Here are two poems read and drawn as an interesting collaboration of artists as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951. The drawings were used to make a series of scenes for a short film, the spoken or sung content added over this.
In this clip there are two poems. Twa Corbies narrated by John Laurie and illustrated by Michael Rothenstein and Spring and Winter (Shakespeare) sung by Peter Pears to music by Thomas Arne and illustrated by Mervyn Peake.
Both of these poems are available to be seen on the BFI for free. Here is the link.
Michael Rothenstein – A Still from Twa Corbies, 1951
Michael Rothenstein – A Still from Twa Corbies, 1951
Marion Elizabeth Adnams was an English painter, printmaker, draughtswoman and one of Britain’s unknown Surrealist painters, there are many artists who don’t get the recognition they deserve.
Her family were from the Isle of Wight but moved and settled in Derbyshire, where she was born and educated. After reading Modern Languages at Nottingham University and teaching French and English in the day, it was then that she started to paint and took evening classes at Derby School of Art under Alfred Bladen. In some of her paintings she used locations in Derbyshire as the subjects in oil.
In 1938 Adnams became an art teacher and around this time she started painting in a surrealist style; putting apparently unrelated objects together in mysterious scenes, and rarely if ever including figures. †
She became head of the art department at Derby Training College in 1946, the year Aftermath was painted. The skull and barbed wire may allude to the war, but they were also standard Surrealist motifs, seen also, for example, in the work of John Banting. ‡
Adnams made many friends in the artistic world, she is listed in the credits of many books on surrealist and abstract art in the 1930s and credited as a adviser on churches in Derbyshire in John Betjeman’s English Parish Churches. She is also thanked in the book, Vom Bauhaus nach Terezín – Children’s Drawings from the Concentration Camp Theresienstadt.
Marion Adnams – Alter Ego, 1940
Marion Adnams – For Lo, Winter Is Past, 1963
Marion Adnams – Three Stones, 1968
Marion Adnams – Variation On Red, 1949
Marion Adnams – The Seven Lamps, 1956
Marion Adnams – Spring In The Cemetery, 1956
Marion Adnams – Hay Harvest, 1947
Marion Adnams – Coloured Ending, 1962
Marion Adnams – The Living Tree, 1939
The Living Tree: On a visit to Sark in the summer of 1939 she was thrilled with the sea and its accompaniment of seaweed, sand and shells. Skies fascinated her, too, and of these she made endless colour notes. The twisted trunks and branches of trees. ♠
† Marion Adnams – National Galleries of Scotland
‡ Another World – Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists, 2010, p162
♠ The Studio Magazine – Volumes 127-128, 1944, p120
Alan Windsor – Handbook of Modern British Painting and Printmaking 1900-1990, 1998, p3
Sara Gray – The Dictionary of British Women Artists, 2009 p11
The other day I bought a vintage magazine and inside the copy were a set of photographic contact sheets for the article. The piece was on ‘The house they built with glue!’ I have copied out some of the text and posted the pictures from the magazine and the contact sheets.
The Wilson House.
The first House of the Year is built on a delightful open site, green and peaceful, with trees screening it on two sides and a fine view to the south. Basically T-shaped, the four-bedroom house has an enclosed open-air patio in the centre to add space and light.
R.H.Wilson is a chemist/engineer who specialises in adhesives. He is sales director of CIBA (A.R.L.), the firm that developed the lightweight glued construction for Mosquitoes during the war. The adhesives used were epoxy resins, so strong that if you stick two pieces of metal together the metal will fracture before the joint breaks.
These resins are the vital components of the Wilson house. They hold the beams together. They hold the roof together. They even hold the flooring on. “The house,“ says Mr.Wilson, “would quite literally collapse and disintegrate if the adhesives failed."
Mr. Wilson asked Felix Walter to design the house after reading Walter‘s book, Fifty Modern Bungalows. The architect chose a simple post and beam construction on a concrete slab, with walls of double glazing and cedar cladding, and brick sections for stability. The framework of the house is light and strong, based on a new type of box beam developed by the architect and W.Brown & Co. (Ipswich) Ltd. Lighter, and easier to handle than traditional solid beams, it is made from plywood, the hollow centre strengthened and stabilised with struts glued to the ply with resin. According to Mr. Wilson, “this is a staggeringly stable construction that doesn’t warp or twist like ordinary timber; it‘s economical to make and easy to erect.”
What is the significance of the techniques used in the house? Briefly, they could make future house building cheaper and faster. This is what our Consultant Architect, Eric Ambrose. has to say: “I have often stressed that the future of economic and effective house building lies in the factory-the methods used here mean that much of the house can be delivered to the site ready for rapid ‘assembly’. The lightness of the materials (the beams and the roof) means reduced cost in labour and transport. The technique makes a big advance towards the ideal of dry construction. This avoids the present necessity of having to live in wet houses holding something like sixty tons of building water that can only be dried out at comparatively high heating costs in the first year."
The shape of the outside house is beautiful, the cut of the chimney, the line of the roof beyond the garage, quite lovely.
The BBC Radio for Schools books were a wonder for illustrators and young artists, a chance to showcase a style but also work with a brief given by the BBC based on whatever the topic was about. In the days when Radio was a more dominant media than television the BBC had opportunities for the public and schools to buy printed booklets on the shows with more information and sometimes pictures too.
A music series offering children opportunities to listen to music and sing along, with creative suggestions and games to develop music appreciation and skills.
Bernard Cheese – Cover to Singing Songs,
Below are the drawings made by Bernard Cheese in 1968. As the BBC wanted to save money the booklets were normally one colour and black on white paper. Here Cheese is working with pure Cyan. Some of them use dotted plastic film that was used in the printing process then, normally to save money on ink and to add shading. But in the cover picture above there are various features going on that make it a remarkable print technically. The band in black but with the drum and flag decoration shaded in blue, the crowd to the right are in black at the front and behind in blue – a cunning use of limited colours. The shading too is in blue and black dots. This is a process that the other images have been separated up using.
The following illustrations are curious as they incorporate parts of 19th century illustrations, likely from religious books like the Quiver, the sea and the trees are clearly from steel engravings, the King and Queen I also suspect are not from Cheese’s own hand. It is a jolly way to use and recycle such illustrations.
Although not a post on art per se it is an account of a family and their links with art.
Lord Sempill
William Francis Forbes-Sempill, 19th Lord Sempill, was a Scottish peer and record-breaking air pioneer who was later shown to have passed secret information to the Imperial Japanese military before the Second World War.
Educated at Eton, he began his career as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps and then served in the Royal Naval Air Service and Royal Air Force during the First World War. In 1921, Sempill led an official military mission to Japan that showcased the latest British aircraft. In subsequent years he continued to aid the Imperial Japanese Navy in developing its Navy Air Service.
In the 1920s, Sempill began giving military secrets to the Japanese. Although his activities were uncovered by British Intelligence, Sempill was not prosecuted for spying and allowed to continue in public life. He was eventually forced to retire from the Royal Navy in 1941 after being discovered passing on secret material to Tokyo shortly before Japan declared war in the Pacific.
John Lavery – Eileen in Primrose Yellow, 1926
Eileen Lavery
In 1919 Sempill married Eileen Marion Lavery, daughter of the Irish painter Sir John Lavery the WW1 War Artist. Eileen was Lavery’s only child. Shortly after giving birth and suffering from tuberculosis, Kathleen MacDermott, her mother, died in November 1891.
When her father took up permanent residence in London 1898. Eileen attended Holy Cross Convent School at Rochampton, and accompanied her father on his annual trips to Tangier before her marriage to James Dickinson in 1912. This marriage failed after the birth of their first child and Eileen and James divorced.
John Lavery – R23 Type British Airships at Pulham St Mary, Norfolk, 1918
In 1920 Eileen married William Francis Forbes-Sempill, later Lord Sempill of Craigevar with whom she had two further children.
Their first daughter, Ann Moira, was born in 1920. Their second daughter, June Mary, was born in 1923, and was killed aged 18 as a result of enemy action on 11 May 1941 – the last day of the Blitz – at 15 Basil Street, London, just behind Harrods. She had been serving with the WVS Mobile Canteen Service. Eileen died in 1935.
Eric Ravilious – Wood Engraved Trade Card for Dunbar Hay Ltd, 1938
Cecilia Dunbar Kilburn
Lord Sempill would remarry, Cecilia Alice Dunbar-Kilburn, the daughter of Bertram Edward Dunbar-Kilburn, a
patent agent.
Cecilia would open the shop ‘Dunbar Hay Ltd’ of 15 Albemarle Street, London W1. It was founded in 1936 with and Athole Hay and gave opportunities for graphic artists and students from the Royal College of Art. These included Eric Ravilious, Eric Bawden and Enid Marx, to show their designs, including furniture, furnishings, ceramics, fabrics, patterns. Ravilious designed the wood-engraved trade card for the shop, which closed in 1940 because of WW2
In 1947 Cecilia would publish a monograph on English pottery and china as part of the Britian in pictures series of books.
Sir Ewan Forbes, 11th Baronet
Sir Ewan Forbes of Craigievar, 11th Baronet (6 September 1912 – 12 September 1991) was a Scottish nobleman, general practitioner and farmer. Due to the presence of an intersex condition at birth, he was christened Elizabeth Forbes-Sempill, and officially registered as the youngest daughter of John, Lord Sempill. After an uncomfortable upbringing, he began living as a man at the start of his medical career in 1945. He formally re-registered his birth as male in 1952, adopting the name of “Ewan Forbes-Sempill”, and was married a month later.
In 1965, he stood to inherit his elder brother’s baronetcy, together with a large estate. This inheritance was challenged by his cousin, who argued that the re-registration was invalid; under this interpretation, Forbes would legally be considered a woman, and thus unable to inherit. The legal position was unclear, and it took three years before a ruling by the Court of Session was finally upheld by the Home Secretary, granting him the title.
Roland Vivian Pitchforth was 44 when war was declared. He was one of the few artists to get the job done. He painted every type of scene you could think of and accurately.
The spotlight after the war fell on more abstract artists. I blame gallery curators who want to make an easy (lazy?) link between the wars; the abstract paintings of Paul Nash of the First World War next to the paintings of Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore’s Second. In this funk I think Roland Vivian Pitchforth lost out, as did Eric Ravilious until his work was reviewed again in the 1970s. I think it is time these works are championed.
After almost a year of bureaucratic wrangling with the start up of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, Pitchforth was made an official war artist.
Kenneth Clark was chairman of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. That committee was part of the Ministry of Information. Clark would describe the ministry and its role succinctly, if rather negatively, in his autobiography:
It was said to contain 999 employees… [Its] large staff had been recruited to deal with three or four different objects. The first, and most defensible, was censorship; the second the provision of news; the third a feeble attempt at propaganda through various media; and the fourth to provide a kind of wastepaper-basket into which everyone could throw their grievances and their war-winning proposals.
The official role of war art had been, after much difficulty, established during the First World War. (In part, the idea had succeeded because the Germans had already developed such a scheme of their own, and the English felt a need to rival their enemy.) The essential purpose was that artists should provide a record of the war; and in some instances, (though it was not required, or expected) they might create something beyond reportage or official portraits – works of art in their own right. †
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Post Office Buildings, 1941
From 1940 to 1945, Pitchforth served as an official war artist for the Ministries of Information, Home Security, Supply and for the Admiralty. In March 1940, he was given a brief to depict the work of the Air Raid
Precaution (ARP) organisation and in December secured a six month
appointment with the Ministries of Home Security and Supply.
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Repairing Telephone Cables, 1941
In a series of pencil, watercolour, oil and lithograph pieces, he depicted ARP training, war damage, military production and naval scenes. Many of these were singled out for praise by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC) and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1941. He also painted a series of London war damage scenes including a number of paintings of the House of Commons in 1941
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Repairing Telephone Cables, 1941
His artist’s eye picked out the many bleak and surreal sights on London’s bomb sites. In March 1941, he described sketching damaged lift shafts open to the elements: “They look like dead prehistoric animals lying
over the jagged walls.”
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – The City Temple Church, London, EC4, 1941
Pitchforth subsequently specialised in coastal scenes, joined several naval convoys to Gibraltar and the Azores and produced paintings on RAF test flights and maintenance subjects.
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Loading Stores for Italy at Algiers, 1944
Commissioned in October 1943 as a temporary captain in the Royal Marines, Pitchforth was attached to the Royal Navy and in 1945 was sent by South Eastern Command to record the naval campaigns to retake Burma and Ceylon. During the British assault on Rangoon, he assisted in the camouflaging of his group’s amphibious craft. He captured the events in a series of paintings of Colombo Harbour and in The First British troops in Rangoon (1945). At war’s end, Pitchforth acquired a lung infection and spent 1945-1946 convalescing in South Africa (he still managed to exhibit at Wildenstein’s Gallery) before returning to London in 1948.
It is not surprising that you can still find the locations of Pitchforth’s paintings in London, but due to bombing and redevelopment some of the shops have changed shape.
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Sunday Morning, Great Titchfield Street, London, 1941
The Street Today, Google Maps.
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Chamber of the House of Commons, Bomb Damage, 1940–1945
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – AFS Practice with a Trailer-pump : On the banks of the Serpentine, London, 1941
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Fire-hose Practice in St James’s Park, London, 1941
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Protection Pits for Dispersed Aircraft, Lee-on-Solent, 1941
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – A New Runway, Lee-on-Solent, 1941
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – A Swordfish Aircraft Getting Ready to Take Off, 1941
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – A Royal Observer Corps Post, Rottingdean, 1944
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – An AA Battery, 1943
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – WAAFs Packing Parachutes, 1940
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Raw Materials for 4.5 Anti-aircraft Shells, 1941
Roland Vivian Pitchforth – Night Transport, 1940
† Peter Stansky & William Abrahams – London’s Burning – Life, Death & Art in the Second World War. 1994. p16
Both beautiful and inspiring, the artwork that Shell used on their posters was a shift in advertising for two reasons: They were selling the ambitions of the motorist beyond commuting; a generation of day-trippers without trains. Also they were presenting modern art to the public in an era when museums charged admission. The posters were pasted on the sides of petrol stations, lorries and billboards with that simple line “You Can Be Sure of Shell”.
Shell Mex Limited appointed a new Publicity Director in 1932, Jack Beddington. His insight turned the British Shell advertisements of the 1930s into one of the classic campaigns of the twentieth century. The genius of the campaign was to let artists depict Britain in their own styles, they would paint an image and whatever their style, it was surrounded by text. There would be no need for product placement, for models holding petrol cans, it was a campaign exposing the beauty and wonder of Britain and modern art.
Some of these posters were exhibited at the New Burlington Galleries in 1934. Below are two quotes from different reviews on the exhibition that show the surprise of critics to Beddington’s use of modern artists in poster design.
It is now a good many years since, under the able directorship of Mr Frank Pick, some of our best designers were encouraged to show their works in public – using the expression in its broadest sense. People who never though of going to picture galleries could, for the first time find delight in good pictorial art even in an Underground station and in the street. –
Apollo, January to June, 1934, p322 †
If it can be hoped that big firms like Shell-Mex are really going to patronize art as intelligently as this, we shall expect to be seeing in a few years’ time at Christie’s, not the sale of the collection of the Duke of Frumpshire, but of the Gas Light and Coke Company. If the princes of commerce are going to behave like princes we shall have some fun. ‡
The Everywhere You Go series is one of the more curious for it is before the typographic design for the posters had settled down, a range of typefaces, colours and sizes are used. The first offering by W J Steggles has the tag line in lowercase. Steggles was part of the now fashionable, East London Group of artists, he painted various scenes for Shell posters, as did his brother Harold and
Elwin Hawrhorne.
Walter James Steggles – The Thames at Cookham
Edgar Ainsworth – Gordale Scar
Elwin Hawrhorne – North Foreland Lighthouse
Robert Miller – Devil’s Elbow, Braemar
Harold Steggles – Bungay
Rosemary and Clifford Ellis – Lower Slaughter
Graham Sutherland – Oust Houses nr Leeds, Kent
M. A. Miles – Polperro Cornwall
Charles Mozley – Boxhill
John Armstrong – Newlands Corner
Graham Sutherland – The Great Globe, Swanage
George Hooper – Kintbury Berks
John Armstrong – Near Lamorna
Paul Nash – Rye Marshes
Edward Wakeford – Gravesend
† Apollo, January to June, 1934, p322
‡ W.W.Winkworth – The Spectator – 29 JUNE 1934, p15
Catherine McDermott – Design Museum Book of Twentieth Century Design, 1998, p319
Rather like my post on Graham Clarke, where I complained of his etchings and promoted his linocuts, in this post I would sooner promote and have a Sutherland etching than any of his other works.
I don’t know why I dislike so many of his paintings and to my opinion he only got worse with time. His work before WW2 seemed to have the sinister lust for mocking everything into destruction. It is almost as if he was calling for the war and then to use it as source material afterwards.
Frederick Landseer Griggs – Southwell Minster, 1916
Sutherland was apprenticed as an engineer before studying engraving at Goldsmiths College in London. His tutor was F. L. Griggs, who had been working as an illustrator for the Highways and Byways series of books. These publications bought to light the modern ability to travel by bus, car or train around the country. Griggs pen drawings for these books, I would say, were the point when romantic nostalgia came back into fashion and his students would have been exposed to this.
‘He had a palm as delicate as gossamer,’ Sutherland remembered, it was his drawn illustrations to the thirteen volumes of the Highways and Byways guidebooks which had inspired both Piper and Sutherland as boys. When the older man offered both friendship and technical advice Sutherland was flattered to receive it. He and Paul Drury spent the Christmas of 1926 with Griggs learning about inking plates and printing them. Above all he helped to augment their growing enthusiasm for Palmer. †
Samuel Palmer – Landscape, Girl Standing, 1826
In autumn 1924 William Larkins showed his friends a Palmer print The Herdsman’s Cottage, which he had bought in Charing Cross Road. This tiny work came as a revelation to them all. Sutherland recalled: I remember I was amazed by its completeness, both emotional and technical. It was unheard of at the school to cover the plate almost completely with work and quite new to us that the complex variety and multiplicity of lines could form a tone of such luminosity. †
The landscapes were daring and drawn from unexpected viewpoints: The Girl in the Ploughed Field astonished me with its total disregard for conventional composition. The drawing is almost what we today call naïf. †
So, as noted, the biggest change in style for Sutherland at this time from the teaching of Griggs into the engraving style of Palmer works would be to etching the sky. The image Number Fourty-Nine above from 1924 has a clean sky where as the images below have engraving all over the etching-plate.
In the 1920s, when photographs were being used as illustrations, the question of art was in doubt; why should an artist depict a scene when the camera can do the job for them? So the result was that an artist can bend reality. From this came an ideal eden like view of the past and a retelling of rural life before the invention of machines. Later on the art world would rebel against the camera and surrealist, cubist and impressionist styles would be invented.
The 1920s was the start of a revival for Palmer, unpublished plates were being printed, the Medici Society published his other works for the public and books were being scribed.
Other artists worth noting are Robin Tanner or Paul Drury, both new converts to the church of Samuel Palmer’s work. These men walked the first steps in the world of the New Romantics, coming out of Goldsmiths College at that time.
Paul Drury – September, 1928
Robin Tanner – The Road Mender, 1928
All men at the same time made an impact on the artworld and they all shared themes, knowingly or not. Below are the etchings of Sutherland.
Graham Sutherland – Wood Interior, 1929
Graham Sutherland – Cray Fields, 1925
Graham Sutherland – Pecken Wood, 1925
I thought it worth including this study by Sutherland of a print. Looking more like a mono-print it has all the qualities of Palmer’s work as it is done in ink and oil paint. The final etching is below.
Graham Sutherland – Sketch for Pastoral, 1930
Graham Sutherland – Pastoral, 1930
Graham Sutherland – Oast House, 1932
These words would get translated in various styles into Sutherland’s work but one of the most restrained and pleasing was this Shell Poster.
Graham Sutherland – Shell Poster – Oust Houses, Near Leeds, Kent, 1932
† The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and Their Times, 2001, p108
Stuart Sillars – British Romantic Art and the Second World War, 1991, p42
André Villers et Pablo Picasso – Picasso dans le jardin de La Californie, 1961
Picasso was always interested in trying every medium of the arts. So in 1961 it comes as no surprise that he joined the photographer André Villers to work on a series of collaborative decoupages. These were drawings and paper cut outs by Picasso with photographs by Villers. Most of the works were published in 1962.
Pablo Picasso – Selection of some of the Paper cut outs, 1961
The Picasso paper cut outs where layered in the way the cyanotype is, placing items on photographic paper in a dark room and exposing natural light to them. Items placed on the paper would, after processing come out white on a black background; the paper drawings would appear white when processed. This negative would then be placed with one of Villers photograph negatives, a leaf, tree… the black areas of Picasso’s images would be transparent when processed and exposed as one picture. The result is a series of naive paper-cuts in cubic style and silly humour.
Pablo Picasso – L’Homme aux Chats II, 1962
Pablo Picasso – L’Homme aux Chats I, 1962
André Villers and Pablo Picasso – Diurnes: Nunc, 1962
André Villers and Pablo Picasso – Le Corrigan Effeuille, 1962
André Villers and Pablo Picasso – Un General, 1962
André Villers and Pablo Picasso – Le Corrigan a la Dentelle, 1962
André Villers and Pablo Picasso – Vacarme, 1962
André Villers and Pablo Picasso – Hic, 1962
André Villers and Pablo Picasso – Le Garou, 1962
André Villers and Pablo Picasso – Untitled, 1962
André Villers and Pablo Picasso – La Chèvre à l’Horizon, 1962
André Villers and Pablo Picasso – La Chèvre au Grillage, 1962
