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Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World @ the National Portrait Gallery

From the Sitwells to the Rolling Stones…

Introduction

Cecil Beaton (1904 to 1980) was a phenomenon. He made himself into the leading fashion photographer of his day, but that was far from being his only achievement: he was also a fashion illustrator, a painter, a writer of fashion essays and books (34 books in total), a social caricaturist, a serious wartime photographer, a costume and set designer for theatre and the movies, while all the time keeping one of the classic celebrity diaries of the century (at his death he left no fewer than 143 diaries which were published in 6 handsome volumes).

But the core of his achievement was the forty years he spent as a leading figure in fashion photography and that’s what this grand exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery focuses on. Aptly titled ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’, it is the first exhibition to exclusively explore Beaton’s pioneering contributions to fashion photography.

It’s designed to be a landmark show, with some 250 items on display, mostly wonderful photos but also including Beaton’s:

  • drawings
  • illustrations
  • magazine covers
  • a youthful home movie he and friends made of fooling around
  • several painted portraits of him by artist friends
  • and, in display cases:
    • a handsome collection of first editions of 20 or so of his books
    • the actual Kodak camera he did his early work on
    • the Oscar he won for ‘My Fair Lady’

1920s and ’30s

After the Second World War Beaton spent more time doing set and stage design, and in America working in Hollywood. It’s from this period that date the many classic portraits of notable actors and artists and, in particular, of Hollywood stars from the 1950s and ’60s, which many of us are familiar with. These are regularly shown in exhibitions with titles like ‘Cecil Beaton: Portraits’ but that’s not what this one is about. This one really does focus on his fashion photography and related work (illustrations, covers, books) and so has lots of his photos for Vogue magazine from 1927 to 1937, depicting upper-middle class debutantes and society ladies in wonderfully elaborate outfits against ornately staged backdrops, none of whom we’ve heard of and will ever hear of again.

Princess Emeline De Broglie by Cecil Beaton (1928) Gelatin silver print, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

Thus the very first room hosts 16 very big silver gelatin prints which survive from the landmark exhibition of Beaton portraits which the National Portrait Gallery held back in 1968. The curators point out that it was the first such show accorded a living photographer and helped to cement his reputation as ‘the finest arbiter of taste of the twentieth century’. And these 16 big black-and-white portraits are, indeed, stunning in composition and execution. But what I’m saying is they’re all of people you and I have never heard of: society figures from the 1920s and ’30s who are long forgotten. For example:

  • Sita Devi, Princess Karam of Kapurthala, 1935
  • The Honourable Mrs Richard Norton (Jean Norton), late 1920s
  • Paula Gellibrand, the Marquesa de Casa Maury, 1928
  • Mrs Harrison Williams (Mona Williams), 1936
  • Hazel, Lady Lavery, late 1920s
  • Mrs Robert H. McAdoo (Lorraine McAdoo), 1934
  • Lady Sylvia Ashley, 1934
  • Mrs Allan Ryan, Junior (Janet Ryan), 1929
  • Doris, Viscountess Castlerosse, 1932

A few leading actors are included (the beautiful young Vivienne Leigh) but the Hollywood celebs, for the most part, come a lot later.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing three portraits from the first room recreating of the 1968 show: note the elaborate paper-cut roses on the wall, echoing Beaton’s classic floral backgrounds (photo by the author)

Beaton’s beginnings

After this introductory room of greatest hits from the 1920s, The show is laid out in a straightforward chronological order. It starts with Cecil being born the son of a prosperous timber merchant in Hampstead. He had two sisters (Nancy and Barbara aka ‘Baba’) who appear in his earliest photos, as well as photos of his mother, Etty. After prep and public school, he got a place at Cambridge, where he studied history, art and architecture but wasn’t very academically minded and put most of his energy into theatre and the Footlights Revue.

The early rooms contain photos of his two glamorous sisters, Cambridge friends and society contacts. These include a wonderful picture of the artist Rex Whistler posing as a character from a Watteau painting. We learn that this was one of a series of tableaux en fête champêtre (‘pictures from a country festival’), a homage to the stylised paintings of Lancret, Watteau and Fragonard held at Wilsford Manor, Stephen Tennant’s family home, which Cecil organised in the summer of 1927. Next to it is a large portrait of Stephen Tennant, brightest of the Bright Young Things.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing the big portrait of a young Stephen Tennant

It’s in this room that the home movie is showing. It was made at Weirbridge Cottage near Savay Farm, Denham, in Buckinghamshire, the country home of the Mosley family and featured Bright Young Things such as Teresa ‘Baby’ Jungman, Georgia Sitwell, John Strachey, and the ubiquitous Tennant.

The point is Beaton’s ambition and determination. His parents were affluent enough to send him to private school and Cambridge but the rest was up to him and so he became a networker of genius. He managed to be taken up by all the important cultural circles of the day, namely: 1) Lady Ottoline Morell, the famous hostess of artists and writers at her country house, Garsington Manor, 2) the Sitwells, led by the poetess Edith Sitwell.

Charming, clever, charismatic, ambitious, talented, Beaton made friends and contacts wherever he went and people were flattered to be photographed by him. So in this room are photos of Lady Ottoline and some of her circle, of Edith and her brothers Sacheverell and Osbert. He is quoted as saying he learned an immense amount about posh upper-class manners and taste from his stays at Sacheverell’s country house at Weston Hall, Northamptonshire. Study, copy, rise.

Originally taken for the larks, Beaton’s photographs of Tennant and his circle now have considerable historical value, being considered some of the best representations of the Bright Young People of the twenties and thirties.

What comes over from all these wonderful black-and-white shots is the extent to which modernist art had been assimilated into the culture, especially in the 1920s. The tranquil rural settings of the Watteau homages are the exceptions because most of the photos are highly stylised interiors, taken against often striking Art Deco backgrounds, which make the photos works of art in themselves, as in the striking polka dot backdrop for Princess Emeline De Broglie, above. Here’s an installation view showing half a dozen of his wonderfully stylised 1920s and ’30s portraits. Note the striking modernist backdrops, the lovely outfits and the dramatic poses.

Installation view of Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery

One modernist technique he used to dramatic effect was deploying multiple exposures. There are one or two examples here, although not the famous masterpiece, his portrait of Nancy Cunard.

Cecil’s self-creation

Part of Beaton’s ambition to get into the best social and artistic circles of the day was the drive to invent himself, to curate, mould and promote his own image. One result was that, over the years, a huge number of photos were taken of Beaton himself, a large number of artful self portraits but also portraits by other snappers, especially in his post-war celebrity period. The curators boast that the National Portrait Gallery alone holds 360 portraits of Beaton, by some of the most celebrated practitioners ranging from Man Ray to Richard Avedon, Dorothy Wilding to David Bailey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn and Arnold Newman. And so the exhibition includes photos of:

  • Cecil play-acting as King Cnut
  • Cecil outside the Excelsior Hotel, Venice
  • Cecil in Room 1806 at the Ambassador Hotel, New York
  • Cecil dressed up as the popular novelist Elinor Glyn
  • Cecil on the Menai Suspension Bridge
  • Cecil in RAF photographer’s uniform, the Western Desert
  • Cecil and Truman Capote in Tangier
  • Cecil and Audrey Hepburn on the set of My Fair Lady
  • Cecil looking grand in a cloak by the great American photographer Irving Penn in 1950

And many more.

Cecil’s stagings

I thought the single most important piece of information in the exhibition was the curators’ own observation that Beaton was never known as a highly skilled technical photographer. Instead, he focused on staging a compelling model or scene.

At school, university and after there’s plenty of evidence that he loved the theatre, loved staging plays and performances (the home movie, the Watteau series), loved not just acting in them but costume and set designing. Indeed, it was not just photography alone but his ability to make designs for the charity galas staged by fashionable London society, which boosted his reputation among the rich and titled. Here’s an installation view showing three of his photo portraits from a 1930s charity ball, which demonstrate just how elaborate these settings could be, almost dwarfing the human subjects. Note the mad profusion of flowers.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery (photo by the author)

Once this talent for dressing a set is explained you see it everywhere. We are told that Beaton owned a couple of trunks full of props and spent a lot of time dressing and arranging the set or backdrop before he got around to the person or model to be shot. In so many of the shots it’s the dress and costume the sitter is wearing (this is fashion, after all) that has a lot to do with it – but what made it so Beaton would be the elaborateness or artfulness of the backdrops.

And so this is what a lot of the photos here consist of: classic debutante and society shots from the ’20s and ’30s – tall, elegant ladies in stunningly beautiful dresses, against stylishly imaginative backdrops. Here’s a photo which demonstrates both his flair for self-presentation and an example of his elaborate and stylish backdrops, in a self-portrait from the 1930s. See what I mean by ornate and elaborate backdrops. And flowers. Lots of cut flowers.

Cecil Beaton (c.1935) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

The sources of Cecil’s style

Almost entirely self-taught, Beaton established a highly distinctive photographic style which combined 1) Edwardian stage portraiture, 2) hints of contemporary European surrealism, 3) the more modernist approach of the great American photographers of the era, all filtered through 4) a pointedly English sensibility. The more I looked the more this ‘English sensibility’ could be summarised as lots of flowers.

Once you’ve recognised these elements, you can see how the mix varied in different shots or periods. For example, the portraits of his arty friends (the BYTs, the Sitwells) use a European modernist sensibility, all Art Deco lines and geometric backdrops, whereas the debutante balls are all English roses (lots and lots of roses). When, in the 1950s, he did Hollywood film stars, there are a few staged settings but most are shot in a more American, democratic, unstaged way. The famous portraits of Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe are all about capturing (supposedly) unstaged and natural moments.

Elizabeth Taylor by Cecil Beaton (1955) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

Reflecting on this, you realise that being invited to do the costume and set design for the Broadway musical, and then for the movie version, of ‘My Fair Lady’ was a dream come true for Beaton, because it is a costume drama, a period piece, set in his beloved Edwardian era, but heightened and stylised through a 20th century sensibility. The outfit and backdrop in the photo below, for instance. They have the feel and apparent shape of an Edwardian outfit, but the details of the dress design, and especially the receding square of the backdrop, owe more to the 1960s Op Art of Bridget Riley than the 1900s world of Edward Elgar.

Audrey Hepburn in costume for ‘My Fair Lady’ by Cecil Beaton (1963) The Cecil Beaton Archive, London

Beaton and British Vogue

Cecil managed to sell his first photo to British Vogue while still an undergraduate and signed a contract with them in 1927. For the next decade he worked as a staff photographer for Vogue and the core of the exhibition is lots of work from this period. This includes not just fashion shoots but illustrations and covers.

Regarding the illustrations, about half a dozen are on show here, all of them are good, and some of them are sublime. Obviously it’s fashion with its eternal body fascism, so all the women are immensely tall with unfeasibly long necks but, if you enter that world, those are the rules.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing one of Beaton’s many fashion drawings: note the extreme thinness and elongation of the models;  in fashion, everything changes and yet nothing changes

Vogue covers

More light is shed on Beaton’s strengths and weaknesses in the matter of magazine covers. You’d have expected the young genius to have supplemented his elaborate fashion shoots with umpteen cover shoots for Vogue but, surprisingly, no. Very few of his classic shots made it onto the cover of Vogue. This was, apparently, because he was too opinionated to submit to the requirements of art directors who needed to arrange images to have lots of text imposed over them. Cecil wouldn’t play ball. So surprisingly few covers.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ showing the display case of holding some of his (relatively few) magazine covers (photo by the author)

Cecil’s antisemitism

Then disaster struck. In 1937, for reasons he could not immediately explain, as he put the finishing touches to a finely-detailed decorative border to a double-page illustration for Vogue, Beaton added in tiny writing an antisemitic slur – basically, he used the k word. Though almost microscopic, it did not go unnoticed. 130,000 copies of the early February 1938 edition were pulped as the magazine’s editors fielded a backlash from  advertisers who threatened a boycott. Condé Nast forced Beaton’s resignation from Vogue. Beaton’s humiliation was sudden and total. Then again, this is the world of fashion. Two years later, partially rehabilitated by the seriousness of his war photography (see below), Vogue rehired him.

The Royals

In 1939, much to his own surprise, Beaton was invited to Buckingham Palace to photograph Queen Elizabeth, wife of the reigning monarch, George VI. Only two years earlier he had potentially alienated the Royals by doing portraits of the two figures at the heart of the scandal which rocked the family, the 1936 Abdication Crisis, namely Edward Prince of Wales and the American divorcee he fell in love with, Wallis Simpson. His 1937 portraits of them are here and very impressive, too, especially Wallis in a striking black and white Schiaparelli jacket.

But despite having taken stylish photos of the Royals’ enemy, he was now invited into the heart of the establishment, to take photos of the loyal Royals, and this was to open up a whole new aspect of his career. Queen Elizabeth (who was to become the Queen Mother) was charming, her husband mild and unassuming, and he took various sets of them. But over the  next decade or more it was their daughter, the young Princess Elizabeth, who stole the show, who emerged from girlhood into young maturity and be captured in a series of photoshoots. Beaton was the official photographer for her coronation (2 June 1953), and captured the growth of her young family. There’s a great shot of her with the toddler Prince Charles.

Meanwhile, her sister, the more fashionable and flirtatious Princess Margaret, was also given the Beaton treatment, but in a more stylish and elegant manner than her more homely sister. Beaton’s long association with the Royals, during which he helped to mould their public image, has been the subject of more than one exhibition and numerous books.

War photographer

If Beaton’s reputation was dented by the antisemitism scandal, it was in part rehabilitated by the advent of war in September 1939. He was recruited into the Ministry of Information and tasked with creating propaganda photos. At first these focused on the Home Front, especially during the Battle of Britain (10 July until 31 October 1940) and the Blitz (7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941). This section of the show features a fashionably dressed young woman set against a completely bombed-out London building.

But the star of the section is the iconic photo Beaton took of 3-year-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne recovering in hospital, clutching her beloved teddy bear. When the image was published, America had not yet joined the war, but images like this did much to create the climate of public opinion in the States favourable to lending Britain arms and materiel.

The Men Who Fly Planes by Cecil Beaton (1941) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

I haven’t really brought out Beaton’s work rate. You don’t become the leading fashion photographer of your age by accident. It took a lot of hard work, ambition and commitment, honing your craft, maintaining contacts and delivering the goods. And the point of mentioning this now is that when the war came, Beaton applied the same commitment and work rate to his war work. At first on the domestic subjects of the Blitz and air battle but, once it was possible, he travelled beyond Britain to other theatres of war, to document all aspects of the war effort: from the shipyards of Tyneside to the Middle East and then the Far East to record the war against Japan.

In total Beaton took some 7,000 photographs for the Ministry of Information covering all aspects of the Second World War, and produced an impressive ten books with titles like ‘History Under Fire’ and ‘Air of Glory’. Like so many other aspects of Beaton’s career this one, too, has been the subject of an exhibition, held, appropriately enough, at the Imperial War Museum.

So much so that I wondered: why is there a whole section devoted to Beaton’s war photography in an exhibition about fashion?

Two country homes: Ashcombe and Reddish

The exhibition takes another digression away from purely fashion shoots to devote a room to Beaton’s two homes. From 1930 to 1945, Beaton leased Ashcombe House in Wiltshire. It was a small, elegant house, undisturbed for years and Beaton lavished years of care, decorating and adorning it with tasteful theatricality, and it became a venue for hosting his many friends in the arts.

Unfortunately, when the lease expired in 1945 it couldn’t be renewed, so he was bereft for a few years. Then, in 1947, he discovered Reddish House, a ‘miniature Queen Anne jewel-box of a house’, set in a couple of acres of gardens, a few miles east of the village of Broad Chalke.

Here he transformed the interior, adding rooms on the eastern side, extending the parlour southwards, and introducing many new fittings. Once again, it became a venue for visitors, friends and celebrities, not least his sometime inamorata, Greta Garbo (the very improbable affair between Beaton and Garbo lasted from 1946 to 1960). Grand personages for a quiet English backwater. Beaton remained at the house until his death in 1980 and is buried in the parish church graveyard.

State and film design

In Britain, the end of the war saw a continuation of rationing and austerity. The most obvious change in Beaton’s world was the advent of colour photography. During the 1930s colour image making was a labour-intensive exercise and Beaton wasn’t fond of it. Technological advancements in colour reproduction had been led by The Condé Nast Publications at its state-of-the-art printing works outside New York so that Vogue was at the cutting edge. The curators claim that Beaton made some of his most
impressive fashion photographs in colour, usually within his trademark stylised format. Frankly, I’m not so sure.

The room of post-war colour photos seemed to me by far the weakest. His colour photos lack the style, precision and thrilling modernity of the black and white ones. I can think of no better way of saying it than that the subjects in the 1920s and ’30s black-and-white images look like flawless gods and legends whereas the people in his colour photos look like people, freckles and skin blemishes and all. Here’s one of his solo colour portraits from just after the war. Nicely staged and lit and everything, but… plain. Amazing dress, lovely little bouquets etc… But lacking any oomph.

At the Tuxedo Ball (Nancy Harris) by Cecil Beaton (1946) The Condé Nast Archive, New York

He’s a lot better when he can arrange his figures into the kind of idealised, stylised Edwardian drawing room ambience which became his post-war brand, as here, less close-up, more stylised. Like a set design.

Worldly Colour (Charles James evening dresses) by Cecil Beaton (1948) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Designer for stage and screen

Possibly this is why his post-war career took a detour away from photography back towards his first love of the stage, costumes and theatrical design. Immediately after the war, in 1946, he designed sets, costumes and lighting for a 1946 revival of Lady Windermere’s Fan, in which he also acted. Eight years later, in 1956, he won plaudits for the costumes he designed for Alan Jay Lerner (lyricist and librettist) and Frederick Loewe (composer)’s musical play ‘My Fair Lady’. The association led to the invitation to be designer to the Lerner and Loewe film musical, ‘Gigi’, in 1958. And then, the climax of his career, to design costumes for the award-winning movie version of the play, ‘My Fair Lady’, released in 1964. Astonishingly, Beaton won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for both these movies.

The last room in the exhibition is devoted to Beaton’s designs for and photos of the stars of ‘My Fair Lady’, not least a montage of shots of the incomparable Audrey Hepburn, along with a couple of the original star of the stage production, Rex Harrison, and the young actress who made the part onstage but was dropped in favour of Hepburn, Julie Andrews (note the roses).

Celebrities

As mentioned, before the war it’s mostly debutante and fashion photos of the 1920s and ’30s are of people we’ve never heard of (apart from the Royals). It’s after the war, when he went to work in America, that Beaton started shooting celebrity actors and performers in large numbers. Thus the exhibition includes memorable portraits of:

  • John Wayne
  • Gary Cooper
  • Fred Astaire
  • Katherine Hepburn
  • Buster Keaton
  • Johnny Weismuller
  • Marlon Brando
  • Yul Brynner
  • Joan Crawford
  • Elizabeth Taylor
  • Marilyn Monroe

Artists:

  • Salvador and Gala Dali
  • Lucien Freud
  • Francis Bacon

Comments

1. Absence of analysis

Exhibition curator Robin Muir is quoted as saying ‘Beaton’s impact spans the worlds of fashion, photography and design.’ OK. Why? How? Explain what lasting impact he had on 1) fashion, 2) photography, 3) design. What, exactly, were his, say, three major innovations in photography?

I was surprised at the lack of analysis of any of this. Blank assertion a-plenty – he was ‘one of the leading visionary forces of the British twentieth century’, he ‘made a lasting contribution to the artistic lives of New York, Paris and Hollywood’ and so on. Yes, but how exactly? In what way did he ‘mould the visual style between the wars’? Why exactly was he called ‘the King of Vogue’? What was it about his compositions or lighting, his arrangement of models and so on, that defined the age?

The wall captions overflow with names of all the sitters, who they were and who they married or divorced – there’s no end of celebrity tittle-tattle, so that much of the exhibition reads like a society gossip column from a hundred years ago:

Marjorie Seely Blossom (1890-1969) divided her time between New York, Palm Beach and Biarritz, where she cultivated a much-admired rose garden. In a letter to Beaton, Diana Vreeland praised Mrs Wilson as ‘the most divinely beautiful woman that ever was’.

Or:

Lady Mendl, the former Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950), was married late in life and to the surprise of friends, to Sir Charles Mendl, press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. They kept separate
residences but entertained together. An interior decorator of influence, Lady Mendl sits in the circular hall of her Paris home in a blue taffeta dress by Mainbocher. Beaton considered her ‘a woman of unquenchable vitality… a living factory of chic.’

There’s hundreds of miles of this stuff. But insights into the precise nature of Beaton’s innovations and discoveries, what his look consisted of and why it was so influential, or indeed an outline of the main developments in fashion during the 1920s and ’30s – disappointingly little.

2. Comparison with Lee Miller

It’s a happy coincidence that the Beaton exhibition (ends January 2026) is running in parallel with Tate Britain’s exhibition of another pioneering twentieth century photographer, Lee Miller (running until February 2026).

In a nutshell, I think Miller is incomparably the greater photographer and artist. While Beaton had a good eye as a photographer, Lee was a genius. Presumably the Beaton has been carefully curated to be the best of the best and so I was very surprised that quite a few of the photos were actually poor. Some seemed to fail the elementary test of being in focus. Many of the post-war colour images seemed to me clumsy and graceless.

Installation view of Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery showing four of Beaton’s colour photos from the 1940s

Many of the debutante photos and, of course, the Royal portraits, are nice. Nicely composed, chaste and demure, cascades of roses complementing billowing dresses etc. I take the point that the style he developed took a lot of effort and flair and so on but they are all, essentially, conservative, in subject matter (all those posh debutantes) and feel and style. Beaton adapted the feeblest British aftershocks of surrealism into his vision, tame and well mannered.

By contrast, Miller went to the heart of the Parisian avant-garde, tracking down and buttonholing Man Ray and forcing herself to become his collaborator and lover. With him she developed dazzling new ways of seeing and using photography (notably the famous solarising technique). The nudes she did in the studio with Man Ray invented new types of beauty, took the concept of the nude to new places. Her surrealist shots of Paris street scenes are inspired. Her war photography was inspired. She not only had a dazzlingly good eye but was brave in the face of actual combat in a way most of us can’t imagine.

For all that Beaton is photographed smiling and larking around, his humour comes over very little in his actual work, whereas Lee Miller’s quirky surreal take on the world comes over in scores of her images.

Maybe Beaton’s concoction from various elements of a sort of modernised Edwardian elegance for the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s was very influential in his day, in fact for a generation – but it is, all of it, tame and contained and good mannered. While Miller blew the lid off photography not once but several times, with the searing intensity of genius.

I know they come from different worlds and are doing different things. ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ is a very good, very interesting and very entertaining exhibition. But almost anything by Lee Miller blows it out of the water.

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Posted by Simon on November 8, 2025

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Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life @ the Courtauld Gallery

‘The laureate of the lunch counter.’

I know. Another American artist. And a very old one. The curators tell us that American painter Wayne Thiebaud had his big stylistic breakthrough back in 1961.

Still, according to the Courtauld, Wayne Thiebaud is ‘one of the most original American artists of the 20th century’, ‘one of the major figures of 20th-century American art’ and ‘ one of America’s most beloved artists’, although it’s a little hard to believe from this relatively small (21 paintings, two rooms) but beautifully presented exhibition.

Everyday Americana

Basically Thiebaud’s schtick, his brand, was realising that everyday objects of mid-century American life – bubble gum dispensers, fruit machines, cake counters in diners – could be painted with the same seriousness as the countless vases, flowers, plates of fish and so on painted by the Old Masters of the European tradition – still lifers from Chardin to Cezanne. Why not? As he put it, in a quote you come across several times in the wall labels, ‘Each era produces its own still life.’

In the mid-1950s Wayne was painting displays of food such as you see in delicatessens or butchers shops but, as the first couple of examples in this exhibition demonstrate, in a blurred and murky style which feels like it owes a lot to Francis Bacon and other Holocaust-haunted existentialist painters.

Meat Counter by Wayne Thiebaud (1956) The Kondos Collection

Then he had a Eureka moment. According to the curators:

In 1956 Thiebaud travelled to New York to meet the avant-garde artists working there. Willem de Kooning was especially inspirational and encouraged him to find his own voice and subjects as a modern painter. Back in Sacramento [Thiebaud’s home town], he began painting commonplace objects of American life, largely from memory, and soon crystallised his unique approach, isolating his richly painted subjects against spare backgrounds.

Thiebaud’s big breakthrough was to lighten up and get happy, to paint his subjects 1) with more clarity, accuracy and precision 2) against clean white backgrounds, in order to make them stand out more, in order to make them feel more like exhibits.

Pie Rows by Wayne Thiebaud (1961) Collection of the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image: Wayne Thiebaud Foundation

1961 is the key date because it was in that year that he took this body of modern still lifes to New York looking for a gallery to show them.

Having been rejected by almost all of them his last stop was at a gallery run by a young dealer, Allan Stone. Stone understood what he was doing and took him on. The following year, Thiebaud staged his first solo show at the Allan Stone Gallery, which was an overnight success, propelling him into the limelight. Important collectors and institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, purchased works and the exhibition sold out. His career was set.

Five Hot Dogs by Wayne Thiebaud (1961) Private Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image credit: John Janca

Thiebaud’s roots in graphic design

For me the key fact about Thiebaud’s art is that he began his working life as an illustrator and commercial art director. The curators tell us:

Thiebaud lived and worked almost his entire long life in Sacramento, California, and was a longstanding teacher at nearby University of California, Davis. In the 1940s and 1950s, before becoming a painter, he worked as an illustrator, cartoonist and art director, including a summer spent in the animation department of Walt Disney Studios and a role as a graphic designer for the US army as part of his military service during the Second World War.

So he spent years and years honing the ability to present commercial products to best possible advantage. This, it strikes me, has two consequences:

1) At some point he realised: all the effort and creativity devoted to designing adverts and promotions, why not transfer it into the realm of ‘high art’, ‘serious’ art? In a sense his career amounts to making that transfer, that move, from arranging everyday products for commercial photoshoots to arranging everyday products to be painted in a serious, fine art style.

2) It gave him a tremendous ‘eye’. Being a graphic designer means understanding the energy and impact of images within a frame, how to position them, how to create visual effects. Although he was not aiming for advert-level flashiness, nevertheless that eye for a product, a strong fundamental sense of design, underlies all his work.

Three Machines by Wayne Thiebaud (1963) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Image: Photograph by Randy Dodson, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Thiebaud and Pop Art

In the same year as his solo show at the Allan Stone Gallery, 1962, Thiebaud (born 1920) was included in two historic shows that established the Pop Art movement, alongside other artists of his generation like Andy Warhol (born 1928) and Roy Lichtenstein (born 1923).

Now on the face of it Thiebaud has the classic profile of a Pop artist: 1) a background in commercial design (like Warhol), 2) a belief in taking the everyday bric-a-brac of American consumer life as a subject for fine art, and 3) a predilection for presenting the objects in a sterile, formalised way, like exhibits. I.e. there are no people in them, there’s nobody serving behind his counters, there’s no crowds in the cake shop, there’s no-one pumping the fruit machines, all his objects are painted as if they’re exhibits in a sterile museum context.

BUT Thiebaud never considered himself part of the movement and the thing which sets him apart is this: most Pop Art rejoices in reproducing its objects on flat canvas, prints or silk screens, flat and slick and clean. By sharp contrast, Thiebaud’s work is painterly almost to the point of exaggeration. What this means is that he laid his paint on with a trowel. One of the main things about going to this gallery rather than just flicking through the images online is that online reproductions make them look and flat and clean whereas in the flesh you immediately realise that all the paintings are made of thick layers of paint laid on very heavily, with the brushstrokes big and heavy and deliberately visible.

Also, to emphasise the effect, instead of self-effacing matt paint, he used high shine gloss paint which, under gallery lighting, really brings out the swirl and contours of his brushstrokes. To be honest, after the first half dozen paintings of cakes, cake counters and cake displays, my mind began to glaze over a little. I found it more interesting to go really close up to the paintings and savour the thick, heavy, super-visible brushstrokes, that’s where the interest seemed to me. I took a number of close-ups to try and capture the effect. Note the thick heavy gloopy brushstrokes and the shiny gloss paint in this one.

Detail of cake by Wayne Thiebaud (photo by the author)

And the raw messiness of the paintwork in this one.

Detail of Cakes by Wayne Thiebaud (1963) (photo by the author)

This is what the critics mean by ‘painterliness’. They mean the deliberate application of the paint so as to leave each brushstroke and the squeezed out ridges between strokes as visible as possible. And it is this deliberate drawing attention to the paintedness of the works which distinguishes him from the cool, ironic and flat surfaces of all the other Pop artists.

Thiebaud and Abstract Expressionism

One last point. Remember how Thiebaud went to New York in 1956? Pop Art didn’t exist then. The dominant art movement was Abstract Expressionism, epitomised by the splat paintings of Jackson Pollock, all highly visible drips and dribbles. And the artist who encouraged him most was Willem de Kooning, a leading light of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

So you could say that Thiebaud’s achievement was to take an Abstract Expressionist sensibility and apply it to Pop Art subject matter.

Thiebaud’s limited subject matter

The curators make a deal out of how Thiebaud realised the everyday objects of American life were worthy of a high art, fine art, classical treatment, the modern-day equivalent of the great still lives of the European tradition, and they reel off a list of his subject matter: ‘quintessential modern American subjects’ such as cream cakes and meringue pies, hot dogs, candy counters, gumball dispensers and pinball machines.

Yes, but it turns out that these subjects fairly quickly pall. Seen one painting of slices of thick gooey iced cakes on a shop counter and, well, it quickly feels like you’ve seen them all. A moment’s thought makes you realise, that if you take the phrase seriously, we are absolutely surrounded by ‘everyday objects’: phones, cookers, fridge and freezers, pots and pans, tables, chairs, sofas, TVs and that’s just in the home, before you get to streets and cars and buses and taxis and advertising hoardings and street signs, phone boxes and letter boxes and so on, and that’s before you get to the huge variety of buildings you see in an urban environment. Cigarette packets. Chewing gum packets. Newspapers.

Some of this was depicted by the Pop artists or American artists of urban life but none of it is in Thiebaud, along with the other really glaring absence in his work, which is of any people. Looking round each of the two rooms it feels like a very, very restricted, self-imposed restriction of subjects. Here’s a complete list of the 21 paintings in the show:

  1. Meat counter (1956-9)
  2. Pinball machine (1956)
  3. Penny machines (1961)
  4. Cold cereal (1961)
  5. Candy counter (1962)
  6. Caged pie (1962)
  7. Pie rows (1961)
  8. Five hot dogs (1961)
  9. Cup of coffee (1961)
  10. Three cones (1964)
  11. Pie counter (1963)
  12. Boston cremes (1962)
  13. Delicatessen counter (1962)
  14. Delicatessen counter (1963)
  15. Candy counter (1969)
  16. Peppermint counter (1963)
  17. Cakes (1963)
  18. Three machines (gumball machines) (1963)
  19. Yo-yos (1963)
  20. Four pinball machines (1962)
  21. Jackpot machine (1962)

As you can see from the number of counters in this list, the smart-alec critic who called Thiebaud the ‘laureate of the lunch counter’ was actually being very accurate.

Mind you, maybe it’s an artificial uniformity created by the curators. One of the wall labels from a late-60s work (Candy counter, 1969) tells us that by the end of the decade ‘Thiebaud’s work extended beyond still life and, during his long career, he was also famed for his figure paintings and cityscapes.’

Ah. OK. None of that is here. Shame. It would probably be optimal to see the cake works in the broader context of the figures and cityscapes, in other words to have a really extensive retrospective of his career. But the gallery visitor can only judge by what is presented by the curators.

Candy Counter by Wayne Thiebaud (1969) Private Collection © Wayne Thiebaud/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025

American graffiti

Nostalgia. Despite all the burning political issues of the day – the Cold War, the spectre of nuclear war, Civil Rights issues and many more – America was in fact enjoying an economic boom. The 1950s saw affluence spread among the middle classes. Thiebaud’s gloopy still lives, especially the many thickly decorated cakes, convey a sense of this new post-war abundance. A kid in the Depression-era 1930s, for young Wayne all these brightly coloured cakes and candies represented boyish joy and freedom.

Now we know that all these cakes and candies have contributed to an epidemic of obesity and heart disease across the western world. Speaking as a man on a low cholesterol diet, I came to feel surfeited and then a little sickened by the sight of all this sugary poison. We know too much.

But looking at these cake counters and fruit machines and gum machines now, and pondering their provenance from the early 1960s, before (for example) the Vietnam War ruined everything, they also feel like exercises in boyish nostalgia, reminiscent of the candy-coloured nostalgia of a movie like George Lucas’s ‘American Graffiti’.

Comparison with Manet

The curators recommend that we compare and contrast Thiebaud’s arrays of treats with an older work in the Courtauld Collection, Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, a painting Thiebaud greatly admired. If you look away from the dominant figure of the barmaid, you realise that this, too, is a depiction of a counter of treats. They’re mainly alcoholic ones in beautifully rendered bottles but seeing it through Thiebaud’s eyes made me notice for the first time the little pile of mandarin oranges in their shiny glass bowl. Yes, you can see the continuity of interests.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet (1882) The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust) © The Courtauld

The most obvious difference is that, whereas the Manet is densely populated with the crowd at a popular bar and features the (rather gawky) interaction between the customer and a barmaid, the Thiebaud paintings on display here contain no human beings at all, not a trace, not in any of them.

Drawings and etchings

There are actually two exhibitions. The one of Thiebaud’s paintings is up in the third floor. A floor below (and easy to miss because of its small doorway) the small gallery devoted to drawings hosts a display of 17 prints and etchings Thiebaud made in the same period (the 1960s). It’s mostly black-and-white prints although four of them have been hand coloured. The display focuses on a portfolio of 17 prints which were published in a 1965 edition titled ‘Delights’.

Two obvious contrasts with the often fairly large paintings in the main display. 1) They’re small, generally A4 size or smaller. 2) They’re flat. They have none of the glossy, gloopy, brushstroke-dominated surface of the paintings. Instead they feel flat and chaste and restrained. Tidy. Sweet (in two senses, given the cakey subject matter).

But they’re almost all of the same very limited topics. Cakes and more cakes, mostly black and white, a few coloured in. An exciting exception is the plate of bacon and eggs.

I sort of liked them, or respected the craftsmanship. In their rather scratchy, sketchy approach they reminded me of the early drawings of David Hockney, which I don’t like very much. The one I liked most was the least characteristic because it was made using graphite i.e. had the warmth and shading of a charcoal drawing, the kind of thing I am more drawn to. It’s a depiction of salt and pepper shakers on a café table. I can’t find it anywhere online so here’s my terrible photo of it.

Installation view of Untitled (Sugar, salt and pepper) by Wayne Thiebaud @ the Courtauld Gallery (photo by the author)

For Thiebaud completists, there’s a display case containing a first edition of Delights, with a list of all the prints it contained, alongside a display of his etching tools.

Display case containing a first edition of ‘Delights’ alongside Wayne Thiebaud’s etching equipment: note his magnifying glasses at centre back @ the Courtauld Gallery (photo by the author)

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by Simon on October 24, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in America, Art, Exhibition, Painting, Prints
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Posted by Simon on October 24, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/10/24/wayne-thiebaud-american-still-life-the-courtauld-gallery/

Ralph Steadman: INKling @ the Heath Robinson Museum

Back when I was a student the classics of Gonzo journalism written by Hunter S. Thompson and illustrated with mad blotchy, psychedelic drawings by Ralph Steadman were compulsory reading, almost style Bibles to some people.

The Gonzo works are only one aspect of the long and wide-ranging career of one of Britain’s most celebrated illustrators – it’s striking to learn that his first cartoon was published in 1953 and he’s still going strong over 60 years later.

This exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum, up in Pinner, is a highly enjoyable dive into some key themes from the great man’s life, works and mind-expanding art.

Poster for Ralph Steadman: INKling

The exhibition showcases works from four themes:

1. Literary illustrations

One wall displays eight of Steadman’s illustrations of three great literary classics such as Alice in Wonderland (1967), Animal Farm (1994), and Treasure Island (1985).

The literary classics wall at ‘Ralph Steadman: INKling’ @ the Heath Robinson Museum (photo by the author)

It’s interesting to study the Alice illustrations, the earliest works here. Right back in 1967 his distorted and rather demented style is evident, especially in the eyes, which are often large as plates with huge black pupils, and often deliberately disturbingly asymmetrical. But the obvious thing about them compared to everything which follows are 1) far more attention to detail than you find later; the images are far more finished in every detail and 2) the importance of straight lines or, more accurately, the contrast between geometrically precise shapes often demarcated by lines, and the craziness of the human figures, especially the scary faces. Look at the precision of the numerable lines in the Through The Looking Glass pictures.

I set myself to choose one image from each of the four themes in the show. The Alice ones have a late 1960s trippy vibe, the Treasure Island pirates look bloodthirsty, but the best image on the wall as of Napoleon and Snowball, the two pigs from Animal Farm, oozing corrupt brutality.

2. Children’s book illustrations

It’s not all drug-crazed eyeballs and Jackson Pollock ink splats. This section displays no fewer than 28 illustrations from children’s books. Some of these are for other people’s books but a surprising number seem to be from books he wrote himself.

Part of the Children’s books wall at ‘Ralph Steadman: INKling’ @ the Heath Robinson Museum (photo by the author)

The 28 images show a surprising variety of tone and finish. Some are classic demented Steadman. Some are more restrained, like the images from ‘Teddy Where Are You?’ which had an almost Quentin Blake sweet common sense about them. The first section included half a dozen works I initially thought must have been painted by children themselves, so deliberately amateurish and childlike they seemed. You can see what I mean in the earliest images on the children’s section of his website.

I loved the spaceship taking off through a murky purple space cloud in ‘Flowers For The Moon’ (1974), the surprisingly realistic depictions of the Teddy bear in ‘Teddy Where Are You?’, and the craziness of No Room To Swing A Cat.

3. Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo

This is what we drug-curious students worshipped Steadman for, for his illustrations for the classic works of American Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, which rise above the category of ‘illustrations’ to become collaborations or, to adopt Gonzo mentality, conspiracies! The classic works are:

  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
  • Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973)
  • The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1979)
  • The Curse of Lono (1983)

Already a well-established illustrator and newspaper cartoonist, in 1970 Steadman was commissioned to illustrate an article about the Kentucky Derby to be written by Hunter S. Thompson for what turned out to be the short-lived New Journalism magazine Scanlan’s Monthly. It was a marriage made in heaven, with the intense prose of the journalist perfectly illustrated by Steadman’s demented pictures. They became very close friends, collaborating on numerous projects and hanging out for the next 35 years until Thompson’s death in 2005.

Part of the Gonzo wall at ‘Ralph Steadman: INKling’ (with some of the Children’s wall, on the left) @ the Heath Robinson Museum (photo by the author). For explanation of the black bats painted onto the walls, see below

Gonzo journalism refers to topical writing which makes no pretence at objectivity, and in which the character of the journalist himself looms very large. This might have been called subjective journalism or something similarly tame; what makes it Gonzo is the writer’s consumption of excessive amounts of booze and drugs, which crank up the descriptions, the prose, the often calamitous events, to hysteria level.

To give you a sense of the scale of depravity, ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ is a fictionalised account of Thompson, under the pseudonym Raoul Duke, attending a drug-enforcement conference accompanied by his 300-pound Samoan attorney, named Dr Gonzo. As if this wasn’t surreal enough, they took with them a carefully itemised booty of illegal substances, to wit:

“two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls.”

Steadman’s extreme style of demented caricature was heaven-sent to illustrate these adventures. The black bats swooping spatter-winged on the wall above the Gonzo images are part of the acid-fuelled hallucination which opens the book.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. (‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, page 1)

The New York Times wrote of Steadman’s illustrations that they “were stark and crazed and captured Thompson’s sensibility, his notion that below the plastic American surface lurked something chaotic and violent. The drawings are the plastic torn away and the people seen as monsters.”

In fact the exhibition only features seven illustrations from the book, classics though they are, accompanied by the black bats and random desert cacti printed onto the wall. Almost as striking is the glass display case which contains memorabilia connected with the Gonzo books and more.

The Gonzo display case at ‘Ralph Steadman: INKling’ @ the Heath Robinson Museum (photo by the author)

At the centre bottom you can see a copy of Scanlon’s Magazine, with paperback editions of Las Vegas, Lono and Campaign Trail just to the left. Gonzo completists might thrill to the fact that at the far left of the case, are items used by Ralph to impersonate Thompson, being Thompson’s trademark white fishing hat, yellow-tinted shades and cigarette holder.

4. Gonzovation

Obviously partial to bad puns, the section on Gonzovation turns out to be a series depicting endangered species and environmental activism. The story goes that in 2011 film-maker and conservationist Ceri Levy approached Steadman for an illustration of an extinct bird for a volume of extinct birds to be illustrated by lots of different artists. He heard nothing for weeks and then four pictures popped into his inbox. In the end Steadman drew a hundred images of extinct birds and imagined birds. The latter came to be referred to as ‘boids’ and became a project, eventually a book published by Bloomsbury called Extinct Boids.

Following the success of ‘Extinct Boids’, Steadman and Levy collaborated on a second book about endangered species of birds, titled ‘Nextinction’ (2013). And this was followed in 2015 by a book about endangered animals, ‘Critical Critters’. The three have come to be known as the Gonzovation Trilogy.

Critical Critters – Bornean-Sumatran Orangutan by Ralph Steadman (2017)

On display here are 16 fairly large images. Most of them are birds but there are striking images of a panda, lion, zebra, tuna fish, blue whale and this vibrant orang utan.

Because the displays go round in a circle (on the four walls of the Museum’s guest exhibition room) you end up where you began, the most recent critical critter placed close to his earliest works, the 1967 Alice images. This highlights the distinctiveness of both, namely the completeness, the thoroughness and the obsession with geometric lines in the black and white Alice illustrations; juxtaposed with the orang and his ilk. Well, how would you describe him?

Clearly there are none of the geometric lines from 60 years earlier, and none of the concern to produce an image complete and finished in every detail. The reverse. The power is in the incompletion of the image and instead the incredible propulsive power of the thick black lines radiating outwards. The orang utan is exploding onto our vision. And Steadman’s trademark splatter technique is here used to maximum effect, the radiating exploding lines feel wiggly and heartfelt

The artist’s desk

Probably the most striking thing in this little exhibition, though, is what appears to be Steadman’s actual working desk, with a photographic mock-up of part of his studio. It is, as you might expect, spattered with decades’ worth of coloured inks, across the drawing table, the surface of the desk and the wall behind it. Stuck to the desk are photos and memorabilia from his long career.

Ralph Steadman’s desk and a mock-up of part of his study at ‘Ralph Steadman: INKling’ @ the Heath Robinson Museum (photo by the author)

That’s not all. I could hear a burbling muttering noise coming from somewhere and eventually realised there’s a little loudspeaker under the desk emitting the sound of someone pottering around in a room, talking to themselves, occasionally bursting into snatches of song. Well, this appears to be a recording of the great man himself, Steadman ralphensis, recorded in his natural habitat.

Ralph Steadman’s desktop and self-portrait at ‘Ralph Steadman: INKling’ @ the Heath Robinson Museum (photo by the author)

Thoughts

Wonderful. Pure visual pleasure with lots of droll comedy. Nostalgic memories of the Fear and Loathing days overlaid with work from each decade since, crowned by the big and striking animal pictures. Steadman found a style in the late 1960s and developed it to infinity and beyond, creating a universe of incisive, dynamic and exciting imagery. Pure delight.

A life-sized cut-out of our hero lurking in a doorway to leap out at the unwary! at ‘Ralph Steadman: INKling’ @ the Heath Robinson Museum (photo by the author)

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by Simon on May 11, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 11, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/11/ralph-steadman-inkling-heath-robinson-museum/

Heath Robinson’s Shakespeare Illustrations @ the Heath Robinson Museum

“Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love to amorous Phillida”. Published in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, London, Constable & Co (1914) The William Heath Robinson Trust

The Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner north-west London is my favourite small gallery in London. It’s only half an hour by tube from Oxford Circus (change at Baker Street onto the Metropolitan line for Pinner). It is a small but beautifully formed exhibition space and always  source of delight and enjoyment.

The museum hosts a steady series of fascinating little exhibitions in its one-room gallery which is big enough to hang 50, 60, 70 prints, illustrations and paintings. Sometimes they’re portmanteau exhibitions featuring a number of artists, for example, the fabulous one about neo-Romantic book illustrators, or the one about the Beardsley Generation.

This one is simpler and more focused; it features just one artist, Heath Robinson himself, with a selection of about 70 of his illustrations for luxury editions of Shakespeare’s plays.

Exhibition contents

The exhibition consists of:

1. 30 large prints of individual drawings or watercolours, hung on the walls.

2. About 7 framed collections which each contain up to a dozen smaller, black and white illustrations, each taken from pairs of plays, for example Macbeth and Julius Caesar (see below).

3. The four display cases each contain original copies of the luxury editions of the Shakespeare plays which Heath Robinson (HR) illustrated, alongside examples of similar volumes by contemporaries, being:

  • case 1: three original copies of the 1908 HR edition of Twelfth Night
  • case 2:
    • a 1914 edition of HR’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
    • 1908 edition of Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Arthur Rackham
    • 1898 edition of Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Robert Anning Bell
  • case 3: three old editions of The Tempest open to lovely illustrations
    • 1901 version illustrated by Robert Anning Bell
    • 1908 version illustrated by Edmund Dulac
    • 1908 version illustrated by Paul Woodroffe
  • case 4: four photocopies of comical illustrations HR made of Jacques’ Seven Ages of Man speech (from As You Like It) for the Bystander magazine in 1905

4. Finally, a slideshow of illustrations for Midsummer Night’s Dream for which the original artwork wasn’t available, projected onto the white gallery wall. There are 37 of these blown-up line drawings and it is quite mesmeric watching the sequence appear on the white wall. It has the effect of really bringing out the compositional clarity of HR’s black and white designs.

As to the 30 or so framed images hung round the walls of the gallery, they are divided into three groups, being selections of the illustrations HR made for:

  1. Twelfth Night
  2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  3. The Cape Shakespeare

1. Twelfth Night (1908)

In 1908 Hodder and Stoughton published Twelfth Night with forty coloured plates by Heath Robinson. It was the first time he had had the opportunity to illustrate a complete volume in colour. He didn’t attempt to provide a literal record of the action but, like a composer writing incidental music for a play, set out to capture the mood.

There are six framed originals. The first one is a wonderfully detailed, naturalistic study of a tall woman swathed in a full dress done in pencil (“Sir, my name is Mary”); the other five are richly coloured, deeply evocative, hugely impressive watercolours.

Duke Orsino: “So full of shapes is fancy.” Published in Twelfth Night by Hodder and Stoughton (1908). The William Heath Robinson Trust

Two things are obviously important about these. One is the architecture. There’s a person and what appears to be a squadron of ghostly cherubs in the picture but the real star is the buildings. The flagstones, the column he’s standing by and then the beautifully detailed colonnade across the square or atrium. It is thrillingly precise and accurate.

Second thing is the gloominess of the image, a night-time vibe which is emphasised when you see the daylight shining on the wall opposite and the top, and realise it is actually daytime. This has all been carefully crafted to capture the melancholy mood of the play’s male protagonist, Duke Orsino, who has plunged himself into a theatrically melancholy love for the aloof Countess Olivia:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

In the scene as written the duke is, of course, surrounded by courtiers, but this is what Heath Robinson meant by capturing the mood or feel of the play, because in his mind Orsino is a lovesick loner and this beautiful illustration very powerfully conveys that.

These are the darkest of all the works, in fact one of them, “Present mirth hath present laughter”, is so dark it’s difficult to make out what’s going on. In these illustrations Heath Robinson took a very painterly approach to composition, blurring his usually crisp clear lines to create an almost impressionistic effect. His genius for the comic is almost completely absent. Some of the paintings are reminiscent of the Turner at his most misty sunset moments.

You can see what I mean by going to this blog about HR’s Twelfth Night images:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914)

In 1913 Heath Robinson, at the height of his career, suggested to his publisher, Constable, that he illustrate a luxury edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The end result was a combination of 12 coloured plates and 40 pen and ink illustrations. The pictures fall, like the play, into two groups, the serious business of the aristocrats, among the temples and columned buildings of Athens, and the fantastical goings on among the fairies and ‘rude mechanicals’ in the woods.

Compared to the sombre impressionistic Twelfth Night pictures, the Midsummer Night’s Dream ones could almost be by a different artist. They are all much more clear and crisp, combining a taste for clean outlines with the fantastical element of the many goblins, sprites, elves and pixies and the down-to-earth comedy of the working class characters.

I opened this review with an image which combines the tremendous architectural precision of the temple depicted at the top with a characteristic stream of rather grotesque goblins and whatnot flowing top left to bottom right. The young man tootling his pipes at bottom right evokes the Edwardian fascination with the Greek god Pan, but what I really love about this image is the way he’s resting on a fallen column. At the top is the official world of a complete functioning temple but as your eye follow the trail of flying goblins you descend into a jungle which has overgrown the world of reason and commerce and law till you arrive at a definitive image of the collapse of law and order and reason, the fallen column, leaning on which is the god of mischief and pranks making merry music. It’s an incredibly symbolic, charged image.

Alongside the fantastical ones, are pictures which show the rude mechanicals, the comic working class characters Quince, Snug, Bottom, Flute and Starveling. Here they all are in an ensemble illustration:

Bottom: “I will move storms, I will condole in some measure.” Published in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Constable and company (1914). The William Heath Robinson Trust

The most obvious thing is the space, the completely white top and bottom of the composition, relieved only by the single pot of drink. Amazing how the simple use of space creates drama and energy, makes the humdrum scene of half a dozen village idiots sitting on a bench seem supercharged with life.

This blog seems to have a good selection if not all of the Midsummer illustrations. You can see the clarity of the lines and the importance of architecture, straight columns, and angular steps in picture after picture:

Some of the colour illustrations, done in watercolour, retain the misty impressionism of the Twelfth Night set. I was particularly struck by a picture of a woman standing in the woods and at the top, instead of Heath Robinson’s detailed way with leaves (especially his favourite horse chestnut leaves) the painting dissolves into washes of green sprinkled with magic fairy lights which is impressionist in feel, almost like one of Monet’s lily pond studies.

Helena: “I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell, To die upon the and I love so well.” Pen and watercolour. Published in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Constable and company (1914)

The Cape Shakespeare

The First World War effectively put an end to the market for sumptuous illustrated gift books. But in 1921 Heath Robinson received a commission from the newly established publishing house of Jonathan Cape to provide over 400 drawings to illustrate a new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare. He completed all 400 by June 1922 but, either though lack of fund for this particular project, or the general decline in the market for luxury books, the edition was never published. Amazingly, it was only in 1991 when Cape moved offices that this treasure trove of illustrations came to light and they are included in the exhibition courtesy of Penguin Random House, their present owner.

The colour illustrations

They’re fascinating for several reasons, first the large watercolour illustrations. The figures are bigger and more central than in the Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrations. They are more front and centre and dramatic.

Lear: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” (King Lear).

Next, the colouring is much clearer and cleaner than in either the Twelfth Night or Midsummer illustrations. Maybe it was the war, maybe it was a natural development, but Heath Robinson has consciously left behind the Turneresque, impressionist vagueness I mentioned about the earlier paintings. Here the backgrounds are plainer and the figures more sharply delineated.

And the faces, they’re much more gargoyly. They have bog bulging eyes under heavy brows. Both Lear and the fool’s eyes look unnaturally enlarged, almost bulging. Compare and contrast with the discreet, almost invisible eyes in all the earlier illustrations. The conscious change in the treatment of eyes is symptomatic of the far wider range of dramatic moods to be found in the Cape illustrations and the need (and ability) to convey this with more than physical posture, but with a lot more detailed facial description.

The black and white illustrations

Because they were never separated to make printing blocks the freestanding black and white illustrations, often relatively small, have been brought together into ‘sheets’ i.e. 7, 8 or 9 of them presented in the same frame. These combine images from different but linked plays, for example, Henry IV part two and the Merry Wives of Windsor, or Julius Caesar and Macbeth.

It was the latter sheet which really grabbed me. Quite obviously the previous two projects had concerned comedies. Here Heath Robinson was called on to illustrate tragedy, violence, horror, fear. He does it in part by really simplifying down his designs. The hundreds of leaves and flowers and cascades of goblins from the Midsummer Night’s Dream period are all eliminated. Instead Heath Robinson develops a new approach which is to eliminate all unnecessary detail, reduce the number of lines, simplify the figures, and use large pools of solid black to give bite and drama.

A sheet of illustrations for Julius Caesar and Macbeth by William Heath Robinson

These images just don’t have the same impact on a small screen as they did to me in the gallery (the top reason for going to any art gallery is that the impact of a work of art is always massively bigger in the flesh). I know some of the images, like the bloke with the shield, may be a little on the cartoon side. But the more I looked at the image of the assassination of Julius Caesar, the more uncanny it felt.

Illustration for Julius Caesar by William Heath Robinson

Heath Robinson using the big white space we saw used to comic effect in the Dream and applied it to an intensely dramatic moment. There is nothing comic or frivolous about the murder of Julius Caesar and so all the figures involved are depicted in the simplest manner with as few lines as possible. But what a stroke of genius to not do it close-up, to not show the agony and the spurting blood. But to depict it far in the background as possible. Somehow it makes it all the more ominous and horrible and distant and detached and gruesome.

And then – who is the bearded man at the bottom right? Is it the soothsayer who said ‘Beware the ides of March’? Why is he so very distant from the action, barely in the picture, is he hastily exiting the terrible scene? But look at his shadow? It’s like a Rorschach blot, it’s like an abstract swirl, it adds to the sense of disorientation.

The more I looked at this, the more spooked I grew. And the more it seemed to capture the terrible world-historical consequences of the deed, namely another thirteen years of civil war which eventually led to the overthrow of the Roman Republic. The weird kissing black aliens in the bottom… I felt more and more spooked.

Something similar with some of the Macbeth illustrations on the same sheet, especially the raddled old figure at the bottom right, almost entirely in ink-black silhouette and shadow. Or the long thin silhouette of the the weird sisters at top right. The more I looked, the more uncanny and powerful they all became.

Obviously they’re to some extent meant to be shadows of the characters but these flowing pools of jet black are done in a style which approaches a Japanese woodcut level of abstraction. The tendency is strikingly evident in a standalone illustration of the dead Cleopatra. For a moment Heath Robinson has travelled back in time 20 years and become Aubrey Beardsley. The simple lines and languid posture are 1890s, but it’s really the liquid shape of the jet black shadows which reveals the influence. Looking at the shadow of her arm and the folds in the bed (?), I wondered whether their serpentine shape was meant to hint at the slinking asps which, according to legend, she killed herself with.

Cleopatra by Heath Robinson

As I mentioned, some of these b&w illustrations are very funny. There are quite a few comic illustrations of Falstaff and the other characters from Henry IV and the Merry Wives. But it was the uncanny images from Caesar and Macbeth which I kept coming back to. In only 15 years his style had travelled a long, way from the brilliantly naturalistic drawing which started the exhibition, “Sir, my name is Mary.” Although he remained, at the exact same time as doing this commission, a brilliant comic illustrator, some of these Shakespeare images seemed to me to break through to a completely new understanding of the stark, brutal forces at large in the world, unlike anything else in his oeuvre.

Illustrations for Henry VI and Richard III by William Heath Robinson, commissioned by Jonathan Cape in 1921. Unpublished. On long-term loan from Penguin Random House archive.

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by Simon on February 20, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 20, 2023

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John Hassall @ the Heath Robinson Museum

In the early twentieth century John Hassall was one of Britain’s best known commercial artists. Starting his career in 1895, he quickly developed an impressive reputation as a book illustrator, a humorous cartoonist for postcards and magazines, an art school founder and teacher, a painter in oils, consummate clubman, and a designer of toys, figurines, pottery and nursery decor. But it was through his commercial illustrations, and especially his posters – for travel companies, political causes, theatre and panto, and a host of well-known brands – that he made his name in an age when advertising hoardings were known as ‘the poor man’s art gallery’.

In the course of a hard working career Hassall designed some 600 posters, illustrated some 150 books and much more. By 1905 one magazine could dub him ‘the King of Posters’.

Skegness is SO Bracing – the famous poster featuring the jolly fisherman designed for the East Coast seaside town by artist John Hassall. Hassall was paid £10 (1908)

The small but beautifully formed Heath Robinson Museum up in Pinner is hosting an excellent exhibition showcasing the full range of Hassall’s work, along with loads of photos, caricatures and paintings of the great man at work, and correspondence, brochures and whatnot relating to his many additional activities as art teacher and founder member of the of London Sketch Club and of the Savage Club.

Potted biography

John Hassall was born in Kent in 1868 but, when he left school at 18, art wasn’t his first choice. After twice failing entry to The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, he emigrated to Manitoba in Canada in 1888 to begin farming with his brother Owen. The exhibition includes some fascinating correspondence describing, and a set of sketches depicting, the tough life of rural Canada, as well as a couple of wonderful illustrations of well wrapped-up children hunting wildlife in the snow (a moose and a walrus).

Boys hunting moose by John Nassall

It was only when one of his illustrations of daily life in Canada was published in the London Graphic magazine that he decided to return to England and try his luck with an artistic career in 1890. On the advice of friends, he went to study on the Continent, first in Antwerp, then in Paris. He met a fellow artist, married and moved back to London in 1894, when a couple of paintings were accepted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

But it was only in 1895 that he was given an introduction to the firm of David Allen and Sons, leading printers of theatre poster. At the interview he was asked to demonstrate his abilities and quickly knocked out a sketch for a poster of the fashionable hit, The French Maid. He was hired on the spot and, over the next four years, went on to produce almost 600 posters.

Poster promoting Pontings department store in Kensington High Street by John Hassall

The range and variety of posters (and postcards and book illustrations) on display in this exhibition allows you to trace Hassall’s development as a commercial artist, and his deployment of different styles for different purposes.

Early influences

The very earliest posters, including the fully worked-up version of The French Maid design, included here, very clearly demonstrate the influence of the French style of posters. In fact the 1890s was by way of being a golden age of poster art, technological advances in printing allowing for an explosion of colours and styles, exploited by artists like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha. This in turn triggered a craze among connoisseurs to collect poster art and Hassall had arrived back in London just as the craze arrived with him, partly triggered by a major exhibition in 1894. Here he is, in the early days, very much channeling the elongated, exotic and semi-abstract feel of Alphone Mucha’s Art Nouveau designs.

The Daughters of Babylon by John Hassall 1897

But as the exhibition shows, after just a few years Hassall had moved a long way from his Continental origins and developed his own, very distinctive style. The exhibition curator usefully defines this as consisting of:

  • bold outlines
  • flat colours
  • minimal letting
  • large areas of negative space

which Hassall combined to produce ‘an engagingly cheery style.’

I think that phrase about ‘negative space’ refers to the way that the use of shading to indicate perspective and/or light sources is dropped in order to produce flattened and simplified images. Probably the most extreme example of this is this almost surreal poster promoting the joys of Morecambe. Flat colours, bold outlines, minimal lettering, large areas of negative space. Look how far he’d come from his languid and cluttered, fin-de-siecle, Mucha phase!

Poster promoting Morecambe as a holiday destination by John Hassall

Hassall produced posters promoting a number of seaside destinations, of which the one for Skegness (at top of this review) became iconic. In 1936 the town invited him for a VIP day to celebrate its success and awarded him a vellum certificate, displayed in the exhibition! The town now boasts a statue of the jolly fisherman.

The Skegness poster became so iconic that it is occasionally riffed on by later cartoonists: the exhibition features two examples, including a very funny one by Peter Brooks where the figure of the jolly fisherman is replaced by a swivel-eyed Jeremy Corbyn.

Book illustration

In 1899 Hassall took on his first book illustration project. In total he illustrated some 143 titles, not including jacket and spine designs. As you can imagine, many of these were for children’s books, some for older readers, such as the adventure stories of G.A. Henty, but most collections of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Making use of flat colours enclosed by thick black lines, his poster style was very adaptable for children’s books, and he produced many volumes of nursery rhymes and fairy stories, such as Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes (1909).

Cinderella enters the coach by John Hassall

In 1900 Hassall was commissioned by Laurence and Bullen of Covent Garden to design a range of nursery wallpaper friezes and lithographic prints for children. He produced a frieze of seven prints of children with their toys designed to be mass produced, sold and installed as a literal frieze around nursery walls. They were retailed by Libertys and other upmarket stores. You can see a slideshow of these on the Hillhouse antiques website.

The exhibition points out that J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play, Peter Pan, became an overnight sensation, generating piles of merchandising and spin-offs. As one of the leading illustrators of his day, Hassall contributed to the sensation with a series of six panels illustrating scenes from the play which are, to the modern eye, oddly flat and stylised. They resemble the stark simplifications of his toy friezes and in this particular scene, as Peter enters the children’s bedroom, you can see how it is liberally decorated with examples of Hassall’s own posters and friezes, a pleasing example of self-referentiality. In fact Hassall was deeply involved in the production: he drew the official poster and designed the cover of the programme, which also advertised these large-scale panels for two shillings each (10p in modern money).

Illustrated panel of Peter Pan by John Hassall (1907)

Also magazine covers: by this time his strikingly simple but effective designs made him a popular choice to provide cover illustrations for a wide variety of magazines such as the Scout magazine, and many others, on display here.

Pantomime

Pantomime is a form of theatre for children so his ability with cartoon and caricature was well suited to produce reams of posters for each season’s pantos.

Original antique theatre poster for the Drury Lane production of Babes In The Wood by the playwrights J. Hickory Wood and Arthur Collins. Poster by John Hassall (1907)

In fact the exhibition includes the complete set of 26 illustrations from a book titled The Pantomime ABC projected as a slideshow up on the gallery wall, with humorous and sometimes genuinely funny poems for each letter by Roland Carse.

The Great War

The First World War was actually the busiest time of Hassall’s career. He continued his commercial work but added a whole new stream of patriotic content, ranging from recruitment posters, to illustrations for patriotic pamphlets and songs, as well as personally touring the front in 1915, and working as a special constable.

The war posters are interesting because they feature iron-jawed, cleancut young men who are quite distinct from his commercial cartoon-style work. They’re the clearest proof that he could adapt his style quite drastically to suit the client and the need.

First World War recruitment poster by John Hassall (1916)

There are quite a few of the smaller cartoons, postcards, sheet music, pin badges and so on in a display case, the highlight of which, for me, is a copy of a satirical work he wrote and produced called Ye Berlyn Tapestrie a parody of the Bayeaux Tapestry featuring numerous examples of the perfidy of the beastly Hun.

Something the exhibition doesn’t include is any of the wonderfully realistic oil paintings depicting machines of war which Hassall made during the conflict. In these he applies all his skills he’s acquired over 20 years in the art of clear, striking composition, but infused with a wonderful ability to depict light and shade and depth. Its presence in stunning works like this (not in the exhibition) highlight how very much he excluded all these elements and abilities in his commercial work.

Short Seaplane by John Hassall (1915) The Collection: Art and Archaeology in Lincolnshire (Usher Gallery)

This section of the exhibition also showcases his broadly ‘political’ works, satirical cartoons about contemporary politics. These include a little sequence of cartoons produced in support of the little-known Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, an excellent cause which I think some brave and foolhardy souls ought to revive in our day.

Anti-suffrage cartoon by John Hassall (1912)

Pick a favourite

I loved all of it, I loved everything I saw. Hassall was a commercial artist who aimed to please, whose works are designed to make the viewer feel good, to associate a positive feeling with the product being sold, whether play or panto, shop or product, book or story – and it works. This is a hugely enjoyable, interesting and uplifting exhibition. I defy any visitor not to come out with a broad smile on their face.

Pick a favourite? Well in the midst of his immense productivity and hard work, Hassall found time to create uncommissioned art works which he submitted to serious exhibitions and competitions. These were generally storybook in style and took as their subject classic moments from English history, such as the morning of the battle of Agincourt.

I found them very appealing because they remind me, I think, of some of the long distant children’s books about history I read when I was very young. They are packed with crowds, soldiers or raiders, they have a rugged Edwardian masculinity and vividness which I really enjoyed. Here’s a photo I took of a detail of the painting ‘The morning before Agincourt’, which was exhibited in 1900. (Apologies for the terrible quality, the exhibition is held in a darkened room and I have a terrible camera. I include it to demonstrate what I mean by the ‘manliness’ of the figures in his ‘serious’ art works.)

Detail from ‘Morning before Agincourt’ by John Hassall (1903)

In these historical paintings Hassall took the opportunity to reintroduce those elements he so rigorously excluded from his commercial work. There is deep perspective, there are complicated crowds instead of a handful of isolated individuals, and, when you look closely, there is a deliberate blurring or mistiness about the faces which gives them a strange dignity, which somehow implies that you are seeing them through a time machine, their faces flickering and blurring through the distance of 500 years. In every way except for the patriotic storybook subject matter, as unlike the minimalist clarity of his posters and commercial work as can be.

Procession by John Hassall (1901)

But if I had to choose one out of all the works on show here, it would be a classic example of Hassall’s commercial poster art, a clear composition, limned with bold black lines in the style of a newspaper cartoon, all background detail kept to a bare minimum in order to focus your eye on the main character which is drawn with affectionate humour.

It’s titled ‘Treasure Trove’ and is an original artwork for a brand of whiskey but, intriguingly, nobody seems to know which one. I think I was partly attracted because the fish look the dead spitting image of the fish which feature in the Tintin adventure, Red Rackham’s Treasure (and because both feature a man in an old-fashioned diving suit). I wonder whether Hergé knew and was influenced by Hassall’s work, by its clarity of composition, solid outlines and blocs of bare or negative space…

Treasure Trove by John Hassall (date unknown)

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by Simon on June 5, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 5, 2021

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Fairies in Illustration @ the Heath Robinson Museum

It always amazes me how much factual information and how many beautiful pictures the Heath Robinson Museum manages to pack into such a relatively small space.

This exhibition manages to cover how the depiction of fairies, elves, sprites and goblins has changed and evolved over the past 200 years through some fifty drawings and illustrations hung on the walls and 17 or so antique illustrated books open in display cases. Over twenty illustrators are represented, from Sir Joseph Noel Paton RSA (1821 to 1902) to the contemporary illustrator and designed Brian Froud (b.1947).

The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania by Sir Joseph Noel Paton (1849)

Here were some of my highlights.

William Heath Robinson (1872 to 1944)

The great man is represented by seven drawings. In the first, Edwardian, part of his career, HR produced beautiful illustrations for luxury editions of classics. The most obvious source of fairies is his illustrated edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (which has of course provided a pretext for artists down the ages to depict sprites and fairies) and five or so of the pictures here are from it.

I love Heath Robinson but I felt these black and white illustrations were just that – you needed to know what was going on in the story to really ‘get’ or understand them. Unlike the obvious highlight of his pictures here, and of the whole show, the wonderful Fairy’s Birthday, which just happens to be one of the most popular pictures in the permanent collection.

The Fairy’s Birthday (detail) by William Heath Robinson (1925)

The Fairy’s Birthday was one of a series of large, coloured ‘goblin’ pictures that Heath Robinson made for the Christmas editions of upmarket magazines such as The Graphic between 1919 and 1925. As the wall label suggests, the goblins and fairies have been given a ‘homely, bumbling’ appearance – look at the French pâtissier carrying the heavy cake, at the top.

Helen Jacobs (1888 to 1970)

Jacobs grew up in East London and studied at the West Ham School of Art. The four fairy pictures by her here are absolutely wonderful. What characterises them is the combination of extremely detailed depictions of the subject – with a very firm use of line and shade to create volume and drama – against wonderfully bright washes of background colour.

Look at the definition of the right arm and armpit of this fairy, but also revel in the midnight blue background. And note also the sprays of pearl-like baubles radiating out from the fairy’s diaphanous clothes. I like strong, defined outlines, so I loved all four of her pieces here for their clarity and dynamism.

A fairy on a bat by Helen Jacobs

Charles Robinson (1870 to 1937)

Robinson trained in lithography but began illustrating books from the mid-1890s and illustrated a trio of books with the collective title of The Annals of Fairyland (1900 to 1902). In 1911 Heinemann published an edition of Shelley’s poem The Sensitive Plant with 18 coloured plates and numerous vignettes.

Just one of these is included in the exhibition, and I found it one of the most haunting. In the centre is a baby with wings, more of a chubby Renaissance putto maybe, than a slender sprite. What I kept returning to enjoy was the way the delicate wash which created a fog, a mist, through which you can see the ghostly outlines of the autumn trees in the background. And the craggy, Gormenghast quality of the black branches, especially the one at the bottom. And then the wonderful spray of autumn leaves falling in a spray around the centre, behind the putto. I’m not sure how strictly fairylike this picture is, but I found it wonderfully wistful and evocative.

Illustration for The Sensitive Plant by Charles Robinson (1911)

Cicely Mary Barker (1895 to 1973)

The exhibition closes with a set of eight of the original watercolours for the Flower Fairy books by Cicely Mary Barker. Barker was born in Croydon and although she later attended the Croydon School of Art, she was largely self-taught. In 1922 she sent some of her flower fairy illustrations to Blackie and Son the publishers who published them as Flower Fairies of the Spring. She received just £25 for the 24 pictures in the book, but it sold well and she was able to secure a royalty for all its sequels.

The Hawthorn Fairy by Cicely Mary Barker (1926) © The Estate of Cicely Mary Barker

Eventually there were eight flower fairy books, containing 170 illustrations. The striking thing about them is their hyper-realism grounded in Barker’s immensely careful depictions of the flora each fairy is linked to. Her sketchbooks have survived and show what immense trouble she took to draw extremely accurate depictions of yew, sloe berries, horse chestnuts, elderberries and many, many more.

As someone who takes photos of English wild flowers, I was riveted by the accuracy of her botanical drawings. But she also used real children to model for each of the fairies. Hence the sense of super-reality.

And yet… There is something rather… cloying about her fairy paintings. Many of the previous fairy drawings and illustrations were notable for their whimsy and fantasy and lightness. There’s something in the very solidity and botanical accuracy of Cicely Mary Barker’s pictures which is a little… overwhelming, stifling almost. What do you think?

Brian Froud (b.1947)

In a display case there’s a copy of modern fantasy artist Brian Froud’s brilliantly inventive and funny book Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book, with a couple of framed original drawings hanging on the wall above it.

This is a very modern, disenchanted, cynical but hilarious view of fairies and, indeed, of human nature, purporting to be the book in which the fictional Lady Cottington has heartlessly captured and pressed to death a wide variety of fairies. The fairies are slender naked females with long dragonfly wings, each caught in a posture of terror and horror as the pages of the collecting book bang shut on them.

A pressed fairy from Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book by Brian Froud (1994)

A frolic of fairies

Those are just five of my personal highlights, but there are lots of other images, by lots of other artists.

Some of them are well known (Rackham, Richard Doyle), many of them far less well-known – and it is fascinating to see just what a variety of imagery and mood can be sparked by ostensibly the same subject, some enchanting, some – frankly – grotesque:

  • from the stately Romantic paintings of Sir Joseph Paton (see above)
  • to the disturbing images of Charles Altamont Doyle who was hospitalised for alcoholism and depression
  • from the very Aubrey Beardsley-influenced, Decadent style of Harry Clarke
  • through to the big baby surrounded by little sprites and goblins painted by Mabel Lucie Attwell (Olive’s Night Time Vigil with the Fairies).

Get in touch with your inner child. Be transported back to all the fairy stories and fairy books of your earliest memories. Go and see this lovely exhibition.

Full list of illustrators and artists

  • Florence Mary Anderson
  • Mabel Lucy Attwell
  • Cicely Mary Barker
  • Harry Clarke
  • Walter Crane
  • Charles Altamont Doyle
  • Richard Doyle
  • Brian Froud
  • Florence Susan Harrison
  • Lawrence Housman
  • Reginald Knowles
  • Celia Levitus
  • Hilda T. Miller
  • William Heath Robinson
  • Helen Jacobs
  • Jessie King
  • Barrington MacGregor
  • Carton Moore Park
  • Sir Joseph Noel Paton
  • Arthur Rackham
  • Charles Robinson
  • Reginald Savage
  • Margaret Tarrant
  • Alice B. Woodward

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by Simon on January 7, 2020  •  Permalink
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Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits @ the Royal Academy

‘By the turn of the millennium, Freud was widely acknowledged to be Britain’s greatest living painter.’
(Alex Branczik, Head of Contemporary Art for Sotheby’s Europe)

Contrary to the implications of the title, this exhibition does not include all of Lucian Freud’s self-portraits, nowhere near. Given that Freud was interested in self portraiture throughout his long career, the selection here is a only relatively small percentage. Also, contrary to the title, the exhibition also includes a number of portraits not of himself, in fact arguably the best room is the one devoted to portraits of other people.

Lucian and me

I didn’t use to like Lucian Freud. I associate him with Frank Auerbach and the other dreary, depressing post-war British artists, a kind of visual equivalent of Harold Pinter, who I was force-fed at school. Their dreary, depressed, rainy English miserabilism nearly put me off contemporary art and literature for life.

But this exhibition made me change my mind (a bit) for two reasons:

1. It is told in a straightforward chronological order, which allows us to see the quite remarkable evolution of his style over 60 years of painting. Stories are always interesting and, by stopping to investigate each stage along his journey, the exhibition does a good job of making his development interesting.

2. By luck I got into conversation with another visitor who happened to be an amateur painter and she, for the first time, made me understand how his journey had been one of technique. It dawned on me that, to use a cliché, he may be a painter’s painter. Certainly the last couple of rooms make you think that his paintings may well depict men or women, naked or clothed, including himself, as subjects – but the real subject is the adventure of painting itself.

And this made me go back and really examine the technique of the paintings in the last few rooms and come to respect, in fact to marvel, at the complex painterly effects of his mature style.

A brief outline

Freud was born in Berlin in 1922 and fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1933, coming to London. He held his first solo show as early as 1944. In the late 1940s he chose to make portraiture the focus of his practice.

Drawing

Drawing was central to Freud’s style from the late 30s through to the early 1950s. His drawings from this era are strikingly different from the later work. This is a rare opportunity to see a whole roomful of them together and they come from a different world. They have a graphic sharpness, an economy of line which makes them very like cartoons. Look at the careful shading in the ears and on the cheek, and the extraordinary attention he’s devoted to each individual hair. Critic Herbert Read called him ‘the Ingres of Existentialism’.

Startled Man: Self-portrait (1948) by Lucian Freud © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

This clear style lent itself to illustration so it’s no surprise to learn that he illustrated a number of books, several of which are in a display case here, Cards of Identity by Nigel Dennis (1955) and Two Plays and a Preface by Nigel Dennis (1958) and that Startled Man was one of five illustrations for a novella by William Sansmon titled The Equilibriad (1948).

Apart from the strikingly clean graphic style, what’s obvious is how performative these pictures are – the male head in them is always striking a pose, adopting an attitude, sometimes with props like a feather, in one dramatic case posing as Actaeon for a book on Greek myths.

Back to painting

Around the mid-1950s Freud turned his attention from drawing to painting and for a period of seven years or so stopped drawing altogether. Initially he painted sitting down using fine brushes. This enabled a smooth finished graphic style, very much in line with the clean defined outlines of his drawings, and the people in them share the same slightly distorted, rather frog-like faces as many of the drawings, more like caricatures than paintings.

Hotel Bedroom by Lucian Freud (1954) © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

The wall label tells us that Freud associated with fellow painters Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon. Like him they were figurative painters working against the grain of Abstract Expressionism and, later on, ignoring experimental and conceptual art. That, in a sentence, explains precisely why I don’t like them.

Bigger brushes

Anyway, Bacon inspired Freud to switch from soft sable-hair brushes to hog’s hair brushes which are capable of carrying more paint. This, it seems, was the physical, technical spur for the decisive change in his style. Between the late 1950s and mid-1960s his painting left behind the draughtsmanlike precision, so close to drawing, of paintings like Hotel Bedroom, and became far looser, a matter of large looser brushstrokes, which create more angular images, images made out of clashing planes and angles with an almost modernist feel about them.

Man’s Head (Self-portrait III) by Lucian Freud (1963) © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

This is the third of three self-portraits which the exhibition reunites for the first time since they were shown together in 1963. You can see how the interest is now in structure more than likeness. There is no attempt to create a realistic background (his studio or a bedroom) which is now a plain matt surface. Similarly, his face has its familiar long, rather hawkish look, but here transformed into a semi-abstract mask.

Watercolours

Surprisingly, in 1961 he took up watercolours alongside paint. Both were ways of escaping from the linearity of pen-and-ink drawing. The exhibition includes a number of watercolours where he is obviously exploring the effect of broad washes, and the dynamic contrast that creates with more sharply defined faces.

In both types of work he drops the symbols and props which had abounded in the drawings. The subject matter is simpler and in a way starker. The paintings still feel pregnant with meaning but their force or charge is achieved by different means, purely by the arrangement of brushstrokes.

Mirrors

Mirrors have been used by artists since time immemorial to paint accurate self-portraits, and countless artists have gone one step further to include mirrors in their paintings to highlight the artifice and paradox or making images which, on one level, claim to be true, claim to be reality, but on another, are patent artifice.

Quite a few Freud self portraits include mirrors or depict himself from angles clearly designed to bring out the mirrorly artifice. When you learn that he did this increasingly from the mid-1960s it makes a kind of sense; you can see the echo of similar experiments going on in in contemporary film posters and album covers. This instance using a mirror on or near the floor is striking enough, but made disturbing by the inclusion of small portraits of two of his children perched ‘outside’ the main frame.

Reflection with Two Children (Self-portrait) by Lucian Freud (1965) © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

In the studio

The penultimate room is the best and it’s the one which has no self portraits. Instead there’s two massive portraits of naked women on sofas, a huge standing male nude (his son, Freddy), and an eerie portrait of two fully clothed Irish gentlemen.

The wall label emphasises that by the 1970s Freud had established a definite approach. He painted people he had some kind of connection with, himself, some members of his family and friends, and sometimes people he met through chance encounters but who held a special visual importance for him.

They are all painted indoors, in his studios, not outside, not at their houses or in a neutral space. They are always in the familiar space of his studio, whose props and space and dimensions he knows inside out. This allowed him to focus on what he stated in interviews was his aim, which was to recreate in paint a physical presence.

So the obvious things about the paintings you see as you walk into this room of late works is that:

  • they’re huge, compared to what came before
  • they’re of other people
  • they’re full length instead of face portraits
  • they’re (mostly) naked

But, among this surfeit of impressions, maybe the most striking is the extraordinary poses and postures he has put his naked subjects in. In his mature works, this became his trademark – the rather tortured and certainly uncomfortable poses of naked women, which creates an uncomfortable, unsettling psychological affect on the viewer.

Naked Portrait with Reflection by Lucian Freud (1980)

What is going on? Is he torturing and exploiting these naked women, demonstrating his male power, as feminist critics have it? Or is he twisting their bodies round to create symbols of his personal unhappiness or anguish, as psychological critics might have it? Or had he stumbled across a new kind of motif, which he realised he could make uniquely his own, a ‘look’ which he could use to consolidate his ‘brand’ in the highly competitive London art market, as a Marxist critic might have it? (It is rather staggering to learn that this painting fetched over £11 million at auction in 2008. God knows what it’s worth now.)

Cremnitz white

But the wall label draws attention another, more technical feature of his painting from this period.

In 1975 he began using Cremnitz white, a heavy paint which, when mixed with other paints, creates a thick granular affect. Armed with this information, look again at the sprawling nude above. Look at the white highlights on her body. Two things:

1. Identifying the area of pure white prompts you to look closely at how they relate to the other colours around them. Obviously there’s a lot of pink but, when you look closely, there’s a lot of yellow and, looking more closely, brown and grey and even green. In fact, the more you look, the more entranced you become by the interplay of colours which make up her flesh, a panoply of creams and ochres and bistre tones.

It dawns on you that maybe Freud posed his naked women (and men, he painted a lot of naked men, too) in this contorted sprawling style and lying down rather than sitting up, because this way he exposes the maximum amount of flesh. Maybe these distorted poses have nothing to do with misogynist exploitation or twisted sexuality or psychological symbolism. Maybe they simply create the largest possible expanse of human flesh for him to paint.

2. Go up close, right up to the painting, and what becomes strikingly obvious is the immensely contoured, nubbly, grainy nature of the surface of the work. It is as if someone has thrown small gravel or stones onto the surface which have got embedded in the paint. It is immensely grainy and rubbly and tactile.

Here’s a close-up of the shadow along the right-hand side of the model’s body. You can see:

1. the lumps and bobbles of solid matter in the paint of the darker shadow near the middle of the image

2. the grooves of the thick brushstrokes moving up out of that dark patch to form her tummy or, at the bottom left, the long smooth but very visible and ridged strokes which create her thigh

3. the tremendous variety of colours and tints: granted, they’re all from the same tonal range of brown: but when you look closely you can see the extraordinary dynamism and interplay of shades. There’s barely a square inch of the same colour, but a continual variety, and a tremendous interest and even excitement created by the plastic, three-dimensional, raised and very tactile way different areas of colours stroke and swadge and brush, and daub and paste and are modelled and placed over and against each other.

Detail from Naked Portrait with Reflection by Lucian Freud (1980)

As I mentioned above, this was partly the result of chatting to the painter I met at the show. It was her enthusiastic description of Freud as a painter as a handler of paint, as the creator of such drama on the canvas, which made me go back and look at these last paintings in more detail.

Same thing can be seen in the other big nude in the room, Flora with Blue Toenails. Armed with this new way of seeing, what I noticed about this painting were 1. that the surface is so granular and lumpy you can see it even in a reproduction 2. the striking difference in timbre between her light torso and her much darker, more shaded legs. The keynote seemed to me to be grey. Follow the lines of grey. A solid line of grey goes from her cleavage, down her sternum and snakes around the top of her tummy almost creating a circle, where it almost joins to another long serpent of the same grey which snakes across her left thigh and curls round at her knee before reappearing across her right shin.

Flora with Blue Toe Nails by Lucian Freud (2000 to 2001)

My point is that, by this stage I was seeing these compositions as adventures in paint, as incredibly complex interplays of an astonishing range of colours, applied in a thick dense impasto, with heavy brushstrokes and entire regions raised and nubbled with grains and lumps of solid matter.

Here’s a close-up of Flora’s elbow, as transformed by Freud’s painterly prestidigitation. I found it quite thrilling to step right up to the painting and examine small areas in great detail, revelling in the adventures of the tones and surfaces – look at the myriad colours intermingling in the broad horizontal strokes at the top of her forearm, it’s almost like a rainbow, the multi-levelled mixing of colours is so advanced. And all this combined with the gnarly gritty, deliberately granular surface.

Detail of Flora with Blue Toe Nails by Lucian Freud (2000 to 2001)

Which meant that by the time I entered the final room, a collection of self-portraits from his final years, I wasn’t at all interested in either the biographical or supposedly psychological elements to them (‘ruthlessly honest, apparently) but instead was riveted by the extraordinarily vibrant, confident, sweeping, dashing painterliness of the things.

Here’s a medium close-up of the 1985 work, Reflection (Self portrait) which is a prime example of his thickly-painted and complex technique. Note the green – green blodges either side of his nose and the pouches under his eyes.

Detail of Reflection (Self portrait) by Lucian Freud (1985)

I became irrationally fascinated by the patterned edge to the image, to his shoulders which is presumably created by a spatula of some kind to model the border between the figure and the background, and which created the kind of crimping effect you see around the edge of pies.

Detail of Reflection (Self portrait) by Lucian Freud (1985)

But everywhere you look in the painting you see the same supremely confident use of paint, applied in apparently slapdash thick strokes and in a blather and combo of colours which seems almost chaotic when seen from really close up…

Detail of Reflection (Self portrait) by Lucian Freud (1985)

… but you only have to step back a few paces to see how these thick, spattered applications meld, at the ideal viewing distance, into extremely powerful, and even haunting, images.

Reflection (Self-portrait) by Lucian Freud (1985) © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

So I’m still not sure that I particularly like Lucian Freud’s paintings, but now, thanks to this handy exhibition, I have a much better grasp of the shape of his career, and a completely different way of seeing and conceptualising his paintings – not as the grim and dreary products of a troubled claustrophobe with dubious psychosexual issues, but as thrilling and masterly exercises in painterly technique.

I am not very interested in him as a painter of portraits per se – I couldn’t care less about the various marriages or children which the wall labels tell us about. But this exhibition did help me see how Freud really was one of the greatest painters of human flesh who ever put brush to canvas.

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by Simon on January 6, 2020  •  Permalink
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William Blake @ Tate Britain

This is the largest survey of work by William Blake to be held in the UK for a generation. It brings together over 300 famous and rarely seen works, from the whole of his career, from all of his publications and projects, and sets them alongside works by contemporaries, friends and influences, in a blockbuster exhibition which spreads over 13 rooms.

Engraving

Blake was born in 1757 into a poor family in London’s Soho – his father was a hosier – who, nonetheless, supported his ambitions to be an artist. Aged 15 he got an apprenticeship to an engraver. At the age of 21 he became a student at the Royal Academy. He appears to have been studious, the exhibition contains a typical plaster cast classical statue which students had to sketch along with Blake’s drawings of it.

Distinctive style

Muscles

But from early on Blake developed an idiosyncratic and eccentric way of depicting the human body. Most of his work is depictions of the human body. Most of the bodies in question are naked or draped in simple Biblical robes, and all of them are extremely muscley, with a heavy, musclebound weight which is reminiscent of Michelangelo. Although the curators don’t mention it I’ve read somewhere that this striking musculature is in fact anatomically inaccurate, and designed purely for expressive purposes.

Capaneus the Blasphemer (1824 to 1827) by William Blake © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Flat and close

Other elements of his style include the lack of perspective. Figures almost always appear in a flat space. This gives them dramatic immediacy and directness, as in this striking image.

The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea by William Blake (1805)

Noses

In both these images note the strikingly aquiline noses of his figures. Sounds trivial but its a trademark of his style.

Anti-commercial art

Blake rejected much of the commercial art of his day, came to despise the Royal Academy, hated the way late 18th century art was dominated by society portraits or landscapes of rich people’s properties.

Visual purity

He wanted to forge something much more visionary and pure. This search for a kind of revolutionary purity reminds me of the Republican phase of the art of the French painter Jacques-Louis David, which also features: legendary, classical or mythical subject matter; half naked men showing off their six-packs; in striking poses; flowing robes and togas.

Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David (1787)

Drawings not paintings

But a comparison with David vividly brings out the difference: Blake was never an oil painter. None of his works evince the kind of lavish, luxurious depth and perspective and colour and light and shade of an oil painter like David.

Most of Blake’s images are engravings, of which he produced over a thousand, and a central quality of an engraving is its flatness.

There are also watercolours but, as the curators point out, these have the clarity of line, formality and flatness of engravings which have simply been coloured in.

There is rarely any perspective or depth. The backgrounds are generally sketchy. All the focus is on the (generally melodramatic postures) of the foreground figures.

Cain Fleeing from the Wrath of God by William Blake (1799 to 1809) © The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University

Illustrations

Cain Fleeing exemplifies a major fact about Blake’s visual work, which is that the majority of was illustrations for classic works. Over his life he was commissioned to produce illustrations for:

  • Mary Wollstonecraft – Original Stories from Real Life (1791)
  • John Gay – Fables by John Gay with a Life of the Author, John Stockdale, Picadilly (1793)
  • Edward Young – Night-Thoughts (1797)
  • Thomas Gray – Poems (1798)
  • Robert Blair – The Grave (1805 to 1808)
  • John Milton – Paradise Lost (1808)
  • John Varley – Visionary Heads (1819 to 1820)
  • Robert John Thornton – Virgil (1821)
  • The Book of Job (1823 to 1826)
  • John Bunyan – The Pilgrim’s Progress (1824 to 1827, unfinished)
  • Dante – Divine Comedy (1825 to 1827)

The exhibition features generous selections from most of these works, for example ten or more of Blake’s illustrations for the Grave or Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, etc.

Bad pictures

What comes over from many of these obscure and little exhibited illustrations is how bad they are. Milky, washed out, strangely lacking in the dynamism which Blake, in his written works, claimed for his art.

Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard, Design 113 by William Blake (1797 to 1798)

Bad, isn’t it? All the illustrations for the Elegy are like this.

Towards the end of his life Blake made 29 watercolour illustrations of the Pilgrim’s Progress which are similarly not much mentioned in his oeuvre. Being woke, the curators suggest this might be because his loyal, hard-working and artistic wife, Catherine, is said to have had a say in designing and colouring them, so their neglect is a sexist conspiracy. Maybe. Or maybe it’s just because they’re not very good. Here’s an example.

Illustration four for the Pilgrim’s Progress by William Blake

The composition, the use of perspective, the crappy buildings, the ludicrous posture of the figures, and the badness of their faces – everything conspires to make this picture, in my opinion, poor. And there are lots more of this low standard in the exhibition.

Good pictures

But what makes it impossible to dismiss and hard to evaluate is that Blake was also capable of coming up with images which turned his manifold weaknesses – the lack of depth, the odd stylised postures, the inaccurate anatomy – into strengths. This is true of many of the illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. Take this depiction of the fate of the corrupt pope – the very unnaturalness of the postures and the weirdness of the setting work in its favour. To make it a deeply strange and troubling image.

The Simoniac Pope’ by William Blake (1824 to 1827) Tate

Take another of his archetypal images, Newton. The closer you look, the weirder it becomes – not least his musculature which makes him look more like an insect with a segmented back than a human being – and yet, and yet… it’s so weird that it’s true – true not to lived life or anything anyone’s ever seen, but to something stranger, more mysterious and more visionary.

Newton by William Blake (1795 to 1805) Tate

The illustrated books

Of course Blake was also a poet, an epic poet, a writer of immense long epics featuring a mythology and mythological characters he made up out of a strange mishmash of the Bible, the classics and Milton. Not many people read these long poems nowadays although, as it happens, as a schoolboy I read all of them cover to cover in the Penguin Complete Blake edition, so I have a feel for the vastness and strangeness of his imaginary world.

Blake produced the poems in books which featured his own line illustrations and decorations of the handwritten texts.

  • Songs of Innocence and of Experience (edited 1794)
  • Songs of Innocence (edited 1789)
  • The Book of Thel (written 1788 to 1790, edited 1789 to 1793)
  • The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (written 1790 to 1793)
  • Visions of the Daughters of Albion (edited 1793)
  • Continental prophecies
  • America a Prophecy (edited 1793)
  • Europe a Prophecy (edited 1794 to 1821)
  • The Song of Los (edited 1795)
  • There is No Natural Religion (written 1788, possible edited 1794 to 1795)
  • The First Book of Urizen (edited 1794 to 1818)
  • All Religions are One (written 1788, possible edited 1795)
  • The Book of Los (edited 1795)
  • The Book of Ahania (edited 1795)
  • Milton (written 1804 to 1810)
  • Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion (written 1804 to 1820, edited 1820 to 1827 and 1832)

The exhibition features many of these illustrations to his own verse. There is, for example, half a room devoted to individual pages from America a Prophecy, which have been removed from the book and framed as prints. Some of them are displayed in double-sided cases set up on plinths so that visitors can walk around and see both sides. The most immediate thing you notice is how very small they are, old-fashioned paperback book size, which makes much of the writing very hard to read without a magnifying glass.

Title page of America a Prophecy, copy A (printed 1795) by William Blake © The Morgan Library

The shorter works

Even his contemporaries struggled with the obscure mythology, strangely named characters (Los, Urizen) and difficult-to-make-out plots of the longer poems. By contrast, two of the shorter works have always been popular, namely the pithy proverbs gathered in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

  • “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”
  • “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

and the short and simple poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which contain his best-known and most anthologised poems. Of these probably the most famous is 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

It is undoubtedly a classic, but there is an odd and telling thing about it, which is that has become, over time, essentially, a children’s poem.

And this is emphasised by the illustration Blake did for it, which often comes as a shock to people who are familiar with it as an isolated text before they come to it in Blake’s illustrated version. It’s not just a children’s book illustration. It’s almost a baby‘s book illustration.

Tyger Tyger from Songs of Experience (designed after 1789, printed in 1794) by William Blake

Extremely hit and miss

And I think at some stage during the exhibition, it struck me that at some level, Blake is not a serious artist. He took himself very seriously, the small group of acolytes who gathered round him in his last years – the self-styled Ancients – took him very seriously, and critics and curators ditto, but… his long poems are all but incomprehensible and his own illustrations to his books are strange but often curiously childish and amateurish. His illustrations for Pilgrims Progress or the Elegy are deeply damaging to your sense of him as an artist. Some of the illustrations of Paradise Lost or Dante have a peculiar power, but many feel weak or half-finished. And strange random images throughout the exhibition leap out as expressing something no-one else had conceived or tried.

The Ancient of Days

Because every now and then, his peculiarities of style and technique (he pioneered new methods of acid engraving which the exhibition explains) come together to create something magical and genuinely visionary, something of depth and maturity.

‘Europe’ Plate i Frontispiece, ‘The Ancient of Days’ (1827) by William Blake (1757 to 1827) The Whitworth, The University of Manchester

The curators end the exhibition with this painting, which Blake was working on right up to his final days, at his house overlooking the Thames. Who is it, what is he doing, nobody is sure, although the hand gesture which seems to be creating a sort of compass is, unexpectedly, a negative gesture in Blake’s symbolism, because mathematics and science are the enemies of the liberated and revolutionary imagination which Blake defended and praised.

Still, as with so much of the rest of his ‘thought’ and personal opinions, it doesn’t matter. Again and again the curators have had to admit that nobody knows what this or that picture really means or whether it is illustrating this or that scene from one of his vast mythological books – so much about Blake’s output is scattered, broken up and mysterious, that one more mystery doesn’t make any difference.

At his best, Blake created images of startling power and resonance which, even if we don’t understand their intention or meaning, have stood the test of time. But the high risk this exhibition has taken is placing that dozen or so brilliant imagines amid a sea of ok, so-so, mediocre and downright poor images which do a lot to dilute their impact.

Two gaps

No explanation of Blake’s politics

The curators mention in several places that Blake was a revolutionary thinker who engaged with the Great Issues of his day, and list those Great Issues as political revolution, sexual politics, and slavery, and he certainly did, in his long radical poems and his notes and essays.

The odd thing is you’d expect there to be, in such a big exhibition, some sections devoted to Blake the Revolutionary, explaining his revolutionary views, his support of the American and French revolutions, his ideas of the power of the unfettered Imagination, sexual liberty and his violent anti-slavery sentiments.

But panels or sections devoted to Blake’s beliefs are strangely absent. His views are mentioned in passing, in the context of t his or that work, but you can’t make sense of a work like America A Prophecy without some explanation of the attitude English radicals took to the war their own government was fighting to put down men committed to freedom & Liberty.

No explanation of Blake’s mythology

More importantly you can’t understand a lot of his images without delving into Blake’s own mythology, which was built around praising the power of the unfettered Imagination, in the arts and politics and private life, and which he elaborated out inventing a whole cast of pseudo-Biblical gods and goddesses.

This also was strangely absent – I mean all it would have taken was a panel explaining the symbolic roles of the characters he invented for the epic poems:

  • Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law
  • his daughters Eleth, Uveth and Ona represent the three parts of the human body
  • his sons Thiriel, Utha, Grodna, Fuzon match the four elements but are also aligned with the signs of the Zodiac
  • Los is the fallen (earthly or human) form of Urthona, one of the four Zoas

and so on, to at least give you a flavour of how strange, eccentric, but oddly beguiling his personal mythology could be.

Maybe – I’m guessing – the curators wanted to focus narrowly on his art, and on the technical ways in which he experimented with techniques of engraving, and with the immediate facts of his biography. That would explain why there were rooms devoted to particular patrons such as John and Ann Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland, Thomas Butts and the Reverend Joseph Thomas.

I bought the audioguide. At the end of several sections on specific series of works, it said; ‘If you want to know more about the relationship between Blake and John Flaxman, press the green button’. My point being that all the additional information was biographical. Not one of them said: ‘If you want to hear more about Blake and the French Revolution, Blake and slavery, Blake and sexual Liberty, Blake’s theories of the imagination’ – all topics I’d love to have heard given a modern summary.

This biographical approach also explains why there is a big reproduction of a period map of London with markers indicating where Blake lived over the years. And even an entire room recreating the room in the family home in Broad Street where Blake staged a quirky one-man show in 1809, a show which was a disaster as hardly anyone showed up and the one critic who wrote about it dismissed Blake as ‘an unfortunate lunatic’.

I may be wrong but it seems to me that the curators have opted for a heavily biographical approach to Blake’s work, placing the works in the context of his real life career and biography, his houses and wife and friends and champions and critics. This is all interesting in its way, but not as interesting as Blake’s imaginative universe.

At the age of eight William Blake saw the prophet Ezekiel under a bush in Peckham Rye, then a rural backwater south of London. A few years later he had a vision of a tree full of angels nearby and, a month after that, a third vision of angels, walking towards him through the rye.

Blake really meant it. All through is life he claimed to have visions of angels and other divine beings, dancing and cavorting in London fields and streets. He was a visionary in the most literal sense of the word.

Although – with over 300 images – this exhibition is thoroughly documented and copiously illustrated, maybe the reason I left feeling so frustrated and dissatisfied was because I felt that Blake’s weird, peculiar and compelling imaginative universe had been almost completely left out of it.

There were plenty of framed pages taken from the illustrated versions of his ‘prophetic books’ covered with verse. But the verse itself wasn’t printed out on a label on the wall for us to actually read. There was an introduction to the subject matter of each one, but little explanation of what they meant or what he was trying to achieve.

This exhibition feels like a big, elaborately assembled, beautifully curated and presented catalogue of all Blake’s visual works. A list. A documentation of his works. But somehow, with all the fiery life, rebellion and pride of the Imagination taken out.

Blake’s life is presented as a story of professional frustration – rather than as a life of extraordinary imaginative triumph.

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by Simon on October 20, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 20, 2019

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Anno’s Journey: The World of Anno Mitsumasa @ Japan House

Anno Mitsumasa

Anno Mitsumasa was born in 1926, meaning he turned 93 this year. For over fifty years he has been drawing and painting book illustrations, for hundreds of books, many of them for children, with the result that generations of Japanese have grown up familiar with his images from an early age, which is the reason he has become ‘one of Japan’s most beloved and prolific artists’.

The Japan House in High Street Kensington is a pleasure to visit at any time, to enjoy the minimalist layout and carefully chosen artifacts in the ground floor boutique. It’s currently hosting a small but beautifully curated exhibition of works by Anno Mitsumasa, the first ever display of Anno’s work in the UK.

The exhibition includes 87 artworks by Anno in a variety of media from watercolours and Japanese-style paintings (Nihonga), to powder pigment (ganryō) on silk, and black papercuts. Althoughhe’s illustrated hundreds, and himself written scores, of books, for the purpose of the exhibition the works have been gathered into six or seven categories.

Learning letters

The show includes examples from the early learning alphabet books Anno created, in which he illustrated the Japanese hiragana syllabary, books such as Anna’s Alphabet (1974) and The A-E-I-O-U Book (1976).

J from Anno’s Alphabet, An Adventure in Imagination by Mitsumasa Anno (1974)

Mysterious World

His first picture book was Mysterious Pictures published in 1968. It is hugely indebted to the work of optical illusionist M.C. Escher, whose work Anno came across on a trip to Europe. It prompted Anno to create his own impossible ascending staircases and upside-down scenes, Escher subject matter, but in Anno’s characteristic stick-men style. He continued this thread with teasing optical illusion pictures printed between 1969 and 1980 in the Japanese magazine Mathematical Science. Thus, if you look closely at the J in the illustration above, you’ll see it has an Escher twist.

Fushigi na E © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

Anno’s Journey

Anno broke through to the big time with his 1977 book, in Japanese A Picture Book of Travels, translated into English as Anno’s Journey.

Unlike the books mentioned so far, Anno’s Journey consists of immensely detailed pictures of natural scenes which are not simplified for children or laughs. Each picture shows a small figure journeying through the cultural and literary landscapes of a country in Europe, based on Anno’s own extensive journeys through Europe, noting the folklore, history and art of each country. He had been a Europhile since boyhood and in 1964 undertook a 40-day journey across the continent, which provided him with the imagery for the books.

The original was so successful that it sparked eight sequels, each focusing on a specific country – Anno’s Britain, Anno’s USA, Anno’s Italy and so on. The exhibition goes heavy on Anno’s Britain (1981) with as many as twenty prints from this one book. What they have in common is:

  • the image is thronged with minutely rendered detail
  • the subjects are an odd, uncanny mixture of actual places – famous landmarks such as the White Cliffs of Dover, Stonehenge, Big Ben – but reimagined among much older, non-existent historical buildings e.g. St Paul’s cathedral not surrounded by modern developments but by thatched cottages and Tudor beam houses

St. Paul’s Cathedral from Anno’s Britain © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

You could make much of this anachronistic reimagining (note the horse-drawn omnibus at the top right of this picture, and all the pictures of rural England are full of thatched cottages and half the inhabitants are wearing the kinds of frocks and bonnets which go back to the Civil War era), but what is perhaps most obvious is the simple imaginative freedom Anno feels. He is a tourist in what, to him, is a strange land, full of unreadable images and symbols, on a journey of discovery: why should anything make sense? Why should he make sense?

Papercuts

During the 1970s Anno produced a series of works using Japanese papercutting techniques. These are as different from the Journey books as can be imagined because they work with large and bold images, as opposed to the many tiny figures which pack out the Journey pictures.

He used the technique to illustrate a suite of Japanese folk tales, made designs for a pack of card games, and adapted the Hans Christian Andersen story The Little Match Girl in 1976.

The papercut technique brings out the basic elements of storytelling without words, reminiscent of the kami-shibai or ‘paper theatre’ format which would have been familiar to Anno from street entertainments before the war.

Scene 12 from The Old Man Who Made Trees Blossom by Anno Mitsumasa © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

The monochrome effect of black and white, and the starkness of the angular outlines, are all hugely at odds with the joyfully coloured, and minutely detailed, and often rather sensual curves and flourishes of his other work – reminding the viewer just how varied and imaginative his output has been.

The Tale of the Heike Picture Book

For me the highlight of the exhibition was a series of illustrations Anno made to the classic Japanese literary masterpiece, The Tale of the Heike. This is an epic account of the struggle between the Taira clan and Minamoto clan for control of Japan in the Genpei War (1180–1185). The text was compiled sometime prior to 1330, and is huge: it runs to over 700 pages in the Penguin classic translation, and is packed with conspiracies and battles, interspersed with diplomacy and – my favourite scenes – nights of wine and love.

The Exiling of the Ministers of State from ‘The Tale of the Heike Picture Book’ © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

Several things set these wonderful images apart from the rest of the work here. One is the medium: they are made from powder paint painted onto fine silk, an incredibly difficult medium to master.

And possibly related to this is the use of washes of colour. In the image above, notice all the tones of grey and greyish brown which he has used to create the atmosphere of dusk and moonrise, and also to convey the sandy quality of dried summer grass at the bottom left.

Anno’s illustrations originally appeared one at a time in the monthly magazine named Books, and there is a grand total of 79 of them, produced over seven years. The ten or so examples on display here are, for me, head and shoulders above everything else.

Partly because they are for adults, unlike almost everything else.

Partly because they deal with war, and so have highly dramatic scenes of ranks of samurai warriors on horseback charging each other, as well as tumbling over cliffs or (apparently) charging into rivers. Much action and movement!

But mostly for their sheer beauty. They are beautiful. The composition, the colouring, and the immense subtlety of the colour washes, make them by turns exciting, dramatic, or mysterious and evocative.

In and Around the Capital

There’s a selection from a series of watercolours Anno did depicting scenes from Kyoto, capital of Japan until the mid-19th century. These are bright watercolours which he produced for the Sankei Shimbun newspaper between 2011 and 2016, skilful and bright and featuring some wonderful landscapes all done in a very loose and relaxed style but, for me, paling in comparison with the works on silk.

Hōrin-ji, Arashiyama from Views In and Around The Capital © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Mori no naka no ie, Anno Mitsumasa Art Museum, Wakuden

Children of the Past

Most recently Anno has reverted to memories of his childhood with a series depicting idyllic memories of his childhood growing up in the small rural town of Tsuwano in Shimane Prefecture. There are scenes of children learning at school or playing in the countryside, all done in a deliberately naive, child-like style, and accompanied by text written as if a diary entry by his boyhood self.

Memories of Tsuwano by Anno Mitsumasa (2001) © Anno Mitsumasa. Courtesy of Anno Art Museum

These were sweet and lovely if you warm to the children’s book thread in Anno’s work. But I’m afraid my heart was totally lost to The Tale of the Heike Picture Book, and, having seen those pictures, nothing else here matched their intense and adult beauty.

Reading cove

The exhibition space at Japan House is one big white room downstairs. For this show they’ve had the simple but effective idea of converting the central part of the room into a reading area, carpeting it with soft black carpet, separating it off with black partitions, and strewing it with surprisingly comfortable white cushions. And placing racks of thirty or so of Anno’s books across the floor, a profusion of books and titles and images which, more than the wall labels, confirm how prodigiously prolific he has been.

I took full advantage of this comfy area to nab the only copy of The Tale of the Heike Picture Book and work very slowly through it, savouring all the illustrations. A couple of families were there with very small children and a baby. This reading nook provided a safe space to sit down with toddlers and show them the pictures, or encourage them to make up stories linking the often textless illustrations.

The reading space at the centre of Anno’s Journey: The World of Anno Mitsumasa at Japan House

The film

Downstairs at Japan House, opposite the gallery space, is a lecture hall-cum-small movie theatre. Alongside the exhibition, they’re showing an extended documentary film about Anno, with sub-titles chronicling his career, with lots of wonderful rostrum shots of his illustrations, and with interview snippets with the great man himself.

The merch

As you might expect, the shop upstairs is stocking a selection of Anno’s books (though not, I was disappointed to see, The Tale of the Heike Picture Book – the copy I looked at downstairs had a Japanese text: I wonder if it’s available in an English translation) – along with some funky Anno Mitsumasa stationery, playing cards and other merch.

This is a delightful way to spend a couple of peaceful, meditative and civilised hours. And it’s completely FREE.

Related links

Other exhibitions at Japan House

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by Simon on August 25, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Illustration, Japan, Painting
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Posted by Simon on August 25, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/08/25/annos-journey-the-world-of-anno-mitsumasa-japan-house/

Quentin Blake: From the Studio @ the House of Illustration

Sir Quentin Blake is arguably the UK’s most famous book illustrator, as well as a fine artist, designer and writer in his own right. He was a leading spirit behind the establishment of the House of Illustration, the only gallery in the UK devoted entirely to the work of illustrators, which opened in 2014, and is housed in a restored Victorian building spitting distance from King’s Cross station.

The House has three galleries. In the main one (three rooms and a small video room) at the moment is a retrospective of work by cartoonist and graphic novelist Posy Simmonds. In the second gallery (one biggish room) is an exhibition of works by the Taiwanese artist YiMiao Shih. In between these two is a really small, L-shaped room. This is the permanent Quentin Blake gallery, tribute to the nation’s most popular illustrator and a pay-off we presume for leading the campaign to set up the gallery.

The Quentin Blake gallery hosts a changing display of works by the great man on different themes, for example last Valentine’s Day it featured a set of twenty or so very funny cartoons on the theme of love and cupid’s arrow.

The current exhibition is titled ‘From the studio’ which allows Blake to tell us a little about his working practices. He tells us that for the past forty years most of his works have been produced in a room overlooking a tree-lined London square. He stands with his back to the French windows and balcony, pen in hand. The room contains four ‘plan chests’ and two tables and a litter of drawings.

The exhibition allows him to share with us some works in progress, first drafts of illustrations which he is currently working on.

Sheffield Children’s Hospital

Sheffield Children’s Hospital opened a new wing opened last year, containing has four wards which, alongside beds also offers therapy and treatment rooms, a patient dining room, a parents’ relaxation room, a social room for teenagers, and a ‘play tower’ installation, for younger children.

Blake was commissioned to create artworks for the walls of corridors in three of the wing’s wards, and as larger-scale murals in communal areas. The designs were drawn on paper, then scanned, enlarged and printed in large scale onto washable wall coverings.

Mural by Quentin Blake at Sheffield Children’s Hospital

The King of the Golden River

In 1841 the critic John Ruskin published this children’s story as a parable about the impact of human actions on the environment. This year the book was republished by Thames and Hudson with illustrations by Blake. Blake tells us that he went about illustrating it ‘the old-fashioned way’, cutting up the text to stick it into position, then drawing in rough illustrations around it.

From The King of the Golden River © Quentin Blake

Moonlight travellers

Blake’s series of paintings of people travelling through bleak moonlit landscapes began as a personal project in 2017, as an experiment in pure imagination. Later this year they will be published alongside a ‘response’ by author Will Self. He is quoted as saying ‘made them up as I went along, almost like a performance’.

Moonlight Travellers © Quentin Blake

Mouse on a Tricycle

This wordless book opens with a tiny picture of a mouse on a tricycle. It imagines the public’s response to the fact of a cycling rodent. Some cheer it on, some are outraged, some are scared, some deliver hectoring sermons. I loved this picture. It says so much about human nature.

Mouse on a Tricycle © Quentin Blake

It is incredible how just a handful of drawings and paintings can fill your heart with happiness and delight!

Related links

More House of Illustration reviews

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by Simon on June 23, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Illustration
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Posted by Simon on June 23, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/06/23/quentin-blake-from-the-studio-house-of-illustration/

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