Ebay at your own risk

                                                                                   
I had an interesting discussion with a reader very recently about the condition of prints. He rightly pointed out that there had not been enough discussion about this important issue when it comes to buying prints from, say, the twenties or thirties. I mean, I think you can get a bit too precious about these things, but now, as if by magic, there are three modern British prints by minor artists up for sale on ebay that show exactly what the problems are. At least two could fetch reasonable prices. But should they?

                                                                           
First off is Thomas Todd Blaylock, an artist who when it came to woodcuts was never shy about coming forward and laid the colour on with verve. At the top the rather drab image now on British ebay, below a typical Blaylock of a similar scene at Poole harbour near where he lived. You can see that all the paper on the top image has light-burn round the mount and in itself this should reduce the price quite alot. One dealer commented helpfully, I suppose, about the merits of restoration as part of much the same discussion. But this print is a terminal case way beyond help. Someone may come up with exactly the same image to prove me wrong, but till then there is a well-known print-blogger who likes to apply a bit of photo-shop technique to images of prints he considers past their best and then puts them back online where he found them. I think this is the print-equivilant of genetically modified crops and irresponsible. Faced with doctored images like that on the internet, you finally have no idea where you are when it comes to judging what a print should look like. But this Blaylock is beyond even his efforts at resuscitation - I hope.

                                                                            
By no means common, and quite nice to see, a Dutch canal scene, as it happens, by Frank Whittington. More ambiguous but still, I would say, not as it came off Whittington's press down at Brockenhurst. We don't see enough of Whittington to say how bright his prints should be, but reason tells you an artist doesn't go to the the trouble of cutting blocks to turn out a drab little print like this. Or do they? He often applied colour sparely in the way his friend Eric Hesketh Hubbard did, but may have decided on something basically monochrome - another Hubbard habit.

                                                                            
I would not want to prejudice anyone over this final conumdrum of a print by John Reginald Taylor. Not at all bad, but is it right as the trade like to say. The seller has it up as lino, but again do you go to the trouble and do you make a print of India that comes out tepid? The other option is the work is simply poorly-printed. When they come out of the package, you will have more of an idea. Till then, proceed with care.

Note: I have just come across a catalogue description for Blaylock's 'Fishing boats, Poole Harbour' (top): 'printed in blue and pink inks. on warm cream wove paper'. A printmaker told me only yesterday that pink was one of the first colours to fade, along with yellow.

The Society of Graver-Printers in Colour, Paris, 1910

                                                                               
If the British Society of Graver-Printers in Colour had been as truly francophile as they appear to be, they would have have had a group photograph taken after their first meeting at Raphael Roussel's studio in London. Perhaps they did; I don't know. But Roussel's son, Theodore, was another founder-member, along with William Lee Hankey, who had a studio at Etaples, and also the Austen Browns who had moved to live at Camiers nearby. The Society's next move was to hold their first exhibition at the Bedford St gallery of the French dealer, Goupil. The show then moved on to Manzi Joyant in Paris, a firm of print publishers and dealers who worked alongside Goupil.

I can't be absolutely sure that Allen Seaby's robust and brilliant Peacock found its way to Paris because I failed to make a note of what he and William Giles showed in London. But never mind, he had certainly made it by then and it is exactly the sort of bravura piece you would want to put on show.

                                                                                 
But what is so striking about the Paris show was how varied, experimental and inclusive it was. Elizabeth Christie Austen Brown's Girl and goose is much less flamboyant in mood than Seaby and falls into line with the kind of low-key work with a rural subject that the French really were producing. If it looks genre and rather cute, her cutting and colours are bold. Her use of white is typical of the British avoidance of snow as an easy option and the patterning of the birds and their beaks with the fence behind is subtle and musical. (Incidentally, this print came up on ebay more than once, but was mis-sold as her husband's work even though Mr Austen Brown wasn't capable of anything so professional and she often printed for him.)

                                                                               
Lucien Pissarro was never a member and, so far as I know, only exhibited with the Society this once, but I have to assume they wanted to fill out the Anglo-French character of the show in Paris. Yet again I didn't make a note of what he showed but his small and delicate wooodcuts would have sat easily alongside the work of Lizzie Brown. Poor Lucien! His life was beset by domineering men. If it wasn't his father exercising quality-control over his work, it was the formidably patriarchal Jacob Samuel Levi Bensusan whose daughter, Esther, he married. At the time, the print room at the British Museum was a favourite meeting place for artists and collectors and Esther and Lucien took the opportunity to meet there out of range of Jacob and his velvet fez. His work has tremendous delicacy and charm and was quite unlike anything else being made in England.
                                                                                

He also worked in black-and-white, but this show was about one thing: colour. It didn't matter what kind of a colour print it was. Lee Hankey didn't show any of his wonderful colour etchings but the Society also invited another non-member to show with them. This was Charles Mackie who had already made the near statutory move to Paris and the art colonies of Brittainy. He had also gone off to Venice with his wife and, I believe, Harold and Laura Knight, only two years before this show and a number of his very individual colour woodcuts take the serene republic as their subject.

                                                                               
I would think it was both his sympathies with France and his unorthodox printing style (he used paint with oil of lavender as a medium) that attracted the Society. Perhaps politics were also at work, but there seemed to be a genuine desire to show a broad range of the colour prints being made in Britain. If I have mainly included colour woodcuts here, it doesn't give a fair idea of what the other printmakers did. Mackie's period of making these prints was fairly-shortlived and the reason why he was never a member was because his blocks were cut for him All the same his impressionism, when it works, is hard to resist. I think the prints were certainly intended for a wall and not obe pored over in a portfolio like mine are.

                                                                            
If John Dixon Batten learned to use the Japanese method with great aplomb, Japanese style was another matter. By 1910 his Constance, with its literary background and narrative style, must have stood out as odd and old-fashioned and I must admit I find it odd that his prints were being exhibited. He had stopped making them by then but he was such a founding-father himself, I suppose he was hard to avoid. The low-key eroticism harks back both to Burne Jones and the days before Batten's own marriage, but the colours and the sensuous inking are pure Batten. No one else quite did this after him and as I've said before, this print is under-rated.

                                                                               
I couldn't say the same thing about Frank Morley Fletcher's Minx. His print output was surprsingly small and Girl reading as it is also known, was his one and only figure subject in print form. Possibly just as well. Batten's drawing may be conventional but he had had learned his trade illustrating books of fairy tales, which required figures, large, small and varied. But he made even fewer prints than his friend Frank, a simple fact that hasn't helped the reputation he has today. But then, I wonder what they made of him in Paris.

                                                                               
French print collectors may well have recognised Henri Riviere in the work of Sydney Lee. Never a member and not even making colour woodcuts by that time, Lee nevertheless maintained a strong position amongst the colour print fraternity, a position I find hard to credit (and I have to say I am surprised that the Royal Academy in London have given him a show). He's not a stylist - or at least he's not the sort of stylist that I would go for now. (I had a Lee phase many years ago). But then almost all the prints here are less stylish than the work produced after the war. What all this work does have is a sense of newness. Behind all these works was a real effort to master the difficult art of colour-printing and this accounts for the healthy diversity of methods and the perplexing diversity of styles. The actual range of post-war colour prints was probably narrower than it was in 1910.

                                                                               
One man who went on with experimenting long after this show closed was the man from Wallingford, William Giles, and he was still at it in the 1920s. There is something rather technical about the way Lee allocates his flat colours in Drying Sails and if Giles' colours are just the sane side of lurid in Swans, well, he and Ada did spend hours in a punt on the river Thames observing them. But he completely rises above any of his studies (and he often took great care in making prints) and his swans inhabit a dream-world in the end more seductive and more evocative than the work of Carl Thiemann simply because he is as observant as he is visionary, and Berkshire to the core.

Sydney Lee at the RA & Aberystwyth

                                                                                

I know that I have not always been kind to Sydney Lee, but the forthcoming exhibtion of fifty prints at the Royal Academy in London is nevertheless a must for your diary. Lee played a pivotal role in the early days of modern British printmaking. He was one of the first practitioners of colour woodcut, then took over Frank Morley Fletcher's class at the Central School, which morphed into Noel Rooke's famous and highly influential wood-engraving class.

The show runs from 27th February to 26th May, 2013, and will be held in the Tennant Gallery and Council Room, and coincides with the publication of Robert Meyrick's catalogue of Lee's prints. Robert, who is professor and head of the school of art at Aberystwyth University, has also curated the show. (Some years ago Robert published a very enjoyable and must-have book, 'Edgar Hollway and friends' about the artist's personal collection). The exhibition then opens at Aberystwyth on 17th June and runs untill 6th September.

                                                                                 
Of the three British print exhibtions I have posted on over the past year, this will certainly be the most thorough. I know that Robert has been buying Lee's colour woodcuts far and wide and this will be a one-and-only chance for you to see these rare and unusual prints at first hand.

                                                                                   
You can see some of Lee's large, painterly wood-engravings propped up behind him in the photograph, including one showing the Kissing Bridge at Walberswick to the right, eventually made famous for readers of Modern Printmakers by SG Boxsius with his glorious At Walberswick. But you only have to look at Lee's 'Sloop Inn' and this view of St Ives, above, to see what Boxsius learned from Lee.

 Easy to get to, not to be missed. You will find his colour woodcuts in December, 2011.

                                                                                     

Roman Sustov: the third Rome

Even though it wasn't intended as a compliment when I was called 'Arroumi', a Roman, by teenagers in southern Morocco, I nevertheless took it as one. I'm sure, being artists themselves, Roman Sustov's parents took more care when they called him the same thing. But even if they didn't, their son's work still draws heavily on the antique past.

                                                                                         
Probably to find a similar melancholy refinement, you need to search out the images from old Constantinople preserved in modern Istanbul. Somehow he appears to have inherited the exquisite skill and formality of the old Greek artists. As Sustov suggests, it is the cities that travel.
                                                                    

 

He comes from Minsk in Belarus where he studied first at the School of Art followed by the Belarus Academy. I have to admit I have no idea what kind of a training he received, but I would be surprised to learn that the old disciplines of drawing and printmaking, the ones that have gone out the window in countries like mine, were not a big part of the curriculum. His level of skill and the dedication it requires is far more incredible than any of the images themselves.

                                                                               
He has an almost weird mastery of various techniques. The red image is a lithograph, the two black and white ones are etchings, the one above is mixed media, and the one below, believe it or not, is a linocut. But I don't think you can learn to be like this. Somehow he also finds himself with skills and subtlety reminiscent of the artists of the Eastern Roman Empire. It was different from the West. When Manuel II Paleologus was the guest of Henry IV at Eltham outside London in 1400, the court were deeply impressed by the diginity and simplicity of the emperor. He travelled for two years across western Europe to save his city from conquest, but to no avail.

                                                                                
After that, it was orthodox Russia that claimed to be the third Rome. I think Sustov's images inhabit that borderland between ourselves (I mean the West, in general!) and that whole area of culture and history that many Europeans know nothing much about. When I wrote to Sustov soon after I'd bought the top image (it shows Budapest), he said the client had asked for a more conventional image. For a long time I found it one of the most satisfying of his works for that reason. But it isn't really typical and his mind is obviously set on other things.

If you look closely enough, you will see the etchings are bookplates, though they are a long way from what many of us would call bookplates and are, to all intents and purposes, straightforward etchings. You won't be surprised to hear he is also an illustrator and has worked on at least twenty fine books.

Most of the images here are taken from his website www.sustovart.com/ .It is well worth a look and, unlike many of the artists I post on, his work is easy to buy. I was lucky, though. I found a Czech dealer on ebay selling mine and incredibly no one else bid.

                                                                                      

 

                                                                                          

Orlik in Germany

                                                                             
I have only just heard that there are currently not one but two Orlik exhibitions in Germany. Both concern themselves with the work he produced in Japan but I haven't had time to work my way through the spiel which I need to translate from German. Unfortunately, the one at the Ostdeutsche Galerie in Regensburg closes in three days time, on 3rd February. Wie ein Traum! at the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, is on untill 14th April. Much as I would like to be there, I can't see it happening, but look forward to a review from Klaus, who put me on to this tonight. Hopefully, if you can't get there, the German galleries will publish catalogues, unlike Sheffield.

                                                                              

Emil Orlik after Japan

                                                                                      
Once Emil Orlik came home again from Japan, even though he had gone there to learn how to make woodcuts in the workshops, the woodcuts he made were few n number. Instead he embarked on a long series of portrait etchings. One of the first is one of the most famous, his portrait of Gustav Mahler, a typically articulate image that is probably no better than many of the others. When he first met Orlik in a cafe, Mahler thought him too talkative, amonst other things. Perhaps he was unaware that the man with the sketchbook had mastered one of the visual idioms of Japan.

                                                                              
The first image here, though, shows someone who was a part of the same circle of Secession designers and artists. If Orlik knew Kolo Moser well, it is still less portrait than design. For all the sophistiocated work he had produced while in Japan, back home he reverted to cutting and printing that lets the medium speak for itself. He takes such a different approach with etching, it is hard to credit that he made his portrait of Moser only about a year after the one of Mahler, although again I wonder whether portrait is quite the right word.

                                                                                 
Orlik knew Bernard Pankok (above) before he went off to Japan. In fact, it was with Pankok that Orlik began to make his first woodcuts once he had pulled out of the Munich Academy of Fine Art. The image certainly suggests the artistic milieu of the man but the usual analysis of character we might expect from an etching is missing. Instead Pankok hunches over the image that he is creating. It is an image of the artist, cramped and concerned only with his work. It is some long way from the dramatic refinement of Mahler.

With Pankok and Moser, the image is deliberate and bold; it takes up the whole space. For Mahler, there is no such intimacy but the differentiation is intense. Where the pressure gives out at the bottom left hand corner in the Pankok, the sepia tone is graduated with care for Mahler. It isn't the colour of the paper you can see, it is the colour of the image. The strict represenatation of Mahler's face stands out agains the smudge of his bow-tie and the scrawl of his waistcoat and jacket. It is an image of intelligence and refinement rather than artistic passion. It was also also someone he barely knew.

                                                                            
It strikes me that, by and large, he opted for woodcut when it came to someone that he knew and knew well. It doesn't matter how sophisticated their way of life might have been, his colleagues and friends from the Secession were rendered raw and square. There weren't many of them, more's the pity. There were far more of the portrait etchings. I must admit, I don't know who the one above shows but coming from 1901, it is one of the earliest. Even so he has the elegant spatial arrangement off pat. With the woodcuts we look everywhere, with the etchins, it is the eyes the nose, the ears we look at. The blank jacket, the dark cravat, the beautiful planes of the forehead and the beard, all lead us one way. It has tremendous finished concentration, there is nothing provisional, raw or creative about it.

                                                                             
Reluctantly, I have to admit his woodcut of the great designer Josef Hoffmann isn't one of his strongest, but there are so few of them around, it has to go in. The one of the Swiss artist, Ferdinand Hodler is more powerful and affecting. Perhaps it was the peasant build and personal tragedy that makes it that way, but I have already given Hodler alot of space and now it's more interesting to look at two more works that in some ways use a dual appraoch.

 I assume the art critic and writer Hermann Bahr was known to Orlik. He would certainly be one of the wider circle in Vienna and this etching is considerably less formal than the others here. With the vivid pose, the questing eyes, the untidy hair, it is vigorous and appealing. After visiting an exhibition of Frank Brangwyn's etchings in Vienna, it was Bahr who said he had wanted to look into Brangwyn's soul and, yes, there is something both intemperate and ludicrous about Orlik's etching of him. But there it is. We come to the 1906 woodcut portrait of the art patron, Max von Gompertz, who I don't know very much about. But again, Orlik shifts his approach to offer something much more like a formal portrait. Like Hodler, and unlike all the others here, he faces left and looks downwards. It's all those kinds of choice that Orlik made, whether conscious or not, that provides the sensitivity beneath the chatter.

                                                                              
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Campbell Grant

                                                                                   
By the time Campbell Grant arrived at Santa Barbara in 1930, things were not looking good for the school of arts and crafts there. It was a private institution, enrolment was down due to the Depression and the British principal, Frank Morley Fletcher, was somewhere near resigning  his post. But apparently there was time between his arrival and Fletcher's departure for Los Angeles, for Grant to learn how to make colour woodcut, in that immaculate American manner, from this one-time British master.

                                                                        
I say apparently because there is a mis-match between the dates I have and the ones provided by US print dealers. I don't know how long Campbell was there. He had won a scholarship at San Francsico College of Arts and Crafts but the two prints above suggest different things he would have learned from Fletcher. Firstly, it was how to print with great skill. Despite the name of the school, Grant certainly doesn't follow Fletcher's old arts and crafts manner, where brushstrokes show. Nor is there an obvious attempt at bokashi. It isn't at all easy to work out how he achieved the graduation of tone in the top print or the mottled effect you see towards the bottom. But he was far from the only artist who had nominally studied under Fletcher to go in for similar, more modern, effects.

                                                                                      
Secondly, he seems to have picked up Fletcher's habit of setting small figures in the landscape. It probably makes more sense in the United States than it does in the Lake District and Grant was better at it than his teacher. Even so, it gives a miniature effect as if he were model-making. Fletcher had not made prints for many years before he embarked on his short series of California prints in 1927, so probably Grant arrived in the nick of time. But none of the prints you see here have either dates or titles and I have to assume that colour woodcut was only a phase in Grant's long career. After Santa Barbara, he spent twelve years at Anaheim, working as an animator for Disney.

                                                                                  
Some of the prints certainly look like applications for the job (if he hadn't got it already). They also show how fluent he had become. He can shift from an image like the one above that harks back to the Vienna Secession as a touchstone, and then on to mode Japan, or go from expressionist to folksy with ease. It is all there, and American, and necessary for successful commercial illustrators. Admittedly there are some who have one style, but it is never exactly their own.

                                                                                  
All the prints, except the last, come from Annex Galleries, appropriately at Santa Rosa (all are sold). The last is from Parniani Fine Art. My thanks are due to them. It costs them to run a website; it cost me nothing.