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Edvard Munch: love and angst @ the British Museum

The fin-de-siecle

The last decade of the 19th century is famous for its fin-de-siecle, decadent, dark imagery. In Imperial Britain this was epitomised by the decadent sexuality associated with the notorious trial of Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Book magazine and the pornographic prints of Aubrey Beardsley. In France there was a reaction against Impressionism which took many forms including the urban posters of Toulouse-Lautrec and the swarthy nudes of Paul Gauguin down in the South Seas. All were well-known and public artists, working in cosmopolitan cities which were the capitals of far-flung empires – London, Paris. They were famous and playing on large stages.

In the other countries of northern Europe, however, one of the most powerful artistic currents was Symbolism.

As the exhibition notes:

Symbolism was a literary and artistic movement that rejected representations of the external world for those of imagination and myth. Symbolists looked inwards in order to represent emotions and ideas.

In Belgium, north Germany and the Scandinavian countries, artists developed a wide range of techniques and styles, but tended to fixate on a handful of themes, namely sex and death. Death awaits with his scythe. Empty boats arrive at forbidding islands. Youths waste away from frustrated love. Beautiful young women turn out to be vampires.

Sex and death and anguish and despair, these are all much more personal, introverted, emotions. Wilde was a flamboyant public personality, Beardsley’s art was defiantly clear and elegant, both were immensely sophisticated and urban and cosmopolitan, confident doyens of the largest, richest city in the world.

Whereas much of the fin-de-siecle art from Belgium, Germany, Scandinavia was much darker, more personal. Of course they produced urban and sophisticated art as well – the 1890s is characterised by an explosion of diverse art movements – but there was also a big strand of empty lakes and immense dark pine forests and brooding skies and agonised artist-heroes.

Edvard Munch

Munch is slap bang in the middle of this social and cultural movement. His most famous work is The Scream, which was first made as a painting in 1893 and then turned into a lithograph in 1895 which was reproduced in French and British and American magazines and made his reputation.

The Scream is probably among the top ten most famous images produced by any artist anywhere, and has been parodied and lampooned and reproduced in every medium imaginable (pillow slips and duvet covers, posters, bags, t-shirts). It featured in an episode of The Simpsons, clinching its status as one of the world’s best known art icons. It’s up there with the Mona Lisa.

The Scream (1895) by Edvard Munch. Private Collection, Norway. Photo by Thomas Widerberg

Why? Why is it so powerful? Well:

  1. It is highly stylised and simplified – it barely looks like a human being at all, more like some kind of ghost or spirit of the woods.
  2. The rest of the landscape is drawn with harsh single lines, whose waviness seems to echo the long O of the protagonist’s mouth.
  3. Thus ‘primitiveness’ of the technique of wood carving – with its thick, heavy ‘crude’ lines – somehow echoes the primalness of the emotional state being described.

The exhibition

This exhibition brings together nearly 50 prints from Norway’s Munch Museum, making this the largest exhibition of Munch’s prints seen in the UK for 45 years.

It also includes sketches, photos and a few oil paintings, not least a big haunting portrait – The Sick Child – of his favourite sister, Johanne Sophie, who died of tuberculosis when she was just 13. These are set alongside works by French and German contemporaries, to present a powerful overview of Munch’s troubled personality, the artistic milieu he moved in, and his extraordinary ability to turn it into powerful images conveying intense, primal, human emotions.

Vampire II (1896) by Edvard Munch. The Savings Bank Foundation DNB, on loan to Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo

Claustrophobic

The exhibition is up in the top gallery in the Rotunda, a relatively small space, which was divided into smallish sections or rooms, the prints hung quite close together on the walls, and the place was packed, rammed, with silver-haired old ladies and gentleman. It was hard to move around. More than once I went to move on from studying a print and found I couldn’t move, with people studying the next-door prints blocking me to left and right and a shuffle of pedestrians blocking any backward movement. Imagine the Tube at rush hour. It was like that.

Possibly, in fact, a good atmosphere to savour Munch’s work. Trapped, claustrophobic, slightly hysterical. it forced me to look up at the quotes from his letters or diaries which have been liberally printed up on the exhibition walls. Just reading these immediately gives you a sense of where Munch was coming from, his personality and the motivation for his art.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. (1908)

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted – and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there, trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (22 January 1892)

The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.

All art, like music, must be created with one’s lifeblood – Art is one’s lifeblood. (1890)

I would not cast off my illness, because there’s much in my art that I owe it.

We do not want pretty pictures to be hung on drawing-room walls. We want… an art that arrests and engages. An art of one’s innermost heart.

Sexual anxiety

There’s plenty more where this came from. The exhibition gives a lot of biographical detail about his early life, describing the Norwegian capital of Kristiana, how it was connected to the rest of Europe by sea routes, how it was a small provincial town whose every aspect was dominated by the stiflingly respectable Lutheran church, but how young Edvard was attracted to its small bohemian, artistic set of poets and writers and artists, how he conceived a massive sequence of works about love and sex and death which he titled The Frieze of Life –

The Frieze is intended as a poem about life, about love and about death. (1918)

How he travelled to Paris and to Berlin and scandalised respectable opinion with the exhibitions he held there, but created a stir and won admirers for the stark, elemental quality of his woodcuts and prints. (The exhibition includes a map of Europe showing Munch’s extensive travels during the 1890s and 1900s, along with a selection of Munch’s personal postcards and maps.)

We are told Munch was born and brought up in a fiercely religious and conservative bourgeois family which was horrified when he fell in with Kristiania’s bohemian layabouts. These bohos practiced sexual promiscuousness, had numerous affairs, and so were plagued by jealousy and infidelity and fights – all exacerbated by the way they drank too much, far too much.

It seemed obvious to me that Munch’s anxiety was caused by the crashing conflict between his extremely repressed bourgeois upbringing and the chaotic and promiscuous circles he moved in as a young man. On the one hand was a young man’s desire and lust, on the other were all the authority figures in his culture (and inside his head) saying even looking at a woman with lust in his heart would lead to instant damnation.

The scores of images he made of women as vampires and weird gothic presences and looming succubi emerging from the shadows, represent a repeated attempt to confront the epicentre of that clash – sex, embodied – for a heterosexual young man – by sexualised young women. They attracted him like a drug, like heroin – but all these compulsive thoughts about them triggered the terror of physical disease – the appalling ravages of syphilis for which there was no cure – along with the certainty of eternal damnation – and all these led to anxious, almost hysterical thoughts, about the only way out, the only way to resolve the endless nightmare of anxiety – and that was release and escape into death, the death which he had seen at such close quarters in the deaths of his beloved mother and sister from tuberculosis.

The obsessiveness of his sexual thoughts, and their violent clash with orthodox Christianity, is most evident in the hugely controversial Madonna, an obviously erotic image to which he blasphemously misapplies the title of the chaste Mother of God. And, when you look closely, you realise that those are sperm swimming round the outside of the frame, and a miserable looking foetus squatting at the bottom left. Sex versus Religion! It’s amazing he wasn’t arrested for blasphemy and public indecency. In fact his 1892 exhibition in Berlin so scandalised respectable opinion that it was shut down after just a week.

Madonna (1895/1902) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

So Munch’s vampire women aren’t real women, of course they’re not. They are depictions of male anxiety about women, namely the irreconcilable conflict between the demanding, drug-addiction-level lust many young, testosterone-fueled men experience, whether they want to or not – and the multiplicity of feelings of shame about having such strong pornographic feelings and experiences, and regret at handling relationships with women badly, and anxiety that you are a failure, as a man and as a decent human being, and terror that – if there is a God – you are going straight to hell for all eternity.

Plus, as the wall labels indicate, there really was a lot of heavy drinking in his circle and by him personally, which led to chaotic lifestyles among the bohemian set, and Munch became a clinical alcoholic. And this addiction – to alcohol – will, of course, have exacerbated all the psychological problems described above.

Exposure to so many of Munch’s prints – alongside detailed explanations of how he made them, the Norwegian and north European tradition they stem from, and so on – really rubs in the fact that he was a great master of the form. It’s not just the Scream. Lots of the other prints have the same archetypal, primitive power, and the exhibition brings it out by setting Munch’s work beside prime examples by other leading printmakers of the time, in France and Germany (many of which are themselves worth paying the price of admission to see).

The subtle prints

It tends to be the extreme images we are attracted to – the Scream, the Madonna, the numerous vampire women, the worrying image of a pubescent girl sitting on a bed. But some decades ago we crossed a threshold into being able to accept all kinds of erotic and extreme images, so these no longer scandalise and thrill us in the same way they did their initial viewers, although they still provide powerful visual experiences.

But having had a first go around the exhibition taking in these greatest hits, I slowly came to realise there was another layer or area of his work, which is – in a word – more subtle. If the most obvious and impactful of his images are about stress and anxiety mounting to open hysteria – there were also plenty of images which were far more restrained. In which – to point out an obvious difference – the women are wearing clothes.

Instead of vampire women whose kisses are turning into bites, these tend to be of fully dressed, utterly ‘respectable’ late-nineteenth century types, set outdoors, in open air situations where… somehow, through the placing and composition of the figures, a more subtle sense of aloneness and isolation is conveyed. They capture the mood of a couple who are, for some reason, not communicating, each isolated in their brooding thoughts.

The Lonely Ones (1899) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

Like the complex ways relationships between the sexes fail, become blocked and painful in the plays of Munch’s fellow Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen. (Munch, as a leading artist of the day, was acquainted with both Ibsen and the younger playwright, Strindberg. It crosses my mind that if Munch’s more hysterical images can be compared to the highly strung characters in a Strindberg play, the more subdued and unhappy images in some way parallel Ibsen’s couples.)

Having processed the extreme images of vampire women, sex and death in my first go round, on this second pass I warmed to these less blatant images.

I noticed that the naked women images are almost always indoors (as, I suppose, naked women mostly had to be, in his day). But that the more ‘respectable’ and subtle images were all set outside, and often by primal landscapes – namely The Lake and the Forest – the kind of primeval landscape we all associate with Scandinavia and which really was available right on Kristiana’s doorstep.

The exhibition ends with a set of prints which perform variations on his characteristically hunched, half-abstract human figures – characteristically, showing one man and one woman – but in this series hauntingly isolated, leaning on each other – or against each other – in something which doesn’t look at all sensual but more like the survival techniques of characters from a play by Samuel Becket.

Towards the Forest II (1897/1915) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

Less striking than the vampires and naked women and girls, I thought these strange, half-abstract, ‘lost souls in the landscape’ images had a kind of purity and haunting quality all their own.

Breakdown and rebirth

It comes as no surprise to learn that in 1908 Munch had a nervous breakdown. His anxiety, compounded by excessive drinking and sometimes fighting, had become acute, and he was experiencing hallucinations and persecution mania. He entered a clinic and underwent a comprehensive detoxification which lasted nearly eight months.

When he left, he was a new man. Well, new-ish. His work became more colourful and less pessimistic and the wider public of Kristiania for the first time began to appreciate his work. Critics were supportive. His paintings sold. Museums started to buy his back catalogue. His life improved in all measurable ways. But in a textbook case of the artist who needs his anxieties and neuroses to produce great works, everything he carved and painted from then on – portraits of rich friends, of the farm he bought, murals for factories – lacked the intensity and archetypal power of his early years.

Years later all that storm and stress and hysteria seemed so distant as almost to be inexplicable.It is typical that, decades later, he told the story of how his famous painting, Vampire II, got its title. He himself had simply titled it Love and Pain. Pretty boring, eh? But Munch’s friend, the critic Stanisław Przybyszewski, and clearly a man with a flair for publicity, described it as ‘a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire’s face.’ And, looking back, Munch comments:

It was the time of Ibsen, and if people were really bent on revelling in symbolist eeriness and calling the idyll ‘Vampire’ – why not?

A man in remission from alcoholism and mental illness, the older Munch can be forgiven for not wanting to revive unhappy memories, and for wanting to palm off the idea for lurid titles onto his friends. But the prints themselves, and all his early writings, don’t lie. The later work is interesting and decorative – but it is the unhappy period covered by this exhibition which produced the intense and troubled works which seem to take you right into the heart of the tortured human condition.

Older, wiser and sober – Munch among his paintings at the end of his life

The promotional video

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Reviews of other British Museum exhibitions

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by Simon on July 22, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 22, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/edvard-munch-love-and-angst-british-museum/

Wandsworth Prison Museum

Wandsworth Prison was opened in 1851. It is an all-male prison and can currently hold 1,628 prisoners, making it one of the largest prisons in Western Europe.

You can only visit the prison itself if you have professional credentials or official business, but out in the forecourt of the prison is what is basically a large garden shed which turns out to be the Prison Museum. This you can visit by appointment or on the occasional open day. Over the weekend of 2-3 June it was open to the public, so I went along.

Wandsworth Prison Museum

Although small, the museum contains over 400 separate items, packed, hung, arranged and displayed densely together to make a kind of Aladdin’s cave of memorabilia, ephemera, all sorts of documents, old photographs, prison equipment, warders’ uniforms and much much more, all with informative and interesting labels which shed light on the history of Wandsworth Prison in particular and, by extension, on the broader development and evolution of British prisons as a whole.

Bird's eye view of the Surrey House of Correction, as it was known when it opened in 1851

Bird’s eye view of the Surrey House of Correction, as it was known when it opened in 1851

The free handout gives a useful overview so I’ll quote it verbatim:

Wandsworth Prison was opened in 1851 as the Surrey House of Correction at Wandsworth. it was owned and run by the County of Surrey until 1978 when the prison was nationalised and became Her Majesty’s Prison, Wandsworth. The prison opened with both male and female prisoners. An original signature piece by the architect, D.R. Hill, a cast iron pillar with the maker’s name plate from the pump house and a letter to Parliament from the first Governor, Richard Onslow, covers the early period of the prison.

The First World War is covered with stories of military prisoners, conscientious objectors, spies, Irishmen of the Easter rebellion, their offences and treatment by the authorities.

The Second World War includes the bombing of the prison, rocket attack, the formation of the Prison Officers Association, spies, traitors and their executions. The conditions for the staff and their duties, including those called up for military service, especially the Deputy-Governor (later Governor) E.J. Paton-Walsh, who attended the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

Notable prisoners have included the playwright Oscar Wilde (held at Wandsworth for five months before being transferred to Reading Gaol), James Earl Ray, the assassin of the U.S. civil rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. The prison was also the location of the escape of the Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs, in 1965. Other prisoners have included Train Robber Bruce Reynolds, Reggie Kray, Eddie Richardson and Frankie Fraser.

Events such as the band Hawkwind playing a concert in the 1970s and a visit by musician Elton John are also illustrated with items on display.

The prison was the last to have an operational gallows that had been installed in 1878, re-built, located in three places and finally removed in 1993. An execution box, No.8, is on display and it contains original items including an execution rope. Details of executions including those of Jack the Ripper suspect, George Chapman, William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw), the last man executed for treason, and John Haigh, the ‘Acid Bath Murderer’, are on display. The last execution at the prison (and in London) was in 1961.

Random highlights

There is a chronological order of sorts to the exhibits, but part of the pleasure of the place is the sense of unexpected juxtapositions, strange displays, odd stories, surprising objects and the general air of a Curiosity Shop of wonders.

Wandsworth was the site of 135 executions, between 1878 and 1961. This is an execution box containing some of the equipment required to set up a working gallows.

Execution box

Taking up one corners is a gallows frame complete with rope and tackle. In the background are photos of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s last executioner (behind the rope on the right) and, obscured by the chain in the middle, Pierrepoint’s death mask.

The heavy chain suspended from the crossbeam was used to adjust the length of drop given to a prisoner during judicial hanging. The test bag at the bottom was filled with sand to the same weight as the prisoner, and used in pre-hanging tests to ensure the strength of the rope, the gallows trapdoor, and the cross-beam. The two single ropes with knots in were positioned so to allow prison officers to steady themselves while standing on plank bridges over the ‘drop’ during the execution.

Gallows, chain and ropes

Photo of the hanging room.

The execution room

An edition of the Illustrated London news showing the execution of Kate Webster in 1879, the only woman ever executed at the prison. She had been found guilty of the murder of her elderly employer, Julia Thomas, in Richmond.

The hanging of Kate Webster, 1879

British citizen William Joyce, known because of his radio broadcasts from Nazi Germany as ‘Lord Haw Haw’, was the last person to be executed in Britain for High Treason. The sentence was carried out at Wandsworth Prison on 3 January 1946.

William Joyce aka Lord Haw Haw in the custody of British troops at the end of World War Two

This is a photo of anti-capital punishment campaigner Violet van der Elst, outside the prison in 1935, protesting the execution of Percy Anderson. Van der Elst used up her personal fortune campaigning to end capital punishment, and lived long enough to see it finally abolished in 1965.

The photo is crying out for a humorous caption in the style of a Private Eye front cover. ‘Oh not ‘er again. She’s always hangin’ round here.’

Anti-capital punishment campaigner, Violet van der Elst, outside Wandsworth Prison, 1935

Anti-capital punishment campaigner, Violet van der Elst, outside Wandsworth Prison, 1935

 

There were other forms of physical punishment than execution. This is a photo of the last corporal punishment frame at Wandsworth Prison, with the punishment position being demonstrated.

Corporal punishment by either birch rod or cat o’ nine tails whip was a court punishment until 1948 and remained a prison punishment until 1967 when it was abolished under the Criminal Justice Act of that year. Its last use in Wandsworth Prison was in 1961.

The corporal punishment frame at Wandsworth prison

There’s lots to be shocked and outraged by here, if you’re of that turn of mind, starting with capital punishment itself and going on to deplore the whole concept of ‘hard labour’, explained here with a number of contemporary illustrations. There are tales of miscarriages of justice and some horrible examples of the very harsh punishment meted out, as so often, to the poor and hungry and uneducated.

For example, the case of Robert Davey, aged ten and sentenced to three months in Wandsworth for stealing rabbits, in 1874.

Photo of ten-year-old convict, Robert Davey

All this I sort of expected.

But one of the things that genuinely surprised me was the revelation of how much of the Victorian infrastructure of the prison endured right down almost to the present day. The very hospitable and informative curator of the museum (himself a prison officer) explained that after the Second World War Britain was bankrupt and forced to continue with its ageing infrastructure of Victorian prisons, despite calls to rebuild them all.

Then decade after decade went by with one Home Secretary after another continually putting off the enormous cost of rebuilding Britain’s prisons, with the result that many of the older ones, especially in London, continued to contain fixtures and fittings dating from their Victorian origins.

The blue door in the photo below, for example, is Victorian and was painted, repainted and painted again with shiny prison blue, managing to serve its function as a cell door until it was finally replaced in the 2010s. The 2010s!

(Next to it is a mannequin wearing prisoner issue denim jacket and blue striped shirt, a style introduced in the late 1970s, familiar to those of us brought up on the TV sitcom Porridge.)

Prison door and prison uniform

This is a cell card and prisoner information card holder of a design which also dates from the Victorian era, and was still in use as recently as the 1990s. The 1990s!

Prisoner information card holder

This is a blank escaped prisoner reward sheet. Probably the most famous escapee from Wandsworth was Ronald Biggs who escaped by scaling the wall with a rope ladder and dropping onto a waiting removal van. I wonder how much reward was offered for information leading to his arrest. This blank form from the Victorian era is offering a generous £5.

Escaped prisoner reward sheet

In 1932 the Governor of the day, Lieutenant Colonel Rich, invited the film star Charlie Chaplin to visit the prison. Chaplin was given a tour of the prison, including the still-working gallows on F wing. Chaplin had briefly known Jack the Ripper suspect George Chapman, from his boyhood days in Southwark.

Documentation surrounding Charlie Chaplin’s visit to the prison in 1931

James Earl Ray was accused of being the assassin of the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior, shot dead on 4 April 1968. Immediately after the assassination, Ray fled to Canada, then used a fake passport to travel on to Portugal and, finally, to England.

Two months after the assassination he was arrested at Heathrow airport attempting to use a forged Canadian passport to board a flight to Belgium. He was held in Wandsworth prison while arrangements were made to have him extradited back to the US. During this remand period, Ray’s lawyer arranged a plea bargain where, in exchange for pleading guilty, he would avoid the usual sentence for murder, at that time, execution by electrocution – the electric chair.

So Ray was extradited, convicted and sentenced to 99 years in prison without a trial and without the evidence against him being tested in court. Soon afterwards he changed his plea, and then spent the rest of his life (until 1998) trying to prove his innocence and that the murder had been the act of a widespread conspiracy.

Mugshot of James Earl Ray, on remand in Wandsworth prison

Mugshot of James Earl Ray, on remand in Wandsworth prison

This is the view from a gallery of the central atrium of the prison at the centre of its famous radial design. On the right, on the ground floor against a wall, is the old wooden ‘central desk’, which is now in the museum.

The main prison centre

Prisoner food tray and cutlery.

Prison tray and cutlery

Prison issue shaving kit.

Prison issue toilet kit

Implements of restraint – handcuffs, belt, a whistle etc.

Handcuffs and other instruments of restraint

Prison officers’ equipment, including truncheons and radios.

Prison officer equipment

Modern helmets: from left to right an officer cap with Senior Officer’s badge (1990s), a Control and Restraint helmet (1990s), and an Officer issue baseball cap (2000s).

Prison officer helmets

I always imagined prisoners wearing jackets covered in arrows was a cartoon convention. Not so. Just such suits were worn until 1922. Apparently the idea stems from medieval heraldry where the image of the arrow denotes ‘government property’. It was conceived by Sir Edmund Du Cane in the 1870s after his appointment as Chairman of Convict Directors and Surveyor-General of Prisons. He intended the arrows to be a mark of shame and a hindrance to escape insofar as the characteristic outfit was immediately identifiable to anyone who saw an escaped convict. I was surprised to learn that the nails hammered into convicts’ boots were also arrow-shaped so that he left footprints in mud or sand which were also designed to show he was ‘government property’.

A convict wearing the characteristic arrow uniform

And, in amid the hundreds of factual artefacts and objects, what does it actually feel like to be locked away in prison for years? The museum has a number of examples of prisoner art, creative art, of course, being a technique increasingly used in prisoner rehabilitation.

For me this work stood out, not for any technique or sophistication, but for its simple eloquence. It seemed, to me, to be saying ‘Help’.

Prisoner artwork – Open hands, from the 2000s

To find out more about the museum, correspondence should be directed to:

Wandsworth Prison Museum
c/o POA Office
HMP Wandsworth
Heathfield Road
London SW18 3HS

wandsworthprisonmuseum@hmps.gsi.gov.uk

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by Simon on June 4, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, History, Museum
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Posted by Simon on June 4, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/06/04/wandsworth-prison-museum/

For Then, For Now, For Ever: 100 Years of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission @ Brookwood Military Cemetery

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) commemorates the 1.7 million men and women of the Commonwealth forces who died in the two world wars. Their cemeteries, burial plots and memorials are a lasting tribute to those who died in some 154 countries across the world. The CWGC register records details of the Commonwealth war dead so that graves or names on memorials can be located. In the UK no fewer than 300,000 war dead are commemorated, some as names listed on large memorials, but more than 170,000 have known and marked graves in 12,500 locations around the UK.

A small but fascinating and moving exhibition marking the centenary of the CWGC is currently being held at Brookwood Military Cemetery in Surrey, the largest CWGC site in the UK with more than 5,000 burials and 3,500 commemorations.

The military cemetery is located within the larger civilian Brookwood Cemetery between Woking and Farnborough. You can drive there but it’s also directly accessible from Brookwood train station on the Waterloo to Basingstoke line. You simply go down some steps from the platform and through a gate into the huge public cemetery.

To get to the military section, bear immediately right and walk along a single track tarmac road with views down onto the general (public) cemetery, until you reach a gate into the fenced-off military section

Brookwood Military Cemetery

Brookwood Military Cemetery

The exhibition is being staged in the Canadian Records Building at the western part of the cemetery, nearest the entrance from the main road. It is small, contained in just one room, and consists of twelve factual panels looking at different aspects of the history, plus a video, architectural designs, a display case of books and documents, and a map of the world highlighting just how global the Commission’s work is.

Installation view of the For Then, For Now, For Ever exhibition

Installation view of the For Then, For Now, For Ever exhibition

Sir Fabian Ware volunteered to fight in the Great War but being in his 40s, was considered too old to fight so he served in the Ambulance Corps on the Western Front. He was dismayed to see so many corpses and body parts being buried randomly without any organisation. It seemed to him that each body deserved respect, and that family members back home would desperately want to know the fate and location of their loved ones. He made suggestions to his superiors.

By 1915 his mobile unit was officially recognised and incorporated into the British Army as the Graves Registration Commission. After several further evolutions the Imperial War Graves Commission was given a Royal Charter on 21 May 1917.

Establishing principles of the IWGC

Establishing principles of the IWGC

The IWGC contacted Sir Frederic Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, for his advice, and it was Kenyon’s advice and suggestions which shaped the appearance and design of the graves, memorials and cemeteries. All this was contained in his far-reaching report War Graves: How the cemeteries abroad will be designed.

Rudyard Kipling, who had lost his son in 1916, was asked to be literary advisor and served in that capacity right up till his death in 1936. It was Kipling who suggested many of the phrases used by the IWGC such as ‘Their name liveth for evermore’, ‘Known unto God’ and ‘Their Glory shall not be blotted out’.

Rudyard Kipling's contribution to the IWGC

Rudyard Kipling’s contribution to the IWGC

One of the foremost designers of the early part of the 20th century, Leslie MacDonald Gill, was commissioned by Kenyon to design the lettering and regimental badges on the headstones. His concern for detail included stipulating the angle at which the lettering should be engraved, to make the names easier to read.

Leslie MacDonald Gill and the IWGC

Leslie MacDonald Gill and the IWGC

Sir Edwin Lutyens oversaw the design of more than 250 IWGC cemeteries, but is best known for designing the Cenotaph in central London and the Thiepval Memorial to the missing of the Somme. Sir Reginald Blomfield designed the Cross of Sacrifice which stands in numerous IWGC cemeteries round the world.

The central monuments

The central monuments

More than 500,000 service men and women who died during the First World War have no known grave. The exhibition shows how the idea of memorials for the missing was born and developed. It features the work of Sir Herbert Baker, who designed a number of memorials to the missing in France.

Memorials to the missing

Memorials to the missing

Sir Arthur Hill was Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and was asked to be the commission’s horticultural advisor. He recommended the types of flowers, shrubs and trees which would best suit the IWGC’s numerous locations.

Sir Arthur Hill and horticulture

Sir Arthur Hill and horticulture

Once the principles of design and layout were established, they could be extended beyond core European battlefields in France and Belgium to more far-flung locations, such as Greece, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt. A leading role was played by Sir John James Burnet who was tasked with designing cemeteries and memorials appropriate to the local conditions.

Beyond the Western Front

Beyond the Western Front

The IWGC had just about completed its enormous task in 1938 when, with horrible irony, another world war broke out the following year. Due to intensive bombing many more civilians died than in previous conflicts and the IWGC expanded its remit to cover these casualties. The Commission’s staff had to be evacuated from the continental cemeteries many of which were now, once again, in war zones.

IWGC in the Second World War

IWGC in the Second World War

British and Commonwealth casualties in the second war were about half of those in the first, largely because of the nature of the war (i.e there wasn’t the grinding butchery of four years in the trenches) and because the advent of early antibiotics meant fewer soldiers died of infection from wounds. But the IWGC’s work started anew after 1945, and now had to be extended to new theatres of war, in North Africa and the Far East.

A global task

A global task

As Britain divested itself of its empire the Imperial War Graves Commission changed its name to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in March 1960. Its work continues to this day, not only maintaining existing cemeteries, and running an enormous database of wartime casualties (which can be searched online) but supervising the burial of the dead in conflicts which continue to the present day.

This map shows just a handful of the hundreds of cemeteries worldwide which are managed by the CWGC.

Map indicating the global scope of the CWGC's work

Map indicating the global scope of the CWGC’s work

The Brookwood Military Cemetery – and the wider rambling old Victorian public cemetery of which it is only a part – are both well worth a visit. And if you’ve ever thought of going, make a point of going now while this small but fascinating exhibition is open.

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by Simon on August 14, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 14, 2017

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The Municipal Museum of Tossa de Mar

Tossa de Mar was originally a settlement on a small promontory sticking out into the Mediterranean about 1oo kilometres northeast of Barcelona. The Romans built a small town with villas and so on, and in the middle ages the promontory itself was sealed off by a thick wall punctuated by great round towers. Within was a rabbit warren of lanes and alleys.

With the tourist boom of the 1970s onwards hotels sprang up like mushrooms along the big curving sandy beach to the north, and in the evening the streets of the newish town are lined with tourist boutiques and restaurants, though within the thick stone walls, the old town – the Vila Vella, in Catalan – is much quieter.

In a small square at the top of a steep cobbled lane stands the medieval building – once the house of the local Abbot – which has been gutted and converted into three light and airy floors full of art which is now the Municipal Museum of Tossa de Mar.

Though called a museum it is in fact much more of an art gallery. The basement has three rooms or so of Roman statues, coins, kitchen utensils and pots and on one wall hangs the big restored mosaic found in a nearby Roman villa. But the two floors above it each contain half a dozen rooms devoted respectively, to the museum’s permanent collection of artists who lived or worked locally; and to a rotating exhibition. When I went, the exhibition was ‘La Forma en Evolució’, works by Josep Martí Sabé.

It’s hardly worth making a pilgrimage to, but on the other hand the entrance fee is only three euros and for that you get a lot more variety and interest than you’d expect. Also, in the blistering heat of a Spanish summer day, it is lovely and air-conditioned!

1. Archaeology

There are some remains from palaeolithical times onwards, but the main display is of Roman remains from the several nearby villas which have been discovered. Coins, broken pots, farm tools and fishing tackle, hairpins and brooches, along with a handful of bigger pieces.

Roman statue, Museo Municipal de Tossa de Mar

Roman statue in Carrara marble, Museo Municipal de Tossa de Mar

A hundred years ago a major Roman villa was discovered and excavated on the outskirts of the present town (just next to the bus station is a fenced-off area clearly showing the ancient walls and floor).

The pride of the archaeological section is the huge recreation of one of the villa’s mosaics.

Restored Roman mosaic, Museo Municipal de Tossa de Mar

Restored Roman mosaic, featuring the name of the villa owner, Vitalis, and the mosaic-maker, Felices. Museo Municipal de Tossa de Mar

2. Josep Martí Sabé – Form in evolution

Jose Marti-Sabé (1915-2006) was a Catalan artist, born and lived at Santa Coloma de Farners about thirty miles inland from Tossa. He trained as a sculptor in Barcelona. To quote the exhibition handout:

In 1950 Marti-Sabé founded, alongside the sculptors J.M. Subirachs Francesc Torres Monsó and the painters Esther Boix, Ricard Creus and Joaquim Datzira, the ‘Postectura’ group. They were influenced by constructivist tendencies and preconised a new humanism. Josep Martí Sabé worked with materials such as stone, cast, iron, and terracotta. Each material allowed him to experience with the plastic qualities and he consolidates the analysis of dualities and oppositions: horizontal and vertical, positive and negative, full and empty.

In practice the thirty or so pieces here show a development from kitsch neo-classical statues of naked women with babies which would have been at home in the state-approved realism of Nazi or Soviet art, through a more stylised soft modernism in wood and bronze, and on to flat metal sculptures reminiscent of Picasso crossed with Giacometti.

Banyistes de Cassi (1954) by Josep Martí Sabé

Banyistes de Cassi (1954) by Josep Martí Sabé

Part of the point is to show his experimentation with materials. This wood carving is very easy on the eye.

Eva (1977) by Josep Martí Sabé

Eva (1977) by Josep Martí Sabé

A couple of pieces in bronze really stand out for the combination Art Deco style faces or bodies, against deliberately rough backgrounds.

Profiles (1979) by Josep Martí Sabé

Profiles (1979) by Josep Martí Sabé

Having spent a few hours in the nearby sea made this shiny bronze of a swimmer all the more relevant.

Nadador ((1975) by Josep Martí Sabé

Nadador (1975) by Josep Martí Sabé

And late in life he experimented with a completely new approach, producing these completely flat, stylised steel cut-outs of people. Note the way the joined heads make the shape of a heart.

Parella (1990) by Josep Martí Sabé

Parella (1990) by Josep Martí Sabé

Not earth shattering but a pleasant break from the nearby beach, and an insight into a little local world of art I’d never heard of. How many thousands of similar artists worked across Europe during the twentieth century, never breaking into the big time but commemorated in local museums and galleries?

3. The permanent collection

Speaking of which, the permanent collection records the fact that by the early 1930s a surprising number of artists were living and working in Tossa, making it a ‘Babel  of Arts’, as a contemporary magazine feature put it. The most famous single artist was Marc Chagall who – allegedly – dubbed Tossa ‘the blue paradise’, and is commemorated by two works.

The Celestial Violinist by Marc Chagall

The Celestial Violinist by Marc Chagall

The oil painting (above) has pride of place, but I preferred the simpler more poignant impact of this print.

Vers l'autre clarté by Marc Chagall

Vers l’autre clarté by Marc Chagall

The handout mentions over 30 artists who lived and worked here and who are represented by at least one piece. Apart from Chagall, I’d never heard of any of them, though that probably reflects my vast ignorance of European art.

Ballerina by Jean Metzinger

Ballerina by Jean Metzinger

It’s a fascinating cross-section of B or C list art from the 1930s, much of it very enjoyable.

Cavaller (1934) by Oscar Zügel

Cavaller (1934) by Oscar Zügel

The big exhibitions I see in London are always of super-famous international stars. The Tossa Museum gives you the opportunity of meeting and savouring much more obscure artists, and enjoying the variety of styles available to 20th century artists.

Moulin Rouge by Eugene Paul

Moulin Rouge by Eugene Paul

Mostly paintings, but some striking sculptures.

Untitled by Manuel Alvarez

Untitled by Manuel Alvarez

I kept returning to this one. I like sketches, works in charcoal, strong lines and cartoons. Ricard Lambi’s Fish market reminded me of sketches by Old Masters. I liked the confident lines and sense of action.

Fish market (1911) by Ricard Lambi

Fish market (1911) by Ricard Lambi

There’s a story behind this statuette of Ava Gardner. In 1950 she arrived in the town along with director Albert Lewin and co-star James Mason to shoot a movie, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. During her stay Ava made a big impact on the locals for her genuine friendliness and openness. Plenty of the local shops have big posters of Ava, or collages of press and publicity photos. You can buy Ava Gardner memorabilia. In 1998 the Spanish sculptress, Ció Abellí, created a life-size statue of Ava looking out from a small square in the old town onto the beach where she frolics in the movie. This is a small study for the larger work.

Bronze statuette of Ava Gardner (1992) by Cio Abelli

Bronze statuette of Ava Gardner (1992) by Cio Abelli

Beautiful town. Lovely museum.

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by Simon on August 5, 2017  •  Permalink
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Edward Ardizzone’s Illustrations @ the Heath Robinson Museum

The Heath Robinson Museum opened in October 2016 to provide a permanent display of the 1,000 or so art works they own of Heath Robinson’s marvellous cartoons and illustrations. It is worth visiting for that alone. But the Museum also has a temporary exhibition space and this has recently been devoted to a wonderful show about the book illustrations of Edward Ardizzone.

Edward Ardizzone at work © The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

Edward Ardizzone at work © The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

Quick biography

Ardizzone is a distinctly later artist than Heath Robinson, born in 1900 compared to Heath Robinson’s 1872. He was a solidly 20th century citizen, compared to Heath Robinson the late-Victorian.

And an art career also came harder for him than for the older artist: whereas Heath Robinson’s father and brothers were illustrators who gave their brother advice, examples and contacts, Ardizzone had to earn a living as an office clerk for some years, while fitting in his study of art in the evenings and weekends.

Ardizzone only began to get paid work as an artist – illustrating books and doing adverts and illustrations – in the early 1930s. In 1936 he inaugurated the series he’s best known for, the books describing the adventures of a boy named Tim, with Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain.

In the 1950s and 60s Ardizzone’s name became associated with children’s books – he wrote and illustrated an impressive 18 or so stories of his own, many of which I loved when I was a boy. And he also gave a distinctive look and feel to The Otterbury Incident (1948) by Cecil Day-Lewis and Stig of the Dump (1963) by Clive King, among many others. Altogether he illustrated an impressive 170 or so books for adults and children.

Illustrations of Trollope

The exhibition at Heath Robinson Museum features illustrations from Tim and Stig, but also explores other areas of his work, including the illustrations he produced for adult books. The show includes the 25 illustrations he did for Trollope’s first two Barchester novels, which have never been exhibited before.

The Lookalofts and the Greenacres - Edward Ardizzone illustration from Barchester Towers (1953)

The Lookalofts and the Greenacres – Edward Ardizzone illustration for Barchester Towers (1953) © The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

They are wonderfully vivid and characterful. Ardizzone is quoted as saying an illustrator needs to do more than just make pictures, he needs to get inside the characters and the plot and the atmosphere – and this certainly comes over in the best of the works here.

Bertie in the ha-ha - Edward Ardizzone illustration for Barchester Towers (1953) © The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

Bertie in the ha-ha – Edward Ardizzone illustration for Barchester Towers (1953) © The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

The more you look at an illustration like Bertie in the ha-ha the better, and funnier, it gets. The pose of the two dissolute chaps, their wild check trousers, the disapproving ladies looking down, are all captured with subtle humour. Note the way Ardizzone uses lines for the sky, for the grassy slopes, intenser cross-hatching for the vertical side of the ha-ha; the characteristic feathery look of the trees in the background.

A selection of children’s books

The second section of the exhibition features the better-known children’s illustrations, including Stig of the Dump, as well as his late illustrations for Graham Greene’s The Little Fire Engine and Robert Graves’s Ann at Highwood Hall.

But some of the most enjoyable illustrations are for less well-known books by Eleanor Farjeon and James Reeves. I particularly liked the four or five illustrations of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza from The exploits of Don Quixote as retold by James Reeves from 1959. What a world of sorrow is in Sancho Panza’s slumped shoulders…

'Sancho followed dolefully after his master' - Edward Ardizzone illustration of Don Quixote © The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

‘Sancho followed dolefully after his master’ – Edward Ardizzone illustration of Don Quixote © The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

And the sweet and tender depictions of childhood he made for The Little Bookroom (1955) by Eleanor Farjeon. Farjeon is quoted as saying of one of his drawings, ‘All of childhood is there’, a spot-on description of Ardizzone’s incredibly sweet and innocent depictions of children taking a bath in front of a real fire, or reaching up to pay over a shop counter, or simply reading a book.

Edward Ardizzone illustration to The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon (1955)

Edward Ardizzone illustration to The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon (1955) © The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

As a boy in my local library I noticed something which the exhibition points out – which is that Ardizzone didn’t just provide illustrations for inside the book and a jacket picture, but provided a complete design for the book jacket, with the title and author’s name written in his distinctive hand-writing, both on the cover and the spine, giving the books a very distinctive look on shelves, particularly in local libraries.

Ardizzone’s distinctive approach to designing not just the picture but the entire frame and font of the book cover are also evident in his art work for Ealing Studios, and the show features the poster he made for the Ealing Studios production of Nicholas Nickleby.

Nicholas Nickleby film poster by Edward Ardizzone

Nicholas Nickleby film poster by Edward Ardizzone © The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

London life in watercolour

The show also includes a third strand from his oeuvre, which is the watercolour pictures he painted of local London life, especially around his home in Maida Vale, north London. These are distinctly more knowing than the children’s illustrations, with tipsy sailors or soldiers snogging women in furtive corners or eyeing up passing ladies. And not only is the subject matter different, but the lines and outlines seem broader, cruder, while the watercolour tones make the pictures deliberately rougher, matching the subject matter.

Public Bar at the George by Edward Ardizzone

Public Bar at the George by Edward Ardizzone© The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

Analysing Ardizzone’s line drawing

Some illustrators, like Heath Robinson, are noted for their cleanness of line, an addiction to clarity and space which is often compared with the Japanese prints which their generation grew up revering. Ardizzone feels the exact opposite, his figures created by a kind of obsessive working and reworking of figures in multiple lines and pen strokes and the liberal use of cross-hatching. There’s a deliberate sense of incompleteness and unfinish – the cross-hatching doesn’t try to reach the edges of the relevant area, it merely hints and sketches at them. Part of the charm is in the sense of rough and readyness.

The faces, also, are very characteristic: created with the minimum of lines and indications, the noses just a tick, the eyes the merest of commas. It is rather magical how Bertie in the ha-ha’s expression of lofty indolence can be conveyed with so few lines. The faces are a kind of still centre, while the rest of the world is dramatically roughed out with multiple rough-hewn lines and shade: the more I look at it the more I realise how the different surfaces are created by different techniques: the horizontal lines of the sky, the feathery outlines of the tree, the obsessive cross-hatching of the vertical wall, the skimpy scattered lines of the grassy slope, the dark frock coat, the complicated check suits…

There’s something about the repeated lines of, for example, the Stig illustrations which gives them a strange kind of accuracy and presence, a shimmering sense of hovering attention, a blurry sense of movement. The beauty is in the imprecision – or maybe in the way the rough cross-hatching and blurry outlines conspire to create a quick, acute fleeting impression.

The watercolours, by contrast, have far fewer lines or you just can’t see them so well because of the heavy washes of colour. Either way, they feel blunter and heavier and this is often appropriate to the harsher, more adult realities he is conveying.

After soaking up the watercolours for a while, you return to the line drawings with renewed appreciation for their lighter, daintier effect. Take the lovely illustrations of carefree childhood for the book The Suburban Child (1955) by James Kenward.

Badminton was the game of suburbia's great days - illustration by Edward Ardizzone © The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

‘Badminton was the game of suburbia’s great days’ – illustration by Edward Ardizzone © The Estate of Edward Ardizzone

Look at the extensive use of cross-hatching and parallel lines, used to create almost everything in this image – shadowed fence, foliage, roller, sky, roofs, walls. In fact there are hardly any spaces untouched by lining and hatching and the eye is immediately drawn to these few white patches – the faces of the adults and the little girl, the boy’s white hat, the sheen on the roller, maybe along the top of the fence – which help give the image its dynamic feel.

Comparison with the watercolours helps you appreciate the way the outlines of the figures and objects in so many of Ardizzone’s illustrations, created with repeated lines and hatching, gives them such vigour and vibrancy.

Nostalgia

Above all, for viewers of a certain age, Ardizzone’s distinctive line drawings bring back the warm emotions and comforts of childhood, the happy memories prompted by the Tim books, Stig and the others, read in well-worn library copies of the 1970s.

This is a small but beautiful and evocative exhibition which sheds interesting light on a much-loved artist.

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by Simon on June 13, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 13, 2017

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The Heath Robinson Museum, Pinner

The Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner Park, an easy 5-minute walk from Pinner Tube station up the Metropolitan Line, is an unalloyed joy and delight.

The Museum opened in October 2016 and houses some 1,000 artworks by this brilliant and prolific artist, cartoonist and illustrator. Not only is the collection a thing of joy and wonder, but the museum is sited next to an open-air cafe which serves yummy food, both set beside a tree-lined lake in the picturesque Pinner Memorial Gardens. It is a perfect Sunday outing.

The Heath Robinson Museum (right) next to Daisy's In The Park cafe (left)

The Heath Robinson Museum (right) next to Daisy’s In The Park cafe (left)

Why Pinner? Because Heath Robinson moved here with his young family in 1908, doing much of his best work at a house in nearby Moss Lane, where he is now commemorated by a blue plaque.

Museum layout

The Heath Robinson museum in fact consists of just one main display room but it is an education in itself to witness just how much information can be conveyed in one room. The most interesting feature is the way his life and career is told on a continuous strip extending right round the room at waist height, and undulating and curving a bit like a solidified scroll. This tells HR’s full life story with explanations of key aspects of his career. Some pictures are embedded in the scroll, while above, at head height, is a series of black and white prints, and then over our heads hang a sequence of really large full-colour, poster-size illustrations.

The Heath Robinson Museum showing the waist-level information shelf, mid-height prints, and high-up posters, plus the model contraptions in the middle

The Heath Robinson Museum showing the waist-level information shelf running round the wall, the mid-height prints, and the high-up colour posters, plus the model contraptions in the middle

There’s an audio guide or commentary. Just tap it against the symbol next to a relevant illustration and it gives a bit of commentary and opinion about it.

And in the centre of the room are some entertaining models of some Heath Robinson contraptions. So although it’s only one room it takes a good 30 to 40 minutes to go round reading everything and looking at everything (and laughing out loud).

Potted biography

William Heath Robinson was born in Finsbury Park in 1872 into a family of artists. His father was an illustrator for newspapers and magazines, and William and his brothers used to copy him as well as drawing things in the family garden and nearby park. Eventually all three brothers became illustrators.

William hankered to be a landscape artist and landscapes remained his first love, but a man needs to eat and, through contacts of his father and brothers, he quickly found work which rewarded his stunning draughtsmanship and eye for detail. From the turn of the century he provided lavish colour illustrations to editions of children’s classics such as Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales and Legends (1897), The Arabian Nights (1899), Tales from Shakespeare (1902), Gargantua and Pantagruel (1904), Twelfth Night (1908), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914) and The Water-Babies (1915). Several of these titles are available in the Museum bookshop as luxurious hardback editions.

'So full of shapes is fancy' (Twelfth Night) by William Heath Robinson

‘So full of shapes is fancy’ – Twelfth Night (1908) by William Heath Robinson

The most amazing thing about this picture is that it’s set during the day. The topmost part of the facade opposite is in full daylight – so this isn’t a night-time scene, as the dim darkness suggests – it’s a beautifully poetic evocation of daytime shadow.

In 1909 Heath Robinson was commissioned to illustrate Kipling’s multi-part poem, A Song of the English, written to convey the far-flung nature of the British Empire and the heroism of the men, in particular the sailors, who toiled to preserve it. The pen and watercolour illustrations are quite dazzlingly brilliant.

It’s startling that a man capable of such powerfully visionary pictures could also write and illustrate a children’s book of his own, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902). This is the strange tale of a man who falls asleep minding his baby by a brook only for it to be stolen by the ‘bag-bird’, resulting in a series of adventures to remote picturesque locations like Arabia or the Arctic to try and find the missing babe. Uncle Lubin features in a number of images here, including large poster-size versions of Lubin flying in a typically fraying-string and hand-made balloon.

The Aeronaut from The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902) by William Heath Robinson

The Aeronaut from The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902) by William Heath Robinson

Contraptions and gadgets

In fact, Uncle Lubin is sometimes regarded as the start of HR’s career in the depiction of unlikely machines – the enormous range of illustrations and cartoon of complicated hand-made contraptions featuring ropes and pulleys, levers and handles, and incongruous household elements like umbrellas and kettles, absurdly and unnecessarily complicated devices erected to carry out incongruously simple or far-fetched activities. It is the mind-boggling array of such devices which gave the language the adjective ‘Heath Robinson’ which can be applied to any absurdly complex and jerry-rigged contraption.

'Stout members of the sixth column dislodge an enemy machine gun post on the dome of St Paul's' by William Heath Robinson

Stout members of the sixth column dislodge an enemy machine gun post on the dome of St Paul’s by William Heath Robinson

Heath Robinson realised that the contraptions are funnier, the more seriously they are taken. Therefore every element of every device is imagined down to the tiniest pulley and knotted string, and all of the army of technicians and engineers and soldiers and scientists are going about their business with the utmost seriousness. He said that the viewer has to believe in the subject as seriously as the characters themselves.

Deceiving the Invader by William Heath Robinson

Deceiving the invader as to the state of the tide by William Heath Robinson

Two World Wars

The market for top end, luxury, lavishly colour-illustrated books dried up with the advent of the Great War. Heath Robinson had been providing comic cartoons for a variety of publications and, when war broke out, began a stream of humorous cartoons satirising the enemy in three books – Some ‘Frightful’ War Pictures (1915), Hunlikely! (1916) and The Saintly Hun: a book of German virtues (1917). All three volumes are collected into one book, available in the bookshop.

Twenty years later, the saintly Hun was back again and Heath Robinson produced another set of war cartoons, this time noticeably satirising official British war efforts. As the commentary points out, maybe the Nazis were just too unspeakable to laugh about.

The war was of course a period of rationing and austerity, with everyone being encouraged to ‘make do and mend’, not throw anything away, but patch and fix things. There’s an obvious link between the increasingly home-made, amateur DIY which the whole population was forced towards, and the relevance and popularity of Heath Robinson’s cracked contraptions.

A warm welcome for every parachutist by William Heath Robinson

A warm welcome for every parachutist by William Heath Robinson

Cartoons

After the Great War the early lavish illustrations gave way to a flood of humorous drawings for magazines and advertisements. In 1934 he published a collection of his favourites as Absurdities. For example:

You could go a bit heavy and wonder if this between-the-wars interest in absurdity echoes and anticipates the French existentialist emphasis on the absurdity and futility of human existence. The French had Jean-Paul Sartre and the Resistance; we had Heath Robinson and Dad’s Army; the Nazis had the Horst Wessel Song; we had Noel Coward and comic songs like Don’t Let’s Be Beastly To The Germans.

The intellectual summer holiday reminded me of my recent visit to the Wolfgang Tillsman exhibition at Tate Modern, where everyone had their heads stuck in the exhibition pamphlet. Works like Testing teeth typify his deployment of massed ranks of managers and technicians, scientists and supervisors, to give the joke machinery added solemnity and pomposity. They remind me a lot of the government departments where I’ve worked.

Designs for living

The 1930s saw the first big wave of self-improvement books and guides and manuals. Only recently at the British Museum exhibition of landscape watercolours, I was reminded of the Shell guides, written by poets and writers of the day and illustrated by leading artists, which were designed to get the reading public motoring off into the country to explore the counties of England, or pulling on their hiking boots and setting off a-rambling.

It was in this climate that Heath Robinson was paired up with the humourist K.R.G. Browne to illustrate a brilliant series of ‘how to’ books – How to live in a flat (1936), How to be a perfect husband (1937), How to make a garden grow (1938), poking fun at new trends and fashions for ‘modern living’.

Romantic possibilities in modern flats by William Heath Robinson

Romantic possibilities in modern flats (1936) by William Heath Robinson

In 1933 Heath Robinson did his marvellous cartoon illustrations for the first of the Professor Branestawm books written by Norman Hunter – The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm – which I read and loved as a boy.

Adverts and commercial work

It is also striking to learn that Heath Robinson provided illustrations, straight or comic, for some 100 commercial products, several of which are included here, notably his cartoon-style ads for Hovis bread and some of the humorous illustrations he did for the leather-making firm of Connolly Brothers.

Heath Robinson’s watercolours

But the aspect of his work which I wasn’t expecting and which crept slowly up on me as I walked round, was the strength and power of his more serious work – the early Shakespeare and literary illustrations, for sure, but also the really stunning watercolours and landscapes which he produced throughout his life.

Eastern Market Scene by William Heath Robinson

Eastern Market Scene, watercolour by William Heath Robinson

The commentary explains that, quite separately from his commercial work, Heath Robinson continued to paint landscapes in his spare time – sometimes pure pastoral, sometimes with whimsical fairies and goblins, sometimes with more spiritual-looking Greek or idealised human figures ghosting through them.

Girl on a riverbank by William Heath Robinson

Girl on a riverbank, watercolour by William Heath Robinson

The cartoons are often very, very funny, all the funnier the more carefully you follow through their ludicrously intricate machinery. But some of these watercolours and spiritualised landscapes are masterpieces in a completely different mood – brilliantly evocative and powerful, strange and haunting.

The commentary points out that Heath Robinson made careful use of deliberately limited tone and palette – the washes come from the same colour base i.e. almost all greens in the watercolour above, variations on blue in the Twelfth Night illustration at the top of this post, more greens in the landscape below. An almost Japanese sense of the unity and harmoniousness of the colours creates a wonderfully dreamlike impression.

Landscape with tall tree and haystack by William Heath Robinson

Landscape with tall tree and haystack, watercolour by William Heath Robinson

As you soak up Heath Robinson’s command of watercolour and the tonal unity of these works, it makes you appreciate all the more how he combined this colour control with the immaculate draughtsmanship so obvious in the cartoons to produce a synthesis – wonderful tonal harmony controlled by breath-taking design – in the best of his fairy, Shakespeare and literary illustrations. And makes you go back to marvel at them all over again.

And, as the exhibition shows, this incredibly diverse artist could also use the same combination in another flavour or style or ‘voice’ altogether – away from the fantastical fairy world, in a style which depicts the modern world with no comic intent but with the same breath-taking linesmanship and colour harmony to create a wonderful sense of warmth and friendliness.

Heath Robinson’s art is at home in the world and makes the viewer, also, feel profoundly, safely at home.

What a really great artist, a brilliant illustrator, a hilarious cartoonist, and a wonderfully evocative watercolourist. This is an absolute treat of a museum!

Credit

All Heath Robinson images reproduced with kind permission of the William Heath Robinson Trust and © The William Heath Robinson Trust.

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by Simon on June 12, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 12, 2017

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