Sydney Lee: colour woodcuts

Sydney Lee (1866 - 1949) is the kind of artist who often interests me because they don't seem to quite fit in with the general pattern of things. And I always find there's something almost maladroit about his work, which seems to go with the individualist trend. He was brought up in Prestwich in Manchester and went to the school of art there (where I think Walter Crane was principal) and then made the move that was almost inevitable for people of his generation: he went to Paris. He trained at Colarossi's and once back in England, he became a habitue of art colonies in true European style: Walberswick, Staithes and, as you can see here, St Ives, in Cornwall.

The Sloop Inn shows a public house that was popular with artists. How much time he spent there, I do not know but he dud spend alot of time in St Ives in the mid/late 1890s. This print dates from 1904, a very early date for a British colour woodcut of this kind. Teaching of the Japanese method had only begun seven years before he made this print, so this places Lee at the start of the colour woodcut movement, along with Royds, Seaby and Giles. He was certainly no slouch.

As images go, it is classic Lee: a night scene that gives him the opportunity to make use of muted colours. It looks pretty straightforward, but the perspective is handled with subtlty. Nothing is aloowed to disrupt the intriguing mood. And I am quite sure, looking at this and other colour prints by Lee, that his skill and lyricism was recognised by Sylvan Boxsius who used the same combination of blues and pale orange light for his linocut Winter over twenty-five years later. (I think Boxsius also adapted Lee's print of Whitby - and improved on it, as you have to do).

Boatbuilding, St Ives certainly lets us know he knew the work of Henri Riviere. There is a similar naive draughtsmanship which comes across as more sophisticated in the Frenchman than it does here. All the same there is a lovely balance of tone and colours and no sign of his favourite colour - blue. This was also a subject that another artist also tackled.(See The definitive Ethel Kirkpatrick). She would certainly have known Lee through their mutual visits to St Ives and also as habitues of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Kirkpatrick took part in the first student exhibition after the founding of the school in 1897 and I strongly suspect that both Kirkpatrick and Lee attended Frank Morley Fletcher's trailblazing classes there. Fletcher moved on to Edinburgh in 1907, fatefully handing the class over to Lee. He continued to teach colour woodcut in the Japanese manner but by the time Noel Rooke took over from Lee a few years later, the class was set to become the crucible for modern British wood-engraving and Lee himself is primarily known as wood-engraver today. Like Emil Orlik and LH Jungnickel, Lee gave up making colour woodcuts after only a few years and by the time the Society of Graver Printers in Colour came into being in 1909, Lee was not amongst the founding members.

                                                                         
The image above also looks to me like one of his earliest. If it's by far the most French of the prints and not the kind of image many colour woodcutters would go on to make, it also suggests he knew the pictures of young men that Henry Scott Tuke was painting in Falmouth . It doesn't quite work as image for the medium in much the same way that John Dixon Batten's choice of subject may strike us now asn inappropriate. But this onlt shows that both artists were not prepared to simply follow Japanese conventions. Interestingly, both went on to other things soon afterwards. The use of blue here also reminiscent of early Batten and I wonder whether the figure of the half-submerged boy had found its way into the woodcut from Seurat's Bathers, Asnieres in the National Gallery. Needless to say I am deeply grateful to Robert Meyrick who sent me this fascinating print. (All three belong to him and anyone who missed the two St Ives images at auction in Germany earlier this year will probably never get the chance again). Mabel Royds was the only colour woodcut artist who went on to tackle male figure subjects with any seriousness and this woodcut of Lee's is as rare as any of them get.

                                                                               

Robert Gibbings: early colour woodcuts

Robert Gibbings (1889 - 1958) came from the Irish city of Cork and if Retreat from Serbia, 1916 (above) doesn't look very much like the Venice of the West, I am pretty sure his interest in bridges comes at least in part from the memorable limestone bridges that cross the river Lee there. After making very little headway as a medical student in his home city, he persuaded his father to subsidise lessons with a local painter before taking off to London and the Slade School in 1912. Two years later he volunteered for the Royal Munster Fusiliers. Commissioned at the rank of lieutenant, he was shot in the neck leading his men against Ottoman defences during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. He drew on the time he spent recuperating, first in Salonica and then Malta to produce a small group of eloquent and unusual little colour prints - as eloquent and unusual as the man himself.

In January, 1916, he had opened the pages of a British illustrated newspaper to find a series of photographs showing first the disastrous retreat of the Serbian army through Albania, followed by more photographs of Britsh transports at anchor at Salonica. These ships had arrived as a relief force but too late, the intention being also to hold Salonica if they could not capture Constantinople. Gibbings had seen the slaughter and later read of the withdrawal from the Gallipoli Peninsula. Now, there was a powerful photo of yet another wholesale withdrawal. He merely cropped the photo and cut the images from chestnut planks. The result was as simple as it is sedcutive. We look at this print today and think, 'What is happening here?' Now you know. [The photo comes from ebay.]

He sailed from Salonica in the hospital ship you see here in Shipboard, the Llandovery castle,1918. As it happens this is a wood engraving. Gibbings had also enrolled in the etching class at the Central School but at the suggestion of Noel Rooke, he tried wood-engraving instead. The same dramatic use of keyblock and shadow is there but used with greater sophistication. What we see on the decks of the Llandovery Castle is the tedium that can effect troops; what we see in The retreat from Serbia is the way imagination can override a lack experience and produce a haunting work of distillation. Each of the images here somehow slips free of the mundane.

There is also a sophisticated interest in structure and light and shadow in the print. Gibbings was well able to ring the changes between the finesse of engraving and the more direct expressiveness of woodcut. Evening at Gaza, 1918, manages to combine the two. (He spent a month in Alexandria I think before the Gallipoli landings). Here he uses the simple silhouette and keyblock with a gradation of one colour on a second block. This is as far away from the Japanese method as you can get and when these works were praised in 1919, there was an immediate response from William Seaby. All the same, it has the glamour we require of the best colour woodcuts. Even so, by the time he used the method for the lst time in Albert Bridge, Chelsea, 1919, he was already tiring of its obvious limitations. He had outgrown colour woodcut as he had outgrown Cork. Here is the Irishman, full of immediacy, restlessness and flair.

Jean Armitage: tangled up in blue

There is still not alot known about the British printmaker Jean Armitage (1895 - 1988). I even hesitate to give these dates for her but they do look about right if you consider her training and her surprisingly long career. I think she must have been a Londoner as she lived in Camberley in the twenties and thirties. She trained at the Byam Shaw School, a private London art school for drawing and painting, which had been set up in 1910, but is best known today for colour woodcuts.

She may also be almost unique for having learned to make colour woodcuts from John Dickson Batten (1860 - 1932) a pioneer of the use of the Japanese method of printmaking back in the 1890s. From being a revivalist of the colour print, he went on to being a revivalist of the use of tempera, and this may have been how Armitage came to know him. Ironically, I think she may have been more influenced by Mary Batten (b 1873).

A gilder and woodcarver, I think it's safe to assume she learned the Japanese method of woodblock printing from her husband. Unlike him, she also adopted subject and style from the Japanese. Her Fritillaries owe a great deal to Hokusai's Large Flowers portfolio of the 1830s and I think the same can be said for many of Armitages flower prints. Unlike Batten, she interprets Hokusai with tremendous delicacy. That her style veers towards 1930s whimsy at times, is a part of the deal, I'm afraid. She had to sell prints.

She is certainly far less well-known for her landscapes but Loch Linnhe shows the same subtle use of blues and greys as the meconopsis at the top. This looks more Japanese to us partly because of the positioning of a single plant against a neutral background. But, as you can see by comparing the two prints, her sensibilty follows through. And this is what I like about her work. It doesn't matter really very much if the third image of long-tailed tits looks twee. A subtle use of colour and fine detailing are common to all three woodcuts. And the same craftsmanship is there.

And I would not be at all surprised to learn that it was Armitage's prints that Claude Flight complained about when he made his criticism that colour woodcut mimicked watercolour. It may have mimicked watercolour but I can tell Claude Flight this: these artists' prints were almost always better than their watercolours. Artists like Armitage had found a successful medium for themselves and fortunately her work is still something we can all afford, unlike Flight's contraptions.

I should add that I am grateful to Hilary Chapman for Loch Linnhe and William P Carl for Blue Poppies. Neither print is now for sale. I'm not in the least surprised.

Tales from ebay: Julia Mavrogordato

Back in October, 2010, there was a post about the menu cards that had colour linocut designs by the British artist Julia Mavrogordato on the front. They were produced for the Orient Line that sailed between London and Sydney from the 1930s to the 1950s. Now two more designs have turned up on ebay. [ Please note that since this post went up, they have been sold - to a reader of this blog]. They have been put up by a dealer in Brisbane at the reasonable starting bid of $25 and although I am not a huge fan of Mavrogordato, I still think any discriminating collection of modern British linocuts should contain work by her. So, here is your chance to acquire one or two without breaking the bank.

                                                                                        

I was fortunate enough to inherit mine but I would nevertheless prefer to have the group of robins at the top here. I like the blue that Mavrogordato used  on this one. I think it's livelier than some of the others as a result. I also suspect now that the colours on the ones I own may be a touch faded. The ones you see here are more recent (from the fifties) and that may explain why they look brighter to me. It's going to be interesting to see how many of these images appear, anyway. I have no idea how many designs she made but you really can't go wrong with any of them. You will find them easily by doing a search on UK ebay.

The other Allen Seaby

It may seem paradoxical (I might even go say far as to say perverse) to devote a post to monochrome, or more-or-less monochrome, prints by an artist was was one of the most unashamed colourists of them all. Allen Seaby (1867 - 1953) was a great apostle of the colour print. Like both William Giles and St Paul, he was considerably more brazen than the master. He took to colour with conviction. It is rarely subordinate to draughtsmanship as it became in the hands of John Platt. Bright or subtle, it often washes across the paper in large and unrestricted areas, accompanied by his signature brushwork. From the beginning he had given this treatment, by and large, to wild birds but some time around the first war, he turned his attention to a small number of domestic animals that he portrayed with both restraint and sympathy. And, really, this provide the reason behind the post.

Nor are there many of them. He gives us a pair of foxhounds in a yard, two pigs rooting, rabbits in a hutch and ponies with a foal. They are the kind of animals he saw around him while at work in his hut in the New Forest. Three of them are so similar in style, they form a group. He is considering other possibilities. Plainly, this line of work was not something he could continue with but even so they look forward to the many drawings he made as illustrations for his own books for children. (The rabbits, ponies and pigs were all made by 1922). So they do provide a link forward to later work.

Call me a sentimentalist but I like this prints and also find them interesting. They hint at what Seaby may have recognised as the limitations to his work so far, in all its rainbow glory.

                                                                                        

The pair of hounds with a bowl stand in fair contrast to the same subject I posted recently by Walther Klemm. (See 'The studio at Liboc' October, 2011). So much so, I can't help but feel Seaby knew Klemm's work. But while Klemm typically goes for psychology, with his dogs half-cowering, half-creeping towards their bowl of food, Seaby places them on the ground, ignoring the contents of the earthernware dish. He also sees them totally from outside; there is no inwardness here. There is breeding, yes, an understated nobility, perhaps, but that is all. It is all as English as the shires.

And this is one point I want to make. Seaby the naturalist offers us habitat. On one occasion there are swans in a classical park but the actual environments he depicts are academic ones: Eton College; Magdalen College, Oxford; St Andrews in Scotland. (All this was important to Seaby who had become Professor of Fine Art at University College, Reading, in 1920 at the age of fifty three). Even Porlock suggests the poet Coleridge. But the contexts he gives us in these prints are decidedly downbeat  - the farmyard, the common. Beyond that, the concern is more subtle. It is England.

It is also the world of confinement. The ring against the wall and the dish on the ground define the space for the pair of hounds. And because of them, we immediately understand the purpose of these dogs. Before dawn the next day, they will be responding to the huntsman's horn, just as much as the pigs will be in the pan, the rabbits in the stew. It is the ordinary human world they inhabit, not the natural one. The ponies are native breeds, their survival threatened by lack of use, and Seaby was to go to plead their cause for many years through his pony stories for children. But it is the native British element that is crucial for him.

In removing colour from the equation, he was able to look harder at the subject. Beyond what I have said so far, is the dappled play of light. He selects his animals with care. The markings of both the rabbits and the pigs allow for a subtle change in reflected light. (The glint in the eye of both rabbits is nicely done). In this way he builds up shape. These animals, especially the rabbits, are palpable; they breathe, they digest. The colourful codes of aestheticism are some way behind him.

It is one of the problems with trying to understand Seaby that he never dated his work. There are various ways his prints can be put into order but I would say he was responding to circumstances in this group of woodcuts. Where he uses colour, with the pair of hounds, the patterning of their markings and the way they link up to each other in the composition, is carefully done. There is none of the striving for effect of a Bresslern Roth when she approached the same subject (by way of Walther Klemm). One thing I will say about Seaby, he is never trite. It is almost as if he had suddenly become ashamed of his peacock ways. He has become literal instead, propagandist even - not rabidly - but even so, the Englishman is there.

                                                                                           

Walther Klemm's book of birds: a prototype, perhaps?

Readers may remember that back in November, 2010, there was a post on Walther Klemm's Vogelbuch, or Book of birds. This was in fact a portfolio of six colour woodcuts in an edition of only forty, published in Germany in 1912. At that point Klemm was still a member, along with his friend Carl Thiemann, of the artists' colony at Dachau near Munich.

The impression I get is that complete sets are rare and predictably some of them do come up as single prints without any reference (so far as I know) to the original project. But now I find that he seems to have begun the project as early as 1909 because I have recently come across two further colour woodcuts in exactly the same format but much closer to the Vienna Secession style he was using during his stay at Liboc near Prague. Ducks diving, above, is very similar to his print of underwater ducks in the Vogelbuch, likewise a study in monochrome but considerably more subdued. Personally I think the 1909 print is alot more attractive. I don't think he was every quite so devil-may-care decorative as this. His ability to flip styles is one of the things I admire most about Klemm even if he was soon to change to styles I find less congenial. The subtle integration of greys and blues is really so masterly, it may as well be an object lesson.

                                                                            

                                                                               
Not surprisingly the swan doesn't have a corollary in the second Vogelbuch. It's considerably less successful. I don't know why the project appears to have been abandonned. I can hardly believe it was because no one liked what he had done. I am very smitten with his virtuoso ducks. It is almost post-modern in its playful awareness of form and pattern and appearances. Here is the artist who not only studied under Kolo Moser but studied history of art as well. And here is the accomplished awareness that led him only four years later (at the age of only thirty) to his professorship at Weimar, the image an apt metaphor for Klemm's own performance: agile, delving, disappearing, deft.

And if you click on to gerrie-thefriendlyghost.blogspot.com/2011/10/emil-pottner-feathers.html  you will see that, just like Klemm and Thiemman, Gerrie and I are laying in the same barn.

The studio in Liboc: Walther Klemm & Carl Thiemann

Of these two friends, the one to leave their home-town of Karlsbad first was Walther Klemm (1883 - 1957). Somewhere along the way, he met and made friends with the gregarious Prague artist Emil Orlik. One German sources says it was Orlik that encouraged Klemm to enrol at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna; another believes that Klemm studied there between 1901 and 1904. Only one of these statements can be true because Orlik didn't return from Japan untill 1902. Nonetheless, Klemm certainly studied at the school of applied arts and in Kolo Moser he had a teacher who was the quintessential Secessionist designer, well-connected, stylish and urbane. And my hunch is that it was Moser that may have made the fateful introduction to Emil Orlik.

                                                                                      

Orlik had barely established himself in Vienna than he had set sail for Japan. He stayed for eighteen months, training in printmakers workshops there. This was something completely new. He was the first European ever to study there and Klemm was fortunate enough to learn the techniques of woodcut making directly from him when he came home. The window of opportunity was relatively small; Orlik was not to keep up his interest in woodcut anymore than Klemm was. Ironically it was Carl Thiemman (1881 - 1966) who was to be the greatest beneficiary. And all this says a good deal about the kind of person Klemm was. Simultaneous with his studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule, he had taken classes in art history at the university. As I've said before, Klemm's prints appeal as much to the mind as they do to the eye. This keen interest in both the techniques and ideas that inform art shows what kind of an artist he was. I think he was attracted to ideas; you only need to compare these first two prints (Thiemman at the top, Klemm below) which were made probably less than a year apart, to see that really he was nothing at all like Carl Thiemann. A common birthplace and common interest brought them both together. Klemm made his first woodcuts while still a student in 1903 ie about a year after Orlik's return, and by 1904 was exhibiting with the established artists of the Vienna Secession. This was early success but all the same he left for Prague.

The connection may have been Orlik again. Although based in Vienna, he had kept on a studio in the city and by this point Thiemann was sutdying at the Academy. He had left Karlsbad where he had had to support his widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters while he worked in business, to study painting and etching but all this was rather sidelined by the arrival of Klemm. Some sources have them down as school friends. Klemm was now 23, two years younger than Thiemann himself, but with indirect access via Orlik to the great studios and workshops of Japan. Imagine the excitement of these two young men as they took on their own studio in the village of Liboc just outside Prague. They were to spend only four years there but in that time together they went on to produce some of the most sensitive and articulate prints of the period. The second irony is this: they were both young enough to take the lessons of the Secession to heart; Orlik probably was not. Just take one look at Thiemann's glorious cockeral to see what I mean. Orlik never displayed such bravura.

Nor, for that matter, did the hapless Klemm. By 1906, when he made his woodcut of two turkeys, he had developped his own style, straightforward subjects from the countryside around Liboc that were themselves subject to that analytical eye of his. The square, bold images of the Secession comes out into the fresh air. The canny Thiemann merely lifts the idea from his friend - the pair of birds, the trees connecting the high horizon to the keyblock - and turns it from interesting to irresistible. His woodcut is as opulent as Klimt but wisely dispenses with the self-absorption (and substitutes a sense of humour).

Klemm's Haymaking, also from 1906, finds him in another mood. This interest in people's livelihoods is just as close to Orlik as the more obvious japonisme. It's easy to forget the strong appeal of European naturalism to these artists and the way that the kind of realism they came across in Japanese art only served to bring things one step forward. Here is Klemm almost in popular print mode and he certainly didn't give up these descriptions of country people when he left Liboc; it's just that he has become better known for his clever and appealing animals in much the same way that Thiemann got himself stuck with birch trees.

But then that is in the nature of printmaking where you have multiple images. The two artists co-operated on two joint ventures, at least. I don't know the date of their Old Prague portfolio, or volume. I have only ever been able to track down one image that I can be fairly sure comes from this work. Klemm's rough-and-ready study of light and shadow in Empty Street I think must come from the work. I don't think I can be quite so sure about Thiemann's back street below. At least one rather unreliable source has it down as Lubeck. In a way, it doesn't matter because they certainly stand comparison. Possibly Thiemann never quite got the same cramped sense of narrative again. The washing, the steps, the washing-basket suggests the workaday life he had left behind in Karlsbad. He substitutes Klemm's seller of clothes for the lifeless washing; the open window is also there, but no source of light. The second project was a calendar for the year 1907. They would certainly have known the famous square calendar with contributions from members of the Vienna Secession, including Moser, made for the year 1904. They produced six images each for their own. This was reproduced in facsimile by Thiemann's widow after his death - one to look out for but a quick search turned up nothing so far. [I am am indebted to Klaus (who lives  near to Dachau) for the information about the calendar, which I knew nothing about].

But the play of light is everywhere in Birches (1907(. [I couldn't find the auction-house image so I had to content myself with the Art Value lettering and their impudent copyright]. And with this print we come to the Carl Thiemann that everybody knows: the sense of pattern, the vigour, the stylishness. The play-off of the leaf shapes, the markings of the birch tree and the undisguised cutting to suggest the movement of the grass is already quite masterly. Compare this to the over-excited work of some Grosvenor School artists and you will see how simple-minded they actually were. And I think he also recognised his own success (or someone else saw this for him) because a year later his more famous image Birken im Herbst was being mechanically reproduced in Vienna. (I am also pretty certain that this grouping of trees would be known to Norbertine Bresslern Roth).

Normally, I would have edited the printed letters out but the handwritten display of Original Holzschnitt Handdruck 6/30  with central title and his full name says a great deal about his salesmanship. This was all part of the contemporary trend of distinguishing colour woodcut from the mechanics of C19th lithography and giving their work a personal feel. Although he describes the second print as an original colour woodcut, it is only signed in the block. There was nothing new about offering prints of different qulaity but this move into mechanical reproduction funnily enough precedes their own move to the long-established artists colony at Dachau near Munich. Klemm was to stay for only five years before moving on to the post of professor at Weimar; typically, Thiemann was to make the best of it - build himself and his family a house, and stay forever.

I includes Klemm's print of puppies at a bowl and Thiemann's early version of his swans as a postscript to their time together at Liboc. They may or may not have been produced there in 1908 but in some ways, it doesn't matter too much. Klemm proves himself to be the realist. The composition is almost wilfully inelegant. Ironically, Thiemann plays the Orlik game just as his friend had. In some respects, he is is less good at it than Klemm was. But in failing to connect with Orlik he finds his own voice.

Klemm's exquisite monochrome disquisitions on line and shape - his herons and flamingos that echo Ohara Koson - become a decorative little masterpiece in the hands of Thiemann. The bold arch of the neck and the flare of feathers behind sum up his peculiar intensity. It goes beyond the decorative formalities of the Secession to something delicate, impersonal, grave, unique.