotton. I even have a tablecloth he designed with Chinese style horses. His darker experiments (not included here) often seem to lack conception and rarely make satisfying images but he probed the ambiguities. The figure studies in particular are certainly not to contemporary taste and I can understand why Rice doesn't appeal to everyone. No matter. For me, there is only one issue: the next print, just around the corner. What else will it say about this rather extraordinary man and his sympathies?

Hiroshi Yoshida (1876 - 1950): Three little islands

Klaus Voigt made a very interesting comparison today between the Yoshida woodblock you see here and Carl Thiemann's boat prints. I thought it was well worth putting 'Three little islands' (1930) and Carl Thiemann's 'Abend' (1921) on one page for people to enjoy and compare - and, of course, so that we all know which print we are talking about.

Carl Thiemann (German, 1881 - 1966)

And now we finally come to the inscrutable Carl Thiemann. Always quite hard to know quite what to make of this artist but here goes. He spent his childhood in Karlsbad or Karlovy Vary as it's known in Czech. The town was then a part of Austria-Hungary, an empire that ran from the German border only a few miles from Karlsbad to Brasov in what is now central Romania. That would have meant very little to Carl who lost his father at the age of eight. What that meant was that instead of becoming an artist, he had to study business and help support the family. Even so, by 1905, when he was in his mid twenties, he was a student at the Prague Academy.

He followed the conventional course, studying painting, etching and lithography but when he met Walther Klemm at the academy all that went out the window. Colour woodcut came into his life - so much so he has come to exemplify the central European woodcut artist, period. How did he get there? Certainly Emil Orlik was of profound importance. He had passed on the Japanese technique to Klemm and in 1906 the pair of Karlsbaders set up together in a studio outside Prague and began on a collaborative book detailing the backstreets and allies of the old town. (See the first image). Subdued, subtle, he concentrates on the cramped life of the everyday. Staying with the elongated image, he introduces pattern, light and water and finally sets sail.

By 1907, he was creating image after image, some realist in a Japanese way, others like the one below far more dependant on the stylisation of art nouveau. These are landscapes of atmosphere where nothing happens. A sail is lowered, someone has left a washing basket in the street, and that's all.

What does happen though is that, as the year progresses, his palette finally begins to brighten and he starts to make the images for which he is now so famous. 'Birch trees in autumn' is, of course, a classic image by him, extraordinary for the vivid concentration and play of light. Others were more daring but no one made the Secession look as natural as he did. And this may help to explain why the following year he moved to the artists colony at Dachau some miles from Munich. It had been founded in the C19th but Thiemann and Klemm were among a second wave of younger artists (the Berlin secessionists like Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth being among the first) who had revitalised the colony.

Klemm stayed for five years but Thiemann married, built a house (see below) and got a job at the Munich Debschitz school in 1909. He certainly looked harder at the natural world and the landscape around him. But with a wife and family to support, I suspect the businessman he had had to become came into play once again.

Look at the way he adapts the wildly symbolist landscape of the Munich painter Franz von Stuck. He dumps the academic rigmarole and fancy-dress von Stuck loved and gives us uncomplicated image after image. Highly prolific, he worked in both colour and monochrome, producing cheaper unsigned editions detailing the woodwork of medieval Germany as well as the stark trees and glamorous boats that set the collector's heart beating.

He produced this snowy road to nowhere in 1909 and was elected a member of the Vienna Secession the following year. Basically, his career had taken off, with a very recognisable style and successful exhibitions.

Interesting as well to see what Klemm was doing at the same time. His 'Great Horned Owl' of 1911 has the sense of delicacy and living things that Thiemann never really has.

But Thiemann is the ultra colourist, quite able to describe this azalea in its pot, ready to hang on the sitting room wall. Klemm's art is an art of the mind, in the end; his friend appeals to the eye, he aims to impress (and he succeeds).

I have to say I particularly like 'Stream in winter' from 1915. He takes a suprisingly raw and painterly approach and very much succeeds in getting across the density of the air and the coldness of the stream. It is decorative and all tone but this is also the real frozen world of war-time.

He was still only in his mid thirties here, moving from the lyrical colourism of the early century towards the deco of the post war period. This print of an absurdly colourful lake is as elegant as Erte but less effortful. I still remember my amazement when I found 'Abend' below in a junk shop - the intensity of the colour, the deeply stylised horizon, the dishevelled sails. It is cold and unlikely as a dream but utterly desirable.

I think he knew this. It is the only print I know by him which he printed with a different colourway. It may well have been for the market (it was also sold by picture dealers in England) but there is also the sheer flair and joy of pure printmaking here. I have it beside me now and I assure you reproduction doesn't communicate its impeccable sense of scale or the daring of the raggedy keyblock or the depth of colour. My best buy ever...

I'm not sure in what order the tragedies struck Thiemann but both his wife and daughter met early deaths. Certainly, I've never seen any work later than his Venice pieces of the twenties but he was famous enough into war time. The Anscluss had taken place in March, 1938, followed by the Sudenten crisis in April, and the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1939. A 6oth birthday exhibition with over 200 exhibits was organised in his home town of Karlsbad in 1942 which was by then part of greater Germany (See map). It was a normal thing for German-speaking artists and writers to move between countries - I wanted to describe the way Orlik, Bormann, Leschhorn and Klemm all did this. It strikes me that Carl Thiemman did it with conviction.

William Neave Parker (British, 1910 - 1961) animals before Adam

                                                      

Having made mention of William Neave Parker in the last post, I thought I should try and do him some justice. In our ignorance we used to regard him as an also-ran but as you see he was a skilled and flexible draughtsman, able to turn his hand to fine drawing, woodcut and linocut although it is by no means clear to me what method he was always using for his prints. Wild cat, like all his colour prints, is lino. Some are signed and some are not, but all of them were published trimmed as you see here. Many of them also come attached to a sheet, which again is original.

Despite his obvious skill, his father had refused to allow him to train as an artist and he found himself working in a bank where people were kept behind each night searching for errors - they were always his. Service in the RAF during the second war was followed by a request from the Natural History Museum in London to produce drawings to illustrate palaeontological reconstruction. He then also did work for the Illustrated London News from 1950 onwards. It would be easy enough to slip into mild satire but the bear has a nice sense of line and life - it's convincing - and oddly enough he does fit into the British tradition of animal illustration that begins with Thomas Bewick and works its way towards CF Tunnicliffe. I have seen it described as both wood-engraving and linocut but I am a bit dubious about both those claims.

His linocuts are often a touch crude but this is all the work of a man who had to train himself. This tiger is direct, daunting and well-proportioned. I have a friend with a fluid little weasal by him which I encouraged her to buy instead of buying it myself! He carried on working on childrens book illustration, specially the dinosaurs, which seem so true of the time, untill his own extinction in a cinema, aged 51.
 

Vadim Trofimov (Russian, 1912 - 1981)

We see very little of Russian printmakers so it's a pleasure to post on the colour woodcuts of Vadim Trofimov. I know absolutely nothing about him but assume he came from Siberia. As you see from his raw and impressive Siberian Tiger, he not only handled colour with subtlety, he gave his prints a tremendous sense of animal movement. It could be by the post-war British artist William Neave Parker (1910 - 1961) on a good day.

This reindeer calf dates from as late as 1960 so he was making prints as if the 1930s were still fresh in his mind. 'Urgent Mail' below has the same sense of vitality. In fact the prints are a strange combination of stealth, power, urgency and remoteness.

The monograms appear to be 'BM' and 'M' even though all the woodcuts are ascribed to him. Needless to say if anyone has anything more on Trofimov, please let me know. The pictures do enlarge well if you want to look at the details.

Frank Morley Fletcher: Woodblock Printing, 1916

Probably the closest any of us of very modest means will get to owning a colour woodcut like this one is a copy of Morley Fletcher's small handbook, Woodblock Printing. Not only was Morley Fletcher (1866 - 1949) a superb printmaker, for many years he also had a successful teaching career based on his practical knowledge of woodblock printing in the Japanese manner. Beginning with classes at London's Central School of Arts and Crafts, he progressed to University College, Reading where Allen Seaby (1867 - 1953) was also a teacher. 1907 to 1923 saw him director of Edinburgh College of Art where both Mabel Royds (1874 - 1941) and John Platt (1866 - 1947) were on the staff. In 1916 John Hogg published the first edition of his primer.

If you can find a copy of the book for sale, you also acquire this small print because it was included as an exemplar in each copy. The book was so successful it was reprinted by Pitman with the print below acting as exemplar. Interestingly enough, this second edition includes advertisements for pigments and tools. I can only assume the first book had had an effect. Fletcher left Edinburgh in 1924 to take up the post of first school director of the School of the Arts at Santa Barbara. He stayed there till 1930.

And just in case anyone should doubt a student could learn a technique as complex as Japanese woodcut from a handbook, Steven Hutchins, a dealer specialising in Japanese woodblock prints, once did exactly that. He also produced two very passable prints. A good deal is also made of Morley Fletcher's innovations and while I don't wish to belittle his significant work as a teacher, Emil Orlik went to Japan to study printmaking at the same time that Fletcher and John Dixon Batten (1860 - 1932) were experimenting in London. (Orlik's early career is summarised in an October posting). Unlike FMF, he didn't make a career out of woodcut but dropped them before the first war - Orlik was also a wonderful portrait etcher. Either you have it or you don't.