With the sad news of Ronald Blythe’s death comes an interesting question. What happens to Wormingford’s Bottengoms Farm? Blythes estate has been settled up and I am now the owner of some of Christine Nash’s works.
Christine Kuhlenthal – Standing Nude, 1913
I find her work so significantly because of her early links with Dora Carrington and the Slade but also her affect on John. This drawing was for the Slade Figure Prize in 1913. The images below show that the drawing is from the Prize as it’s the same model used for Dora Carrington’s winning entry. Alongside Carrington in her class would be Mark Gertler, Paul Nash at the Slade.
Christine also worked in the Omega Workshops for the Bloomsbury group, mostly sewing Vanessa Bells fabrics into dress designs.
She met and married painter John Nash. ‘One artist in the house is enough’… that’s what Christine told Ronald Blythe. However history lost a good artist when she gave up art for acting and country dancing so not to upset John. During the end of her time at the Slade School of Fine Art she discovered she had glaucoma. It was too difficult to paint sometimes and she needed glasses to work, but she still could.
When Tirzah Garwood was dying it was Christine Nash who found her a nursing home in Copford and went to visit her with art materials most days. When she died John and Christine picked flowers from their Wormingford garden for her grave. She has been anonymous in so much history.
The nude drawing is also featured in Blythe’s book First Friends, published first by the Fleece Press and then Viking. Pictures like this are rare and to be cherished.
It’s rather annoying to loose one’s keys; to search the house, from worktop – to hallway table, your coat pockets and then find them in the jeans you wore yesterday that had been screwed up and posted in the laundry bin. But it must be another thing to lose a sculpture.
The photographs here are of a lost work by John Skeping of his first wife, Barbara Hepworth made in Rome. It must have weighed a lot, it’s not small and somehow it is missing.
Skeaping wrote in his memoirs that he had advertised for the sculptures return and to find information on where it might be today. Might it be in an Italian household somewhere? Who knows. The mystery lives on for now. Finding it would be the sensation of the modern age.
Within cycling distance from my home is the church at Harlton. The village is known now as the home of Gwen Raverat from 1925 to 1941, although she is buried with her family in Trumpington.
There are various monuments over the church, in windows and on plaques. Also over the church are bits of scratched graffiti as well as a large monument in alabaster and marble.
The Fryer Monument
The first John Fryer, father of Thomas Fryer, the elder of the men commemorated on the monument, was born at Balsham and educated at Eton, King’s College Cambridge, and the University of Padua, then the greatest medical school in Europe. Although he was for a time a Lutheran, and was indeed imprisoned for heresy in the 1520s, by 1561 he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for Catholicism. He was released in 1563, but died of the plague in October of that year.
A scratched Elizabethan gravedigger with spade.
Said to be a consecration mark this pattern can be found all over the country, in churches, barns, castles and on furniture. Most people call them Daisy Wheels or Hexfoils.
The root screen below is said to be Cambridgeshire’s only one made totally of stone.
The rector of the church in 1908-1922 was William Ellison and his son, Jan was the carver of the twelve disciples in the reredos – in the style of Eric Gill. One of eight children, Henry Jan was born in Harlton, and studied sculpture in Paris with Ossip Zadkine. There he met many of the key figures of the artistic avant-gardes of the 1920s and ’30s. In 1935 he designed sculpture for Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry’s Sun House in Hampstead.
After working as an intelligence agent in the Middle East during World War Two, he re-trained in ceramic studies at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London. He set up the Cross Keys Pottery in Cambridge with his wife Zoë. The church now has three of their vases inside and two wall planters.
In my shopping habits, I end up with lots of odd periodicals. This one from The Egoist Press’s magazine The Tyro (1922) has a curious set of editorial quirks – An essay on Russian Artists by Dismorr and an illustration by a young Cedric Morris. It sadly is a home for more of Wyndham Lewis’s ravings on art. The show was likely the 1921 Exhibition of Russian Arts and Crafts at the Whitechapel Galleries. It featured work by artists fleeing the revolution and living in London and Paris. Cagall, Goncharova, Larionov, Vasil’eva, Jacques Lipchitz and Arkhipenko and Pilichowski.
Some Russian Artists by Jessica Dismorr
THE show of exiled Russians at Whitechapel was noteworthy not for the artistic achievements, but as an expression of national character in art.. No other country of Europe has such marked æsthetic predilections. A bias towards clearness of presentment, emphatic shapes and strong colour is hers by inheritance. Naiveté, a farce in Paris and London, is true here. Toys and eikons give with homely terseness the character of the race.
The work of Goncharova is a good example of the toy-making gift. Inventiveness sprung directly from tradition reached in her setting to the “Coq d’or” its finest flower. At Whitechapel she exhibits cubist devices grafted on to immemorial patternings of peasant costume. Her juxtaposed chromes and majentas, so “moderniste” and daring, are commonplaces of the primitive steppe village.
Sarionoff plays a more involved game, dovetailing bright splinters of colour into the forms of men and objects. By his method much animation is suggested in the artificial stage atmosphere for which he works. Vassilieva paints dexterously a world in which all surfaces are fresh paint, all people dolls, all manners the story-book code.
Chagal, wandering Jew, mentally native to Russia is the curious vessel of the national spirit. His subject matter is legend and fairy- tale, his personal adventures or the bald drama of peasant life. Not an illustrator, he is a summoner of forms, all of which have story as well as shape. Men, small and large, numerous important animals, fantastic suns and moons, carts and churches jostle one another throughout these amazing designs. Here, though natural congruities are outraged, there is a plastic orderliness preserved as by a miracle.
Two sculptors of talent seek emancipation of a different kind. Archipenko has been known in Paris exhibitions for block-like stone pieces, so sparingly treated by the chisel as to leave all their natural weight and inertia. A change of intention is seen in his newest works which possess on the contrary great formal variety. Freeing his subject from all but certain selected aspects he traces in air the whorls and spirals of a sculptural shorthand.
With Lipschitz we find a fiercer disdain of realism. The sources of human form disappear as his scheme develops, and a new thing is produced relying upon itself for significance. He works to discover an ideal organisation, one plane pre-supposing another till the sum of parts is reached. Such an endeavour is a searching test of natural gift, for in those polar regions of conquest it has no allies. When Lipschitz fails it is due to an enterprise supported by a talent not equally mature. Jessie Dismorr.
A lot of people write about how Barbara Hepworth was the student of Giovanni Ardini when in Rome. But it seems her scholarship was for Florence, not Rome and she only went there after he had met and married John Skeaping who was at the British School in Rome. Skeaping was apprenticed to Ardini who himself was working for Ivan Mestrovic, turing his plaster and clay maquettes into larger marble works.
Ivan Mestrovic – Madonna with Children, 1925
After Hepworth’s death in 1975, Skeaping wrote his autobiography Drawn from Life (1977) where he put his side of the story. But looking at Hepworth’s published works, it seems she didn’t learn from him, but had a remark translated for her. Has this made academics and authors jump the gun and write she was his pupil? The remark is after all, only about the ‘conception of carving’ and not it as a physical teaching. So have writers been assuming she was his pupil, rather than just being in his circle at that time.
I owe a debt to an Italian master – carver , Ardini , whose remarks on the approach to marble carving , when I was in Rome, opened up a new vista for me of the quality of form, light, and colour contained in the Mediterranean conception of carving.
Barbara Hepworth: ‘Approach to Sculpture’, The Studio, London, October 1946, Vol. CXXXII, no. 643, p. 97
I taught Barbara to carve marble. She could not learn from Ardini as she did not speak a word of Italian and never learned to do so during the whole time we were in Italy.
John Skeaping: Drawn from life, 1977p.72
Who is right and who is wrong? I was trying to find any other evidence of Hepworth with Ardini, and other than a quote from her 1952 book Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings there isn’t a lot.
A chance remark by Ardini , an Italian master carver whom I met there , that “marble changes colour under different people’s hands” made me decide immediately that it was not dominance which one had to attain over material
Herman ‘Hal’ Woolf (1902-1962) studied art at Chelsea Polytechnic and later in Paris at La Grande Chaumiere. He had exhibited with the Royal Academy, become a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and was a member of the London Group, and with the National Society of Painters and Gravers. He designed posters, and twelve days after being hit by a car in Park Lane on November 10 1962, he was found dead in police custody.
Hal Woolf’s case became part of the Skelhorn Report. The case is reported in Hansard, part of a inquiry in the House of Commons.
Mr. Herman Woolf was knocked down by a car in Central London in November, 1962. He was taken to hospital and X-rayed there. A short time afterwards he was considered fit for discharge, and he was promptly arrested by the police on the allegation that he was in possession of a dangerous drug. Within 24 hours he was returned to that very same hospital, gravely ill and injured, in a comatose condition. Shortly after that he was transferred to another hospital, and 12 days later he was dead.
During this whole time—from 10th to 23rd November, 1962—the late Mr. Woolf was under police surveillance, and most of the time under police arrest. In spite of the fact that some days after this unfortunate incident and his transfer to a hospital in the suburbs more than one of his friends reported him missing at a London police station, his former wife—who was his next-of-kin—and his friends were not notified by the police of his whereabouts until after he had died.
The drug found on him was Indian Hemp, a type of Cannabis. Having had a lot of success he seems to be mostly forgotten about today. His memorial show was held at the Woodstock Gallery, London.
Hal Woolf – Salcombe – Shell Poster, 1931
One of the troubles about the whole of this tragedy in 1963 was that those equipped with authority to deal with this matter in any way did not show themselves to be over-anxious to investigate the circumstances of the case. At the inquest Mrs. Woolf objected to the haste with which it was being held, and asked to be represented, but her objection was brushed aside. Later, her legal advisers had great difficulty in getting a transcript of the evidence—such as it was—which had been given at the inquest.
Last summer when, as a result of an article in the magazine Private Eye, the national Press took up the Woolf case, and suspicions and anxieties were aroused among many people about it, an investigation was held by Scotland Yard, under Detective Superintendent Axon. It took a very short time. I know none of the details. There was a report to the Commissioner, and comfortable and complacent conclusions were issued to the Press. But the report has never been published. Neither the public nor Members of Parliament know any of its details.
Woolf Enquiry – HC Deb 15 May 1964 vol 695 cc837-53
Despite the tragic and curious end to his life Hal Woolf has a remarkable legacy in British art and it is a shame he isn’t better known. I always think an artist who Jack Beddington employed was a good bench mark.
My right hon. Friend is convinced—and I hope that the House will take this assurance in a cooperative spirit—that no useful purpose would be served in publishing the proceedings of this inquiry and that it would, in terms of the undertaking he gave in the beginning, be quite wrong to do so.
In 1981 Andy Warhol was embarking on a new series of large screen prints, Myths. Warhol’s obsession with famous image for this series took a turn to things that were culturally iconic like Father Christmas, Dracula and Superman. After meeting Hamilton one evening at the NYC Met Opera, he invited the star of Wizard of Oz, Margaret Hamilton to the factory, his New York studio to re-enact her famous role as the Wicked Witch of the West for the print The Witch.
I saw Margaret Hamilton , the witch from the Wizard of Oz, it was exciting, and I went over and said she was wonderful. Now she’s doing commercials for Maxwell House. She is really petite.
Andy Warhol Diaries, 1980.
Hamilton arrived at the Factory and a make up artist applied some make up, while Warhol took many photographs to see how he wanted the images to look. These polaroids were laid on a table and they both picked their favourites from the selection.
In the photograph above, a pile of screen prints of Debby Harry can be seen stacked up against the wall. The original polaroid is below.
Here in this contact sheet we can see Hamilton and Warhol reviewing the Polaroids on a table.
Then more images were taken with a film real camera of Hamilton, maybe by an assistant of Warhols. But in the end he used the still from the polaroid below.
This is a book and a song. Mmm… Skyscraper I Love You is a song by the band Underworld, and the lyrics by Karl Hyde were about New York city. Anyone that is aware of Hyde’s work would know it is heavily reliant on words; from lyrics he writes that are a a mixture of songwriting, overheard conversations and observations on the street, recorded in his ears much like a street photographer uses a lens. The song was recorded and released in 1993. The Jam Scraper mix was originally due to be on the album but replaced later in the process.
“I write lots of stuff when I’m travelling. I write all my ideas in notebooks… I remember flying over New York and looking down and thinking, ‘It’s a beautiful thing’. So that’s exactly what I scribbled down. And when the captain said, ‘We’re 30,000 feet above the earth’, I wrote that down as well. Those words then became the opening two lines of ‘Skyscraper’. Most of the rest of ‘Skyscraper’ came from stuff which I’d collected wandering round the New York streets over the course of a week. I got some of it out of The Village Voice and Screw magazine, and other parts I wrote in an alleyway in Greenwich Village at four in the morning. When I got back, I cut the various lines up and then made a montage. It’s kind of a Cubist way of writing. What I’m trying to do is paint around subjects instead of focusing straight in on them.”
These lyrics were then taken up Hyde in collaboration with John Warwicker of design company Tomato. They both then used painting and typography in order to make a book of words. Tomato is almost an extension of the band Underworld, Hyde being part of the informal company, they made music videos, design artwork and promotional material as part of the creative process of the music, much like the relationship between Stanley Donwood and Radiohead.
Today it is hard to see this sort of design as mindblowing. But when the book was published by Booth Clibborn Editions in 1994, the computer manipulation of typography was radical. Before this a graphic designer would either have to draw type by hand or use rub-on Letraset transphers, and they were hardly ever produced in these sizes. So the page below is a testament to new technology of that time.
“mmm… skyscraper I love you is the map of a journey through the streets of New York. Crosswalk and chaos: overheard, followed and abandoned, words/fragment from concrete. It is not only a reality but a memory of experience. Everything is in the present moment. It forms a cyclic series of impressions and expressions which occurred over the course of several months but which could just as easily occurred within a few seconds. ‘Read’ it as you ‘read’ a film. Does a thing exist if the individual does not experiment it directly? The city is always there, pulsing, alive, growing: rejoin the flow. Listen to your thoughts. Listen to your thoughts. Do you now what you want? how far do you want to go? No words necessary.”
Book Blurb
Under the rather dull tutelage of typography teacher Will Hill who didn’t care for his students at all and was busy writing his textbooks on type, books like this were very exciting ways to look at typography. I remember printing text off and moving it across the scanner as it was being scanned so the text distorted, and then printing those off and using ink splats and footprints to add other textures. I wonder were all those experiments went? In a box somewhere. But it was handy to have some education.
Henry Moore’s daughter Mary was visiting an exhibition of tapestries of young weavers from West Dean, thought their revival of the craft was worthwhile and and convinced her father to work with them. Moore authorized a series of tapestries based on his drawings. He pick the horse and rider below, because he thought his grandson would enjoy the design with a horse and so other children might as well.
The Henry Moore Foundation have issued 23 works between 1976 – 1987. Moore was not a stranger to this type of design, having been inspired by his friend Zika Ascher to design repeating patterns for textiles in 1943, Moore was commissioned by David Whitehead Fabrics in the 1950s to make some designs. Though the process is different from screen printing to weaving, but it shows he had an idea for his work to be in a domestic setting.
Henry Moore – Family Group, 1950
It is a similar reason of a domestic setting that many of the works are family groups. After the sculpture of the Family Group for the Barclay School in Hertfordshire (cast in 1950 but the original commision came in around 1938), Moore did countless drawings on the theme of children and parents. Maybe it was something he hoped would be universal and sell well.
The technicality of these tapestry designs was down to the weavers, and in an interview they talk of how they wound two different colour tones together in one fiber, to blend the colours of Moores designs into something more fluid and less pixelated, as tapestries have the habit of becoming upclose.
These works were made at the time when Tapestry was more unfashionable than it had been. It was a craft only the wealthy could afford and many of the works made by other artists for the Dovecot Studios at the Edinburgh Tapestry Company were expensive things at the time.
Here is a book you can post. The dust jacket extends and wraps around, ready for a stamp and address.
It says: Pull out back flap, close book right up, wrap flap round book until gummed edge appears just below postage stamp, then stick down. The book is illustrated by Joan Hassell. Others were Old Christmases by William Strode, illustrated by Anthony Gross.
In the communication of today it seems so alien to make the dust jacket part of the design for an envelope, but I think it’s one of the most charming things I have seen.
