Helen Ogilvie: the 1930s

It's a shame that Helen Ogilvie (1902 - 1993) didn't make more linoccuts like The white evening dress. I think it's a small classic, a beguiling subject approached with a Vienna Secession sense of space and detachment. It's also mildly sinister, the kind of work Arthur Rigden Read might have produced if he had walked out of the Dower House in Winchelsea, Sussex, only to spend days on end lost in the bush. But this wish of mine for more figure subjects  goes counter to what interested Ogilvie as an artist.

To show you what I mean, I have teamed the linocut with her wood-engraving The crab. Both have a similar sense of predatory creepiness that allows the subject to work its way across the picture plane; and both have the same vivid sense of light and dark. (When she does white, it is spectacular). The shawl hanging down from the woman's left arm has become an extension to herself, like the legs of the crab.

Like the crab, she achieves her ends by gradual means. Chooks in the straw uses a classic combination of violet, white and black, with smaller areas of red to create, amongst other things, this wonderful white. Even on a pc monitor, you can see the whites of the birds are graded so that it darkens as it gets closer to the violet-grey behind them.

Even though her name sounds thoroughly Scottish, she grew up in rural Australia, at Corowa, New South Wales. The only formal training she received were three years at the National Gallery School in Melbourne (1922 to 1925). Apart from the seven years in London, she spent the rest of her adult life there, in Melbourne. Even so, as far as I know, the city never appears in her prints. All of her work, the paintings and the prints, take the Australia of pioneer shacks and Victorian wrought iron, the plants of the bush and sometimes the animals of the farm, as their subject. The glamour of the evening dress is little more than a blip.

What she liked about printmaking was the immediacy of the cutting process; she felt there was an intimacy between the activities of her brain and her hand. All the same, satisfaction was far from easy to achieve. Just like Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, she read about the technique in Claude Flight's Lino-Cut, first published in 1927. Unlike them, she had to content herself with the book. As she tried to teach herself, she said, 'I became very worked up about it and had no way of learning'. Her own  Flight turned out to be someone closer to home, another Melbourne artist, the painter and printmaker, Eric Thake (1904 - 1982).

Thake showed her how to use her improvised tools. All this says alot about her attitude and the art she was to produce. This co-operation between artists in Melbourne reminds me of the early days of woodcut and then linocut in both Vienna and London between 1900 and 1925. And I think it was this process that eventually gave her prints the vigour and freshness they have. Although she placed herself in the British white line tradition, it was the great individualists amongst them that she mentions - Thomas Bewick (1753 - 1828), Edward Calvert (1799 - 1883) and Eric Gill (1882 - 1940). Again, her only access to their work was through illustrations in books. There was no Noel Rooke to go off to at the Central School in London. Essentially, like Calvert and Gill, she was on her own and she was the better for it.

She used linocut first but the earliest exhibtions I've come across were in 1933. (She exhibited untill 1939). By the time she made this first image of Banksia about 1938, she had made a virtue of rough-and-ready methods. There is no attempt to disguise the activities of cutting and printing and this is where she comes closer to the powerful expressiveness of the Die Brucke group of artists in Germany than Flight and his followers. She may or may not have known the work of the pre-war German artists but, like them, she made her own discoveries; in this way she emulated the pioneers in their little wooden houses.

I have had to stretch the usual definition of the 1930s to include this second image of Banksia made about 1942. By now she casts light and dark around with the panache of a Gertrude Hermes but with far less of the refinement. Both her cutting and her use of the picture plane make me think much more of German artists, especially the architect and printmaker Adolf Kunst (1883 - 1937) and Walther Klemm (1883 - 1957). The final little landscape is so much like Kunst's later linocuts, I would have thought it was one of his for sure. But what they have in common is this: a lack of formal training in printmaking. All three of them could be refined (as we have already seen from the large colour prints of Ogilvie's) but you can just as often see all of them rolling up their sleeves as well.

The old weather bureau may well be in Melbourne, after all. It was made about 1935 but could almost be the work of  a British engraver of the 1980s revival. There is the same sense of care both for the craft and about the past. I think in this she was also a kindred spirit with Eric Thake. You also see a growing interest in form in these last two engravings. The clouds are a nice, witty touch.

These two images, the linocut Kangaroo Paws and another Banksia engraving (circa 1935) show just how much she uses the two mediums in different ways. Like Mabel Royds, she makes no real attempt to suggest depth in the colour print, it is about colour and surface. The engraving approaches light and depth head on. Her cutting is never reduced to fantasy as it can be in Hermes. And the very fact that I can confidently make that comparison shows just how far Ogilvie had come since the day she first opened Lino-Cut in the late 1920s. It is a very good print indeed and one I wish I owned.

And here at last is a little landscape, stony and brown in the foreground, with low grey hills in the distance. All the other prints included here show enclosed spaces or objects without background. Like Kunst's work, this one has a childlike simplicity of image and cutting. Here is someone who was confident about what she wanted to do with any one particularly print. And she got on with it.

Eileen Mayo & Linoland

To read what some curators and auction houses say about Eileen Mayo (1906 - 1994) in the Antipodes, you would think she was some kind of multinational. But all the linocuts here (except for the last one) date from the time she spent in Britain before she left in 1953. Isabel de B Lockyer dated all of hers and most of these are dateable, too. To me, this suggests something interesting about the attitude of these artists to their linocuts - that it is art and not craft. Following on from Claude Flight, they make claims for a medium often seen as suitable for children. (Franz Cizek (1865 - 1946) at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna had pioneered its use for children and in 1925 Alan Seaby had this to say about his work  'it has been found that a child... can deal with linoleum with ease'). And, of course, Turkish Bath (1927ish) wilfully contradicts all this professorial wisdom. Its steamy abandon is hardly general viewing.

Morning tea, with its sexual ambiguity, is even less so. Here is an artist who had trained with a modern vengeance at a series of London art schools: the Slade, the Central School, Chelsea Polytechnic. But it all went out the window with her very first print. She famously got on the phone to Claude Flight for instruction in linocut. The sumptuous art deco of Turkish Bath was the lurid result. It's outrageous, of course, and a lark. And it also got her included in the 'The first exhibition of British Linocut' that Flight organised in 1929. (I am going by Osborne Samuel's date for this - it seems to waver). She was a true printmaker at that point; an artist who was using print to try out new ideas. By Morning tea her lifelong use of bold colour and repetitive, sinuous line is already well to the fore.

She was an admirer of Eric Gill's work but in those first two prints she come across as far more fresh and contemporary than Gill ever did (and I admire his work, too). If Black Swan sees her moving towards an interest in natural history, Cats in the trees displays the same wit and decorative elan we saw in her figure subjects. The skill of her work is beyond doubt. She was highly trained. The growing formalism of her work during the thirties is fairly typical of the times, which were less than easy. She perhaps wasn't going to make a living out of jazz-age linocuts but personally I would have liked to see more.

These two next prints, with their flat figures, simplified colours and sense of recording popular life, would not be out of place in a King Penguin book about British folk art. The Doric Dairy cart is quite some way from the sensuousness of the turkish baths, or waking up. There we had what I find very attractive, a woman artist taking women as her subject - not women in a domestic setting but in pleasurable ones. With ice-cream vendors and milk carts, we move back to a simplified world of linocut childhood. They certainly look like illustrations rather than manifestos.

But this is not a linocut artist, not like, say, Sybil Andrews or Claude Flight. All I have done is look at one aspect of Mayo's work that I like and that starts off very early in her career. She made wood-engravings, lithographs, screen prints, too, sometimes of the same image but never with quite the same sense of verve that she achieved early on.

But everything still went into the mix. This later linocut, which she made in Australia, has elements of both surrealism and abstraction. It's a glorious thing but you can see the teacher in her. In that resepect she is like Bormann and Klemm and Orlik, exemplary in what she does but somehow there is still something missing. I think you can tell by now which of these works I prefer.

Art & the Aesthete update

Just in case readers of both this blog and Clive's haven't read his latest comment, the blog is back online as a resource only.

Helen G Stevenson & Argyll

Helen Stevenson has always presented me with a dilemna for as long as I can remember, and no more so than today, with the shocking news from Art and the Aesthete. For here is a post about an artist that Clive researched with such persistence, it now feels less like a celebration and more like a wake. I'm only relieved I was able to nab an image of Clive's own print The hen wife before it went forever. I am also pleased to be able to say the first time he came across her work was when he saw my own print of Gylen Castle, Kerrera so it provides some consolation, at least. Where I came across the print was in Ayres old shop on Museum Street in London. I went in asking after colour woodcuts and, to my astonishment, the assistant went into the basement and brought up two - both by Stevenson,with the lot numbers still stuck to the glass. She was completely forgotten by then and I took so long over the decison, Christina began to lose patience with me (not for the last time) but I opted for the landscape in the end. But the most surprising twist to the story is this: I never went back and bought the other one.

To console you all I have a new image of  Loch Shiel that displays the purity of colour that is so typical of Stevenson. She was an Edinburgh artist (and trained at the College of Art in the days when Morley Fletcher was principal and John Platt head of applied arts) but I have yet to come across any urban subjects let alone woodcuts of her home city. Many of the woodcuts here are of places in Argyll on the west coast of Scotland, or very near. Mallaig, which used to be in the county of Inverness, is only a few miles north of Loch Shiel, and the Appin peninsula only a few miles to the south. Kerrera is a small island just off the coast. I think we can safely assume that both Campers and The hen wife also both show Argyll. Possibly she used to stay in the area or had family there, but the places I mention are all relatively close one to the other.

You will notice how well she makes use of the limitations of modern colour woodcut byher use of subtle colour and expressive brushwork. Clive told me how remarkable the ultramarine is in The hen wife. I know from my own print just what depth of colour she achieves not just describing the sea but the grass along the cliff top. I always thought this was the most remarkable aspect to the print. The designs are fairly conventional but she is quietly original - no more so than when she is using the convention of the keyblock. Whereas other colour woodcut artists went on to lessen their reliance on the keyblock, Stevenson made a virtue of it. The ruins of Gylen Castle and the rocks around them are almost virtuose in their use of the keyblock. And this print has been dated 1937, pretty late by British colour woodcut standards.

This is what makes me think Clive's own print might belong to this rather later period. There is the same vigour and boldness in the description of the thatch, trees and hens. You can also see the emphatic use of outline around the print with the attractive use of uneven line and rounded corners. Some of these prints like Evening, Mallaig (above) and Rain over Appin (at the bottom) have a Celtic Twilight delicacy about both their colouring and conception. I once saw another one for sale - a view of heather-clad hillsides from across a loch and again there was the same intensity of colour combined with bold design. I won't go into the reasons why I failed to buy that one but they are almost always unedifying. That said, I think the price tag of £250 may have had something to do with it - and it was quite a few years ago.

She became art teacher at St Andrew's Cottage School in Edinburgh as soon as she finished her course in 1924. If the dates we have are right, she was still exhibiting colour woodcuts as late as 1937. It was only the true diehards like Platt and Ian Cheyne who went on that long (and to some extent after the war). But it's not just this fact that suggests to me a true love both of her chosen medium, and of Argyll - it's the work itself. There is nothing inessential about it.  It has the sure touch that gives lasting value, as I have found out.

Art & the Aesthete

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I've not long ago seen the rather sad news that Clive seems to have closed his blog down. I have only found the beginning of a message saying he didn't have the time to dedicate to 'Art & the Aesthete' and what a wonderful time he'd had. To my surprise, the blog doesn't appear to be on the server anymore. But I want to say how grateful I am to Clive for help and support - and of course for the infectious enthusiasm for which he was well-known. The blog was often fascinating and rewarding. I'm sure many readers were aware he had been thinking about his move for a while but I wish him well on the collecting front and I'm only sorry we won't have a permanent reminder and resource online. For me, at least, it's the end of an era.

Steven Hutchins

I first saw this colour woodcut Egglestone Abbey by Steven Hutchins around about 1983. A friend had been on one of his search-and-spend visits to Portobello Road in London and popped in to see Steven Hutchins at his stall as part of the exercise. Now, Steven was a dealer in Japanese woodblock but occasionally sold European woodblock artists. (I bought my treasured Paul Leschhorn from him). But on this occasion he had a woodcut by an artist none of us had ever come across: it was Steven Hutchins himself. And he had done something remarkable.

We knew about the handbook called Woodblock Printing that Frank Morley Fletcher had first published in 1916 but neither us suspected that anyone had used the book to teach themselves how to make woodcuts in the Japanese manner as late as the 1980s. But Steven Hutchins had. You can judge for yourself how successful you think he was but for me he did a good job even though when he asked me if I knew this artist when he showed me a woodcut one day, I failed to buy. (No reason why they should have been cheap but they weren't). Anyway, I wanted readers to see these prints just to show what people can achieve with application. You may also note that Steven worked strictly within the British topographical tradition in these two prints at least. Eggleston Abbey is in Co Durham, Lynton on the rocky coast of north Devon. Incidentally, I haven't seen him since the eighties. It was a great time of shared rediscovery but unfortunately the print dealers with flair like Steven Hutchins all moved on. Hail, and farewell.

Egglestone Abbey is for sale at Era Woodblock Prints erawoodblockprints.com/ in Toronto, Castle Rock, Lynton at annexgalleries.com/ in Santa Rosa. My thanks are due to them.

Isabel de B Lockyer

I used to know someone who would say 'Isabel de B Lockyer' so grandly I got it into my head that, of all the forgotten artists, she must be the most glamorous, the most desirable. So when I eventually found a linocut of hers in a shop in Camden Passage, Islington, I was inevitably confused. It was called The striped sail; it was quite small; it was rather abstract. It had none of the bravura I liked to associate with colour woodcut or linocut and I left it there in the shop. I have never seen another one since.

But, if I was wrong to leave The striped sail down in Islington, my other instincts were proved correct. There is chic and glamour in these early landscapes - the little temple screened by trees in Near Vevey (1924), the Italian coast, above, in Rapallo (1926) and the stylish The lagoon, Corfu (1928). They all make me think of house-parties in the country and holidays abroad. And indeed I think she chose as mentor an artist with the most glamorous light of them all. I mean William Giles (see WG: modern printmaker, March, 2011). There is no record that he actively taught her anything but we only have to look at Near Vevey to see that she knew his work very well. But this is Giles without any pretence at realistic lighting. He went to extremes to get that kind of pink; I don't think Switzerland is quite so northern lights as that.

As I said  'Ada Collier, ancient and modern' (March, 2011), we do know that Giles taught Collier and this does suggest to me that other artists may have gone to him for tuition. We not only find the same improbable colours in her linocuts, she also goes in for his precision. She is not only exact about titles, at times she goes in for describing the light the way he does. But in almost all other respects, there the tutorship ends. Although they may look like colour woodcuts because of the water-based inks she uses, all these prints were made from linoblocks. The works from the twenties are also landscapes, very much in line with many British colour woodcutters of that period, including Ian Cheyne and Helen Stevenson. By 1930, though, there is a change.

The shop window from 1930 is typical - schematic and with more of an interest in the human figure. Inevitably, again, it hard to really know what these changes mean without knowing more about her or seeing more of her work. I've deliberately placed these prints in chronological order (she always dated her work) but we only have a run of eleven years here, which isn't very much to go on. What I do think we can see is the influence of the Grosvenor School, especially when she chooses social or popular activities like shopping or picnics as her subjects. Bear in mind that both Giles and Claude Flight were the kind of men who very much wanted to show what could be done with their chosen mediums. So far as Isabel de Bohun Lockyer went, it seems that work had its effect.

Which brings us to Wembury Church (1933). The Lockyers came from Plymouth and one of them bought Wembury House in the early C19th. He later moved to Australia with the British Army but the family connection clearly took Lockyer to south Devon to produce this rather unsual offshore print. (It's been pointed out that you could have only see the church this way from a boat). The de Bohun bit of her name is something of a mystery. So far as I can see, the de Bohuns only had a residual Devon connection and my own feeling is that this rather grand addition to her name was made by Lockyer herself. It makes her name as complex as one of Giles' titles.

I like the name, as I said; and what I do like very much about her work is the variety. She uses a wide range of colours but usually doesn't let her interest in them predominate  - one of Giles' failings. If she has no interest in natural light (even at its Giles' weirdest) she does have a strong sense of the social world around her. I suspect her early voguish landscapes suggest a social milieu as much as the portrait etchings of Emil Orlik do. These are very specific types of places she is recording. It a view of them as pleasurable with their isolated old buildings. The fur coats, the cloche hats, the Japanese sun shade only add to the general feeling of fashionable exclusivity. [It would also be wrong of me not to credit joseflebovicgallery.com/ in Sydney for five of these prints.]