New Exhibitions

A couple of interesting exhibitions are looming on the horizon: Kenneth and Mary Martin at Tate St. Ives, and the Queen Mother's collection at Norwich Castle Museum & Gallery, both opening on the 6 October. The Norwich exhibition will include (according to their rather dreadful website), work by John Piper, presumably the series of paintings commissioned of Windsor Castle produced between 1941-1944. With dark and brooding skies above Windsor, Piper painted the mood of the country as well as the buildings, although King George VI failed to appreciate the artistic license, remarking that Piper must have had "very bad luck with the weather". Also on at the same time is the touring Tate Britain exhibition of the work of Prunella Clough. Clough, along with John Minton and Keith Vaughan, was one of the generation of British painters to follow Piper, Sutherland and Moore. Taught by Ceri Richards and Henry Moore at the Chelsea Scool of Art (and later by Victor Pasmore at Camberwell), her mature style reflected figurative cubist influences filtered through a post-war industrial palette of brown and grey. These paintings of east coast fishermen, lorry drivers and road workers are highly stylized, and unrecognisable as individual subjects (in this they are similar, but very different in intent, to Vaughan's male nudes). Like many Clough moved into pure abstration in the 1960s, and her later work is more dynamic, although her palette never moved out of the early industrial hues.

Sources & Links
Richard Cork, National Treasure, New Statesman, 18 August 2003.

Prunella Clough, Tate Britain

The Twentieth Century Society

Known previously as the Thirties Society, and set up to campaign for buildings post 1914 (where the Victorian Society draws it's line), the Twentieth Century Society has triumphed a much maligned era in British building. Currently being castigated for recommending the listing of Plymouth's (rather marvellous) Civic Centre, (see illustration) the Society also works to save those objects and buildings which are now seen as icons of Britishness, such as the Giles Gilbert Scott red telephone boxes. In fact, the Society is currently raising awareness of, and trying to get listed status for, the 1968 K8 telephone box (a less immediately lovable, but just as iconic box for anyone with strong memories of the 1970s). This Society is a must for anyone with a serious interest in modernism, in all it's glories (and ugliness), and is a snip at £35 a year.
Sources
Twentieth Century Society http://www.c20society.org.uk/index.html

J & G Meakin

A J & G Meakin Galaxy coffee pot next to my print 9 Circles Green, with the great Ben Nicholson (Humphrey Spender, circa 1935, National Portrait Gallery) lurking in the background, (sorry, I've no idea where the incense burner fits in to this composition).
J & G Meakin were prolific producers of cheap(ish) tableware from the 1950's onwards, joining forces with Midwinters in 1968 until being taken over by the Wedgewood Group in the 1970s. The coffee pot illustrated is of the Studio style, and is available in a large range of decorative designs, the more common being Sunflower, Maori, Aztec, Poppy, Lotus and Galaxy. Not as popular, or as expensive, as some (such as Midwinter's Stylecraft) due to their more kitsch 1970s designs and availability on the market (everybodies auntie/grandparent seems to have had a set tucked away somewhere) they still represent a great period in British tableware design, and a great opportunity for collectors.
Sources
Stoke-on-line
The Potteries website

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer."

Dylan Thomas, 1937.

This poem was to inspire Ceri Richards' Cycle of Nature series, as well as directly inspiring many paintings and lithographs of the same title (illustration, lithograph from Poetry London, Sept-Oct ,1947). As well as other locations, versions are in the Tate, and the Glynn Vivian Gallery in Swansea. The 1947 lithographs for Poetry London (3 in total) were to initiate a lifelong passion for Thomas's work (although they only met once, in 1953, the year of Thomas' death). Richards' work can be seen as a barometer of european art influences of the day: moving from the neo-romantic influences of Sutherland to the continental styles of Matisse, and in particular, Picasso. Even his subject matter was similar, with his Rape of the Sabines, Richards was mining a seam that Picasso had explored with his Vollard Suite in the 1930s.

To my mind, one of the strongest set of works that Richards produced were his 'pictorial relief constructions', abstracted portraits of costermongers (always of great fascination to Richards) and others in a whole variety of materials such as rope, wood, metal and other everyday objects (illustration, Two Females, 1937-38, Tate Gallery)

Sources

A. D. F. Jenkins, (2004), ‘Richards, Ceri Giraldus (1903–1971)’, rev., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2005

The genius of Dai Greatcoat

How many people who gaze up at the magnificent lettering on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre think of the great painter-poet David Jones? I guess not many. In fact they all should, as the lettering is based upon the unique and wonderful 'inscriptions': those "words painted on paper" (Peter Levi, The Times) that Jones produced late in his career (see illustration, Exiit Edictum, 1949, Tate Gallery).

Jones was born in Brockley, Kent, in 1895 to a Welsh father and an English mother (whose own father was Italian). This Welsh-Cockney heritage served Jones well, and can be seen in his 1937 poem-cum-memoir of his time in the trenches In Parenthesis, which was much admired by T.S.Eliot.

Unable to get into the Artists' Rifles, Jones enlisted in the Welch fusiliers on the 2nd January 1915. Wounded in 1916 and invalided home, he missed the carnage of the Passchendaele offensive by a few weeks. Jones, like Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney, found great companionship and humanity in the company of regular soldiers during the Great War: as his Times obituary states, the "comradeship of his section, platoon, and company had a value for him apart from anything that came later". Whereas for Gurney the war crippled him mentally, for Jones it was as much a "flaming light as a shadow" (Times). As Peter Levi states "The fulcrum of his morality was the decency of the infantrymen of 1914".

A painter of ethereal beauty and an engraver of powerful simplicity (see his Ancient Mariner series at High Cross House, for instance) Jones was a unique artist, almost a twentieth century Blake in the strength of his religious and artistic scope and vision. Although playing apprentice to Eric Gill in the early years, and following Gill's artist's colony from Ditchling to Capel-y-Ffin (and having been briefly engaged to Gills's daughter Petra), Jones ' style was less rooted in the medieval than Gill's. Gill presented himself, and was, a craftsman, producing most of his public work to commission, and his private work mostly concerned with his twin passions of Roman Catholicism and sex. Jones created from his imagination, drawing on myth & folklore, personal experience and a fine sense of light and colour to produce multi-layered modern works of art, such as the sublime Aphrodite in Aulis of 1941.

Sources

Levi, Peter, (2006) ‘Jones, (Walter) David Michael (1895–1974)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press; online edn, May 2006

Rothenstein, John (1956) Modern English Painters: volune II. Lewis to Moore. Macdonald and Janes, London.