Here are a set of prints I found from when I was a student doing printmaking and illustration. Many are using photographs from trips to California or my friends.
Category: Uncategorised
This is a link to a podcast about Lucia Moholy, below is a short summery of the show, but it’s worth while while listening.
Lucia Moholy was a photographer and her work documented much of the of the Bauhaus’s output, from architecture to the products it exhibited and promoted. When fleeing Germany Lucia Moholy entrusted her photo collection of works and negatives to Walter Gropius who then refused to return them and then went out of his way to deny her the credit and royalties of her own work.
Moholy fled Germany to Prague temporarily to stay with family, and then made her way through Switzerland, and then Austria, and then Paris, eventually settling in London. Moholy weathered out the war in England. While there, she worked as a portrait photographer for British high society, and also published A Hundred Years of Photography, a book about the medium’s history.
Moholy did not get physical possession of her original material until 1957, but even then she only could recover a portion of them, 230 out of the 560 Bauhaus-era negatives she took, while 330 negatives, according to Moholy’s own card catalogue, are still missing. Her 1972 publication, Moholy-Nagy Notes, was an attempt to reclaim credit for her work that was printed without permission. After her death, the collection of negatives was donated to the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin.
Until a few days ago I didn’t know of Ina Boyle or her work. Boyle was born in Bushey Park near Enniskerry, County Wicklow, and grew up in a restricted circle of her mother, father and sister. Her first music lessons were with her father William Foster Boyle (1860–1951), who was curate at St. Patrick’s Church, Powerscourt, and was given violin and cello lessons by her governess with her younger sister Phyllis.
From the age of eleven, she studied theory and harmony with Samuel Myerscough, the English organist who founded the Leinster School of Music in 1904. From 1904 onwards, she also undertook lessons via correspondence with Charles Wood, who was married to Boyle’s cousin Charlotte Georgina Wills-Sandford.
Charles Herbert Kitson encouraged her to compose the two anthems published in 1915. From 1923, Boyle began to travel to London to take lessons with Ralph Vaughan Williams at his home in February 1923.
Working most days she returned to Ireland and out of a social loop, it was hard to promote her work outside of letters. Her output is remarkable as she worked composing for orchestra in her rural home.
John Maltby (1910-80) rose to prominence during the thirties, when the camera was influencing architectural practice and criticism more than ever before and when the International Style was gaining a tentative foothold. In the same way as Claude Gravot was the favoured photographer of Le Corbusier, so Maltby was closely allied to Lubetkin, one of the great modernist imigri architects working in Britain at the time.
Maltby also had a lucrative commission from Odeon Cinemas – to photograph every theatre in the Odeon cinema chain. His photographs show the wonderful Art Deco architecture as well as members of staff.
After World War II and in stark contrast to the opulence of the Art Deco cinemas, his photographs of Alison and Peter Smithson’s Hunstanton school were admired and reproduced around the world, while his commercial work helped to spread the popularity of the Contemporary look.
John Maltby’s career spanned five decades and produced some of the most enduringly evocative images of British architecture and design during the twentieth century, yet his name remains relatively unknown. There are a number of reasons for this undeserved obscurity. He never became official photographer to a leading journal with his own by-line, as, for example, Dell & Wainwright did at the Architectural Review, but remained a freelance with a varied clientele.
His work, though widely reproduced, was often uncredited. In addition, this work, embracing as it did a broad range of subject matter such as interior design, industry and product manufacture, as well as architecture, was far more diffuse than that of his narrowly focused contemporary practitioners in architectural photography. Above all, however, the reason can be found in the innate modesty which once led Maltby to describe himself simply ‘a record photographer’ and saw him steadfastly rebuff all attempts to intellectualise his work.
While critics rightly laud the great masterpieces of architectural photography, it is often the seemingly more mundane but solidly professional compositions of photographers such as John Maltby, which prove to have the more telling contribution to architectural discourse.
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.
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
Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, 1952
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.
