Leo Frank

                                                                              
When all around them, everyone had gone woodcut-crazy, from Emil Orlik with his raw Ruthenian peasants to Carl Thiemann and his dandified cockeral and on to LH Jungnickel and a zoo-full of hyperactive maccaws, Leo Frank went down the road of refined and understated landscape. Now, this should suit a British collector such as myself, and I admit I would like to own the first woodcut you see here (in fact, another version, in awful condition, as you can see below, came up recently on British ebay), but at the end of the day, with quite alot of his prints, I just think there's something missing, and it's not just a keyblock.

                                                                                    
I think one thing that appeals is the woodcut feel it has. As so often with British colour woodcuts, you can see the way the medium has been applied in the foreground, and there is a tactful use of the keyblock, and a subtle massing of colour that wouldn't be out of place in an English watercolour. I was surprised to see Herbstnachmittag, below, was dated as early as 1908. It was the year of the great Kunstschau in Vienna, when Jungnickel had only just begun to exhibit woodcuts. But Jungnickel wasn't Viennese. He wasn't even Austrian by birth. Nor were Orlik, Thiemann or Klemm. Frank, though, was a local. What we have in the woodcuts is somewhere. And if isn't Austria, then it's Italy. And when not there, we move on to Egypt. But one place we never visit is Japan. Too modish by far.

                                                                                   
Along with his twin brother, Hans, he studied first at the Kunstgewerbeschule, or School of Applied Arts, before moving on to the Academy of Fine Art where they presumably studied painting, pure and simple. It was the standard thing to do, if you proved you had the talent. (Even Egon Schiele took that course to fine art martyrdom). Leo's woodcuts owe less to the emphatic rather abstract style of the Secession than his brother's do. He's also less varied in his approach. He takes a course that blends various styles and trends to come up with work that is sensitive to the effects of light and yet decorative, as other people eventually did, many of them, as it happens, in Britain.
                                                                                  

How far either of the brothers had an effect on British printmaking is hard to say. Hans exhibited six prints with his British colleagues in 1913, and both brothers exhibited  their work in Britian throughout the twenties and thirties. (They were so respected, their work was on show in Birmingham after the outbreak of the second war). It was also available from print-dealers here soon after the first war. The elegant trees that come up time again in Leo Frank, became a standy-by for many British printmakers from the twenties onwards.

                                                                               
You can see how easy it would be to switch alot of this to Sussex or the Isle of Wight. Frank had an interchangeable manner. He re-uses elements - the soft skies, the floating birds, the floating trees - to bring off his aerial enchantment. He suggests, it isn't too exact, nor too demanding. It might have offered a way out. In England we were cowed by French art, above all by the drawing of Ingres. But Frank wasn't Royal College or the Slade, and that's for sure.

                                                                                 
But you could also convert Berkshire to Capri. If  Frank didn't know William Giles' September Moon (see the post) before he made this last delicate print, I'd be surprised. It was a two-way thing, I suspect, for many of them. Both brothers' prints often look like aquatints, and the way Leo abandonned the keyblock so early on in his career could well be a lesson he had learned from Giles who was articulate enough not too need one.

 

Robert Gibbings: the Fenian and the Orangeman

                                                                                  
The allusion to his Irish background in this colour woodcut by Robert Gibbings is both troublesome and fascinating. Is this also the errant medical student who left the bogs of Munster with only enough money for one term, was it, at the Slade? It's just as good to see it together with its companion piece called Play, which was bought by the V&A in 1922, the year the Irish Civil War broke out.

                                                                                          
The top print comes up for a auction at a three-day sale at Bamford's of Derby beginning Wednesday 13th March. It's a quite wonderful piece and I wonder which of the national collections will be bidding.

From the shadows: the prints of Sydney Lee at the Royal Academy

                                                                                    
My own view of the prints of Sidney Lee may well be equivocal, but there is no getting round the comments left in the visitors book during the opening days of this new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. 'Inspiring' certainly suggested that a number of people there made prints themselves. 'A revelation' would have been less of a revelation if such comments had not been so prevelant about many printmakers featured on the pages of this blog. And there was no gainsaying the blunt appeal of  'More prints like this'. It is a long time since any public gallery in London has shown prints from this period and the academy may look a mite out-of-touch and self-regarding when it comes to choice of artist. Lee, after all, was one of their own members. But to some extent it seems the road was chosen by a small group of dedicated Lee followers. There are other contemporaries of Lee who I would consider more deserving of a show in Piccadilly before him, Ethel Kirkpatrick and William Giles amongst them, but the die is cast. Sydney Lee it is.

                                                                               
I have to say the show looks good. The size of the rooms suits the large scale of Lee's prints and the gilded architecture brings out an old masterly touch to Lee I hadn't noticed before. Being a pedant, I could have done with another glass-fronted case, and it was frustrating to read about Lee's watercolour sketches he used to make his colour prints and not to see any. But it is apparent now that alot of Lee material has simply not survived, and it is a credit to all those involved, Robert Meyrick and Harry Heuser above all, that the show has taken place at all.

                                                                                  
Malcolm Salaman came up with one of his phrases when he talked about 'the verity of textures' in Lee's prints. Certainly, the range of his printmaking is impressive. Etching and aquatint, woodcut and wood-engraving, and mezzotint, all worked to a point where the prints begin at times to look like photographs. But Lee, it has to be said, is transitional. Some of the work hovers between the reproductive finesse of C19th engravers and the decorative flair and expressiveness of C20th work. The effect may be mysterious, but the marks Lee actually makes lack interest. What  Samuel Palmer did with pen and ink or Claughton Pellew achieved with his tools, was as individual as it is entrancing, so it certainly isn't a matter of fashion or changing styles.

                                                                                
Lee started out at Manchester School of Art learning sculpture and relief modelling. Unsurprisingly, the stones and buildings he choses as subjects are often sculptural, he harries his prints the way a sculptor might, the light and shadow shifts and glimmers the way it does on a Rodin bronze. At times I found myself wondering whether Lee could actually draw or not, but you only need to take a close-up look at the head of the woman crossing the Ponte Paradiso to undertsnad how much Lee's imagination worked in three dimensions. All the same, the flatness of some of the work is disconcerting.

                                                                                 
Ironically, this is especially true for some of the colour woodcuts, not so much Boatbuilding, St Ives as in Drying sails, St Ives.  There is as much interest in structure as there is in surface, and in Boatbuilding he begins to make marks that have a touch of individuality about them. Unfortunately, I strongly suspect he may have learned this from the lithographs of Henri Riviere. What the early history of Lee's prints is, though, is hard to say. Nothing is dated and everything tends towards the circumstantial. It won't matter very much to people if the odd date is wrong. I would have also thought Lee was making colour woodcut prior to the first date given, which is 1904, but again my own take on Lee is just as circumstantial.

                                                                             
But, all told, this is a fascinating and enjoyable show. The colour woodcuts in particular come up really well. But what comes up most, for all his travels to glorious Italy and sunny Spain, is Lee's northern Englishness, as dour as it is evocative, and he is clearly well inside the main interests of the British printmaking tradition if one considers John Sell Cotman or Valerie Thornton or Norman Ackroyd even. He needs more context. I am dubious about the claim that he was 'experimental'. Original artists prints, especially in colour, were relatively new when Lee began. They were all of them finding their way and, as I've said before, when I talked about the 1910 show in Paris, all of those artists, British and French, were trying out different ways of working. Lee was only one of them. He presented himself in the summer of 1897 as the nineties aesthete. It was an experiment in living that was not to last that long.

                                                                                      

                                                                                   

Swans... William Giles, Hans Neumann, Carl Thiemann

                                                                               

                                                                                
There was a comment from a reader in Colorado today with one of those wonderful good-luck stories about a picture he inherited from his great aunt. She was born in Hungary and when she died about twenty years ago, they had the picture and took it to the framer's who rang back to say he had found another image hidden underneath: Carl Thiemann's Schwane, (below) from about 1916. Why you would want to hide something like that, I don't know, but my reader now has the Thiemann on the wall.

                                                                           
I'd not really thought too much about the preponderance of swans amongst some colour woodcuts artists at the time and I will leave it you to decide what loans were being made, but William Giles and his wife Ada Shrimpton spent weeks in a punt on the river Thames sketching for his glorious woodcut Swans and cygnets (top) which dates from 1911.

                                                                                  
I assume from the description he gives, my reader owns the print you see below the Giles. True to form, Thiemann, when he had made a successful print, went in for other versions, like this one, above. I am taking my German dates from Per Amann's 'Woodcuts', 1989, and according to him, Hans Neumann made the next woodcutn you see, Swans on a lake, at evening (below) in 1914, roughly two years before Thiemann.

                                                                                 
To add a further twist to what is already a complicated little story, Neumann approached the subject once more with what looks to me like a post-war print (below), the overhanging branches being suspiciously like the ones in, yes, Giles' celebrated Haunt of the jay, the moral being, you have to know a good thing when you see one. I suspect Neumann intended to make another image quite different to Thiemann's. I think it's preferable to his first.                                                                 

 

 And if you must know which one I prefer, I think my reader owns something good. I think the tones of the second Neumann are great, especially the white of the swans, despite the drawing being more conventional. The Giles is marvellous and his observation is acute, but Thiemann had that knack of concentrating his efforts into a memorable image. But I think  you would need to see them before deciding, and my hunch is the Giles would win out with his quite superb printing technique, a story, believe me, in itself.  Some of these prints are for sale at Paramour Fine Arts and at William P Carl Fine Art, and my thanks to them. The Giles is by far the most costly.

                                                                                
And there I was, thinking to myself, I should think someone will now send in yet another version of Thiemann's Schwane  only to find that my reader's version is different from the first two I have posted. So, here it is, and thanks to Mike for starting off one more Thiemann post. Where will it end?

                                                                               

Tea with Mr Nash: the Cornerhouse lithographs

                                                                                    
I have advance notice of a cache of lithographs first published by Lyons & Co in the forties and fifties and which is soon to come up for sale. I don't  know which prints they will be, or how much they will cost, but I thought it was about time I began to tackle the whole great subject of the lithographs made for companies like Shell, Lyons and Guinness from the late 1930's onwards.

                                                                                 
Not that these were the first companies to try their hand at publishing original prints. Other, less well-known companies, made a start some years before. But this will be nothing more than an introduction. And for the benefit of most readers to whom the name will mean nothing at all, Lyons began to open tea-rooms in Britain in the 1890s and eventually tried to improve the look of things in their cafes, when means were restricted after the second war, by putting up large lithographs by young, or youngish, British artists. (The photograph below was taken by Wolfgang Suschitzsky in 1934 soon after he first came to Britain from Vienna).

                                                                                  
Some of the artists, like Edward Bawden, had already made a name as graphic artists; others, like David Gentleman, would go on to become well-known in much the same field. Interestingly enough, Charles Mozley (the first two images) had already worked on the Shell project in the late thirties before his print showing the social life surrounding Henley Regatta was published as part of the second Lyons series in 1951. The success of the Shell series provided a model for Lyons themselves.

                                                                          
Lyons own series had no point to make about style - the styles were varied - and unfortunately only half of them were drawn on the stone by the artists. The print union had been unhappy about the use of non-union labour, but a deal was struck whereby the other half were made by workers at Chromolithograph (I think it was). Mozley used the painterly freedom of the stone to his advantage, and reminds us by how much the work of French artists like Claude Monet and Pierre Bonnard could still turn chic in early fifties Britain. (Henley Regatta remains fashionable to this day - I think.)

                                                                            
Staying beside the river Thames, we next have Edwin LaDell's beautifully-judged evocation of another aspect of British social life in Fishing at Marlow. Better by far than his other view of the Thames, by the Tower of London, I think many of these images work better with figures plus landscape than as landscape alone. There was certainly variety, as you see from Fred Uhlman's Lighthouse at St Agnes (above). It was a small tour round Britain, a re-statement in modern-ish terms of what we knew and what we liked. Finally, I cannot resist adding William Roberts' tricksy but masterly drawing, even though he never worked for the project (by that time he was hard-up but far too down on commercialism). I believe this shows the famous waitresses called nippies and must recall the everyday atmposphere of the cafes that Roberts would warm to, and which contradicts the self-consciousness noted by Suschitzsky.

                                                                                       
There will be more about all this once I have more news. Untill then, remember, you read it here first.

Ethel Kirkpatrick & Isola San Giorgio Maggiore

                                                                                       
It takes an artist who knows what they want to do to go on returning to a view of the same small, island. Not any island, I have to admit, but the extraordinary Isola San Giorgio Maggiore at Venice as seen here by Ethel Kirkpatrick in 1898.

It was at that time she began to first make colour woodcuts, but she had already been painting and exhibiting watercolours like this one for at least four years. But what we have seen untill now are the watercolours painted in the west of Cornwall, even though she and her sister Ida went on various sketching trips in southern England and beyond. What we have seen so far may only be a matter of what has turned up, so I am very grateful to the reader who sent in this unusual view of the island with the domes of Santa Maria della Salute at the entrance to the Grand Canal just to the right.

It shows San Giorgio from the west, possibly from the Giardini Pubblicci, or from a boat. Almost all the views of the island you find tend to emphasise its isolation, but Kirkpatrick takes a viewpoint that recalls Istanbul seen across the Golden Horn.

                                                                                  
The restricted palette of blues and reds is telling. Here is an artist who was about to embark on a career making colour woodcut, and it shows just how much that medium would suit her style.  Early morning, Venice (above)  involves another view of the island, with the campanile apparently missing. It was made years later, when the topography of the city was of less interest to her than the nature of its light. But watercolour gave her the opportunity to create a panorama with a real sense of depth that colour woodcut does less well.

By the time she came to make Evening, Venice  (above) in 1913, I think she was on the top of her form and it just shows what expressive freedom she had gained when she came to colour woodcut. It has her taking yet another view of Isola San Giorgio, probably from St Mark's Square this time, and it is fascinating to see her looking at the same subject in three such different ways. So, many thanks to Kia for sending the watercolour in today. We now know more about Kirkpatrick than we did on Tuesday.

W was for Wormell

                                                                                     

A second look at the British illustrator and all-round success story, Chris Wormell - a second look because my first post only dealt with his designs for the Adams brewery campaign, and much as I like those, I actually prefer his animells.

                                                                            

His success, as I've said before, his based on the canny method employed, one way or another, by the illustrators that make a name for themselves. Wormell has drawn heavily on the two great founding-fathers of modern British relief printmaking. Both Thomas Bewick and William Nicholson have seeped into our visual awareness simply because artists and designers have returned to them time and again to build on their approach, so much so we now recognise something we know as soon as we see a Wormell zebra or kingfisher. This has to be one of the main tenets of Adland.

I am not decrying the originality or variety of Chris Wormell's work, but there is a difference between his wood-engraving of a hedgehog, which comes from a small edition, as you can see, and the more upfront frog on a lily pad. The hedgehog goes its own way, in a descriptive world to itself, and relies as much on Bewick's delicacy as the work of Ian Stephens does; the frog blends knowingness, caricature and appeal in equal measures, and is probably closer to the work of his peers in the United States.

                                                                            
Like Nicholson, he has no scruples when it comes to a keyblock, even though he has less need. All but two of Nicholson's woodcuts were hand-coloured, whereas Wormell's linocuts, so far as I know, are all printed. With Wormell, the keyblock is there for the impact and for the style. I doubt that you could print off one of Wormell's keyblocks and publish it the way one of Mabel Royds was, to reveal expressive or incisive cutting - and Royds learned just as much from Nicholson. His keylock provides pattern and outline but no more. Compare Seaby's broken, ragged line the second his alarmed grouse take flight with Wormell's deliberateness. His work is sometimes stationary, like old-time zoological prints, but like Royds and Nicholson before him, he has a great sense of shadow.

                                                                             

Even if Wormell is joyful colourist and rugged designer both, the truth is that, in the end, when it comes to birds or other animells, Bewick and the Japanese printmakers were better masters than the chapbooks or Nicholson who, after all, was only biding his time till he turned into Titian.