Rothensein at the fry

R OT H E N ST E I N

AT T H E F RY ART G ALLERY

M ICHAE L ROTH E NSTE IN GIL L SAU NDERS

Michael Rothenstein was born in Hampstead on 19 March 1908, to Sir William Rothenstein and his wife Alice. Several members of his family were important figures in the art world;

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Kenneth Rowntree. Rothenstein and his wife Betty (generally known as Duffy) arrived in the village in 1941 and briefly rented Chapel Cottage before purchasing Ethel House (as it was then called) in 1942. Rothenstein lived there for 25 years, first with Duffy and latterly with his second wife Diana (known as Sam), whom he married in 1958; they later moved to nearby Stisted. The Fry’s original holdings of Rothenstein’s paintings and prints have been boosted by generous gifts from his widow, Sam, and the collection of items now reflects the whole span of his career, from early watercolours, illustrations and designs for books and magazines, to a variety of etchings, lino-cuts, lithographs and wood-cuts (and some blocks), plus important constructions and reliefs.

Thanks to his early aptitude Rothenstein was sent at fourteen to the School of Art and Woodcarving in South Kensington in 1922–3, followed by a year at the Chelsea

is father was a successful painter, and Principal of the Royal College of Art from 1920 to 1935; His uncles, Albert and Charles, (who had both anglicised the family name to Rutherston) were a painter and an art collector, respectively. Michael’s elder brother John was to become the Director of the Tate Gallery, from 1938 to 1964. Given these propitious and encouraging circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that Michael showed artistic talent from an early age, and went on to a successful career as a painter and an influential print-maker.

Though he was not a native of Essex, Rothenstein’s work is included in the Fry Gallery North West Essex collection because he was for many years a resident of Great Bardfield, where he was part of a now famous community of artists including Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, and Figure with Cockerel, gouache, 1948 3

MICHAEL ROTH ENSTEIN

embodied in his use of non-descriptive colour and a Polytechnic, and then to the Central School of Arts and flavour of surrealism. An untitled watercolour dated 1942 Crafts in 1924. However his art training and early career in the Fry collection shares some of these characteristics, were interrupted by a long period of debilitating illness but is more agitated and (myxoedema) which floridly coloured. Another left him prey to inertia commission, from the and depression, and he War Artists Advisory produced little until the Committee, sent him out to late 1930s. In this period he make drawings of railway worked largely on landscape sidings for the Ministry watercolours, and this led of Transport. He was to a significant commission entranced by the railway in 1940 when he was asked signals, with their strong to contribute to Recording sculptural silhouettes and Britain, a wartime the glowing colours of their documentary project lights, and they feature in funded by the Pilgrim his later work too.

Trust. He later said this Rothenstein was perhaps was ‘a God-send’, an excuse Vegetables and Buildings, pen and ink, c.1940/50s the most avant-garde of to draw without feeling the artists who settled in Great Bardfield, finding early guilty. For the project he made extended visits to Yorkshire, inspiration in Graham Sutherland’s Welsh landscapes, Gloucestershire (where he had spent his childhood on his contemporary continental painting and the example of father’s farm), and Northamptonshire. His pictures for Picasso. Nevertheless, many of his 1940s and ’50s prints the scheme were sensitive studies of buildings – domestic, were of conventional pictorial subjects inspired by the agricultural and industrial – all monochrome pen-andlandscapes and agricultural activities in the village and wash drawings, enlivened with delicate touches of colour. surrounding countryside, and the ‘beautiful abstract Though he described this work as ‘strictly objective’, his geometry’ of barns, sheds and chicken coops. Farm style was an interesting conflation of the topographic machinery was another recurring subject, in prints and in ‘recording’ mode, and a more emotional neo-Romanticism, 4

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Were you aware of his art?

He was … you know, ‘Daddy, the well-known painter’.

And when I got into my teens, I began to build a wall, because I wanted to keep my distance: I felt so different.

But he encouraged you to draw?

Oh yes – he was such a warm sort of person. I’d hear him talking to friends, saying, my son he does these extraordinary drawings…

And your parents kept them all. It’s quite extraordinary to have the whole sequence now isn’t it?

Yes – I think there are about two hundred now housed in the Drumcroon Teachers’ Art Centre.

You didn’t go away to school, like John, your brother.

I was sent to a prep school in Oxford, and I got very unwell, so my mother took me away – a great mistake. For some years I worked at home, with tutors and governesses. Then I started art school incredibly young – about fourteen and a half. My father had rather Pre-Raphaelites-type ideas, that artists should be crafts people before being free creative painters. So he sent me to the School of Art and

Leaf design, ink and black paint, 13 October, 1949 33

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That’s right. It was a bleak place – so different. Teachers didn’t seem to trouble much about students. Meninsky would sit in a corner reading War and Peace or something: he loved Russian novels, and he used to slouch in a terrible old armchair with all it’s insides falling out. He looked like the most depressing figure you could imagine, with this pale, pockmarked face, and emanating such gloom and despair.

Woodcarving in South Kensington. I must have worked there about a year.

You were about fifteen when you met Edward Burra?

That’s right. William Chappell and Burra and I were all at the Chelsea School, and Burra was already getting the attributes of a strongly individual but apparently asexual personality, and of course he was a close friend of William, and they would be in a corner joking… Burra often pretended to be an old charwoman, and they’d go on together in this very camp way. Edward and I would often set off after Chelsea, and we’d sit side by side doing watercolours. He’d do these little figures – they were absolutely lovely. I worked in rather the same way, but I used more gouache, more solid watercolour.

He committed suicide, didn’t he?

Yes, eventually.

It was around this time that you started thinking about Cézanne, wasn’t it?

That was connected with another great friend, Barnett Freedman. Barnett was a man of enormous personality.

His father had a greengrocer’s stall in the East End, and Barnett was one of these plump, real East End Jews. He had a face like a white pear, with hair like tobacco. He was everything I felt like an artist should be. Somebody from the working class, somebody who was doing just amazing life drawings. Later he got this wristy touch, but then he was drawing like a wonderful savage – if you can image Alfred Wallis doing life drawings…

Barnett was absolutely mad about Cézanne. He had a huge colour reproduction of that wonderful, sloping

Did he have a direct influence on your painting?

No – I think we were pretty separate. Quite soon, he began to do these extraordinary images of brothels and gay dance halls. But he was already very ill: all his joints were swollen; his hands looked like the branches of an old tree. But he had a terrific spirit: he’d never say anything about it. And he used to buy these magazines he loves, the most ferocious sort he could get hold of – sex and films and stuff.

Then you went after that to the Central.

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Landscape with a Church, ink and watercolour, 1941 35

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Pig and Cart, monotype, 1949 39

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Signals, lithograph, 1952–53 40

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In Between, woodcut and linocut, 1960 49

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To the Moon – Shelley,

The Crazed Moon – W.B Yeats,

woodcut and linocut, 1972

woodcut and linocut, 1972 50

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And after I did that woodcut of two figures outside a cinema, the Paris Pullman in Chelsea, I got so interested in drawing I carried a notebook everywhere. Not so long ago, in the early ‘80s, I did those paintings of figures in pubs, and the underground. One idea that affected me very much was that the figure is part of what it’s thinking. I saw this sort of cinematic projection from the figure, and its brain, on to the wall: the constant shuffling between desire and fear. Desire is there – the film star faces, the holiday in the sun; fear is there – the gun pointed at your head, the exploding car. Some of the underground scenes shadow this connection.

I’m always very interested, too, in images that persist.

Do you remember those early prints of circles and an ape form? I think our response to things like that is immensely basic: we see them either as a pair of eyes, or of breasts. A lot of my images are about these very persistent things, like a sunburst or a zig-zag, a lightning stroke. I find they animate the construction for me in a very special way.

And what about the boxes you were making around this time?

In America, I remember saying to a group of students, don’t do an image, explore whats around you in terms of a printed surface. And one chap got hold of an old kid’s desk, with everything fixed, the seat and a flap … He took it all apart, and inked up every surface – underneath, on top, everything – and printed it. So he had a series of separate prints of every part of the desk. He then stuck them back, surface to surface, and then screwed the desk together, and it was an object of such engaging interest, you can’t imagine – a print desk! It was that sort of feeling: I found it just lovely that one could do one’s own box prints. This one here, now you see the image in the box – the crowds on Cape Kennedy watching blast off. I was very excited about it, because it seemed to knock aside the barrier between print and construction.

It has something in common with what artists like Kiefer are doing now – the photographs and lead and the strange books he made.

There was a big change in your work from the ‘60s and the ‘70s, wasn’t there, with its emphasis on experiment and new processes, to going back to a much more universal way of working? It returns to a unified composition within traditional techniques.

The imaginative element becomes more important again. It’s not so much the found objects, as a world that you’re creating.

But one day, I felt I had no hands. I was doing these photographic prints, and I got hold of a door and did a woodcut of two figures. Suddenly I’d regained my hands.

I never did a photographic print after that. But at the same time I’d started doing these watercolours and drawings.

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grand simplicity. The whole idea of the hoisted banner, the mustering of troops…

In my head there is this highly coloured place. I sometimes feel I must have a sort of corner of paradise somewhere knocking around in my skull, because there’s so much there, and I start painting, and these things appear – like that bird under the window.

Absolutely true. I became involved in using things from newspapers or the rubbish pile to the exclusion of so much. And suddenly, it all came rushing back in. Early drawings like The Expulsion, or People Lost in a Wood, do relate, I suppose, to this combining of figures with some sort of setting.

You once said that later in life is really the reverses of youth, the mirror reflection of youth; so there is something about this work that connects right back to the childhood drawings.

Yes, I love that.

All these new paintings are the same place: it completely haunts me.

I do believe that.

These images of paradise must go back to that childhood idyll you started from. You once talked about these great cockerels rushing around – and that comes out as a magical vision, and comes back again in paintings like the Tulip Tree with Orange Sky or Forest Birds. You return to it with all that you have learned through all those experiments and discoveries, enabling you to make it, in a fully adult way, as a mature artist, into something visionary.

But now you are not constrained and frustrated by what you can’t do: now you can do everything, technically I mean, and still have that freshness.

It really has to come out of the feeling of the thing. I only like the kind of drawing that belongs to whatever you’re doing. One evening, some boys came to the door wearing Hallowe’en masks – they were just wonderful.

But it isn’t just the imagery: to me, it’s the flooding back of colour. Your work had been very restrained.

I find it mysterious that at this time I feel compelled to make this kind of image. But I think because areas of the work are fairly non-figurative it allows me to experience relationships, rather architectural relationships: I love

Yes – ‘Londony colour’. But I’m very affected by things like flags – colour which asserts itself through a sort of 58

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The North West Essex Collection now comprises 3000 items of paintings, prints, ceramics, illustrations, wallpapers, decorative designs and correspondence and is particulalry strong in its holding of work by Bawden, Rothenstein, and Aldridge. It also contains a significant number of watercolours by Ravilious, as well as his printed and ceramic work.

The gallery is open regularly on five days each week, April – October. For further information about opening times and the varied exhibition programme please visit www.fryartgallery.org or follow on Facebook and Twitter.

The telephone number is 01799 513779. For membership of the Society please contact the Membership Secretary, Fry Art Gallery, 19a Castle Street, Saffron Walden, Essex CB10 1BD

he Fry Art Gallery is a public art gallery managed by a charity and Society of the same name, which in 1987 repoened a derelict Victorian gentleman’s gallery to collect and display work of the 20th and 21st centuries by artists of distinction living and working in North West Essex, centred principally upon Great Bardfield and Saffron Walden.

Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious both arrived in Great Bardield in 1931, followed by John Aldridge RA. Rothenstein and Kenneth Rowntree came to the village during the Second World War. In the 1950s others including Marianne Straub, Sheila Robinson, Bernard Cheese, George Chapman and Walter Hoyle also settled there, although as individuals they were always anxious to emphasise they were not a ‘school’.

Bird and Sun, linocut, 1956/57 63

ACKNOWLEDG EMENTS

Illustrated Works

Contributors

Michael Rothenstein from 1985 when the Gallery was created until his death in 1997 and subsequently his wife Diana (Sam) were generous donors of Rothenstein’s work. Mrs Rothenstein, who died in 2017, presented 250 items from the studio when she closed it prior to moving in 2015. Their generosity is fully acknowledged. This gift means that the Gallery currently holds 350 Rothenstein items in its Permanent Collection. Accordingly most of the items illustrated have come from this source, unless otherwise indicated below.

Other illustrated works were presented by Mr Edward Bawden, Horse & Moon, page 6; Mrs Clare Chalmers, Red Flowers, page 24 and Mr Richard Hollis, Cockerel Turning Round, page 16. The Essex Heritage Trust assisted in the purchase of The Cockerel, page 11 and The Bull, page 14; and the Heritage Lottery Fund ‘Collecting Cultures’ initiative assisted with Figure with Cockerel, page 2. The Fry Art Gallery Society purchased outright the works illustrated on pages 4, 8, 10, 13, 19, 23, 24, 29, 37, 48, 50, 56, and 59.

The entire Collection is vested in the North West Essex Collection Trust, a registered charity.

Photography by Douglas Atfield and the Fry Art Gallery.

Gill Saunders is Senior Curator in the Word & Image Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, specialising in twentieth century and contemporary prints and drawings. Previous publications include Prints Now, Walls are Talking, Recording Britain, In Black & White and co-editor of Bawden, Ravilious and the Artists of Great Bardfield.

Peter Fuller, art critic and writer, was the founder and editor of Modern Painters, a quarterly journal of the fine arts, from 1987 until his death in 1990.

Editors Nigel Weaver, Iris Weaver and Colin Wilkin.

Designed by Webb & Webb.

Literature While there are numerous catalogues for special exhibitions the definitive work on Michael Rothenstein’s prints is Tessa Sidey, The Prints of Michael Rothenstein, (Scolar Press, 1999) His own work on print making are: Linocuts & Woodcuts (1962); Frontiers of Printmaking (1966); and Relief Printmaking (1970) 64

ISBN: 978-0-9573172-2-2