This radical chalk-and-wash drawing was among Bomberg’s five exhibits in the so-called ‘Jewish Section’ that he co-curated with Jacob Epstein at the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s exhibition Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements in May 1914. Bomberg’s friend John Rodker (a racing enthusiast) also reproduced the drawing as a frontispiece in The Dial Monthly, explaining that it was set in a paddock at a race meeting, that the two figures on the front right of the composition were bookies, those to their left spectators, and that the style was ‘cubist’; adding ‘It is not intended to be comic’. Executed in 1913, when Bomberg was only 22, Racehorses is a key transitional work, which demonstrates his absorption and understanding of the contemporaneous European avant-garde, skilfully reworked into a drawing of startling power and originality.
Even before he became a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, Bomberg had begun to employ a shallow picture space and to simplify his forms. By 1913 he was producing ‘Cubist compositions’ including one featuring the wooden ‘donkey’ on which students sat to sketch in the Slade life class (which bears a close resemblance to Bomberg’s stiffly-jointed racehorses).
His understanding of Cubism was enhanced by his visit to Paris in 1913 and he was also aware of the 1910 Futurist Manifesto with its explanation that ‘a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular’. He shared a fascination with mechanisation with the nascent Vorticist movement, reflected in his manifesto accompanying his first solo show at the Chenil Gallery, London, in July 1914, where he explained that his object was ‘the construction of Pure Form’. However Bomberg also combined modernist techniques with allusions to older processes: the close-grained texture of the picture is reminiscent of woodcuts, and the monochrome colouring akin to that in photography of the day.
He would have been familiar with Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographs of the ‘animal in motion’, and his racehorses also neatly illustrate what Muybridge himself noted in
his Prelude to Analyses, that ‘during very rapid motion by a good horse, the aggregate of the body preserves a nearly horizontal line’. Like Bomberg’s other innovative works, Racehorses was generally viewed with hostility and incomprehension when first exhibited with the Jewish Chronicle calling his racehorses ‘Opposed to all that is rational in art’.
The Artist
David Bomberg was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Birmingham, England in 1890. The family moved to Whitechapel in 1895, where he later became prominent among the ‘Whitechapel Boys’ - the term applied to a loose, informal group of young, Jewish, mainly immigrant artists who were either born, raised or worked in the East End in the first two decades of the 20th century, and who, both collectively, and individually, made an important contribution to British Modernism. Initially apprenticed as a chromolithographer, he later studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he was seen as a ‘disturbing influence’. In 1913 Bomberg visited Paris with Jacob Epstein, making contact with artists including Modigliani and Picasso. Bomberg’s harrowing service in the trenches during the First World War was compounded by a disastrous experience as a commissioned war artist, explored in a series of related drawings. Afterwards Bomberg made a series of peopled landscapes before travelling in 1923 to Jerusalem, where he began to work en plein air for the first time.
After a series of disappointments in the 1930-40s Bomberg concentrated on portraits of friends and family, as well as a series of searching self-portraits. Following his visit to Spain in 1929, a renewed vigour resulted in a series of works based on the cathedral at Toledo, flowering on his second visit in 1934–35, into dramatic landscapes of the gorge at Ronda. His final works culminated in the fulfillment of his early promise after his return to Ronda, where he spent his last years. After becoming seriously ill, Bomberg travelled back to England, but died in London shortly after his return, in 1957.
Guidance notes on Modern British Artists
Jacob Epstein
Bust of Jacob Kramer, 1921 by Jacob Epstein (1880-1959)
Bronze, 65.5 x 53 x 30 cm
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After his arrival in England, Epstein received vital early backing from Jewish patrons, Alfred and Rudolf Kohnstamm, through his friendship with Alfred Wolmark. Between 1912 and 1914 he established important links with other ‘Whitechapel Boys’, particularly David Bomberg and Mark Gertler.
From his first public commission for the British Medical Association’s building in The Strand, Epstein’s career was always mired in controversy, partly because of the uninhibited sexuality of his figures and his lasting interest in the non-Western (and often mixed-race) model. However, his portraiture was always highly prized. Epstein’s head of Leeds-born painter Jacob Kramer (there are also casts at the Tate and Leeds City Art Gallery) captures his sitter’s famous nervous energy and restlessness. Epstein wrote to Kramer to encourage him to come to London to sit for the portrait after November 1920. He later recalled that Kramer ‘was a model who seemed to be on fire. He was extraordinarily nervous. Energy seemed to leap into his hair as he sat, and sometimes he would be shaken by queer trembling like ague. I would try to calm him so as to get on with the work’. Epstein scholar Evelyn Silber has cited the work as ‘the portrait of one outstanding Jewish contributor to British modernism by another [which] sees both close to the peak of their creative energies’.
The Artist
Sculptor Jacob Epstein was born into a relatively prosperous family of Polish-Jewish immigrants in New York City, USA in 1880, but as a teenager rejected the Orthodoxy of his upbringing. From 1893–98 he attended classes at the Art Students’ League and was inspired by the multicultural communities around him.After spending the winter of 1899–1900 cutting ice in New Jersey, he turned to sculpture, working in a bronze foundry (1901–2). On the proceeds of his first professional commission to illustrate Hutchins Hapgood’s The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), he sailed to Europe. In Paris he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts (1902–3) and the Académie Julian (1903–4), sharing the appreciation
of artists including Picasso and Modigliani, for Indian and West African art traditions.
Epstein moved to London in 1905 and owned a studio near Hyde Park as well as two cottages in Loughton, Essex, sculpting many of his large-scale installations in the latter. In 1907 he received his first major British commission and created 18 nude sculptures for the facade of the British Medical Association Building (now Zimbabwe House) on the Strand. This commission, like many of Epstein’s other early works, was highly controversial and criticised as indecent. A champion of direct carving, he was also associated with the short-lived Vorticist group, co-curated the so-called ‘Jewish Section’, part of the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s Review of Modern Movements, with David Bomberg in 1914, and was a co-founder of the London Group. He was Patron of the Ben Uri art Society in 1936–37.
His work often challenged prevailing notions of sexuality and beauty and favoured the nonEuropean model. However, his portrait heads, usually cast in bronze, were always in demand. Epstein also painted in watercolour and gouache, and his scenes of Epping Forest were frequently exhibited in Leicester Galleries, London. Epstein died in London, England on 21 August 1959 and was buried in Putney Vale cemetery. More than 300 of his works are in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate and the V&A.
Guidance notes on Modern British Artists
Mark Gertler
Daffodils in a Blue Bottle, 1916 by Mark Gertler (1891-1939)
Oil on canvas, 68.5 x 56 cm
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Gertler began this bold, experimental still life of daffodils in May 1916, during a period of respite away from his major canvas, Merry-Go-Round, in an effort to relieve his ‘penniless’ state by painting “some small saleable things”. After an uncertain start, he wrote to fellow artist Richard Carline that he had “got really interested in it, which means, probably, that it will be too good to sell!” Though keen to try “new notions for colour”, he longed to get back to “my Merry-Go-Round”. Roger Fry included this painting in his New Movement in Art exhibition in Birmingham, then the Mansard Gallery at Heal’s, London, in 1917.
The Artist
Mark Gertler was born the fifth and youngest child of Austrian-Jewish immigrant parents in Spitalfields, London, England in 1891. During a period of economic downturn, the family was repatriated to Przemyśl, Galicia, then in the Austro-Hungarian empire (now Southern Poland), the following year. After his father’s departure to seek work in America, the family lived on the brink of starvation until eventually Louis sent for them and they were reunited in London in 1896.
Following a brief apprenticeship at Clayton and Bell stained-glass makers, and evening classes at the Regent School Polytechnic, Gertler entered the Slade School of Fine Art in 1908, with a loan from the Jewish Education Aid Society; twice winning the Slade scholarship and leaving with another from the British Institution in 1911. He began exhibiting while still a student with Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club in 1910, had a joint show with John Currie at the Chenil Galleries, Chelsea in 1912, and began showing with the New English Art Club the same year. In 1914 his work was included in the so-called ‘Jewish Section’, co-curated by David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein at the exhibition Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. He was turned down for military service during the First World War, firstly on the grounds of his ‘Austrian’ parentage, then later, after being called up in
1918 was excused active service on the grounds of ill health and not forced to publicly declare his pacifist convictions, which were instead expressed in his anti-war painting Merry-Go-Round (1916, Tate). Although offered a commission as a war artist, after an attack of depression, he left it unfulfilled.
Gertler was a leading member of the London Group from 1915 onwards, exhibited with Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop in 1917 and 1918 and participated regularly in the Goupil Salons (1915-37). He had five solo shows at the Goupil Gallery, London (1921, 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1926), but tuberculosis, first diagnosed in 1920, seriously undermined his health, frequently confining him to sanatoria: from November 1920 until May 1921, and then again, in 1925, 1929 and 1936. His work was included in group shows at the Ben Uri Gallery in 1934 and 1937 and he had six further solo shows in his final decade: at the Leicester Galleries, London (1928, 1930, 1932 and 1934) and at the Lefevre Galleries, London in 1937 and 1939; from 1934, until its closure on the eve of the Second World War, he also taught part-time at the Westminster School of Art. Suffering from ill health and depression, Gertler committed suicide on 23 June 1939. Memorial exhibitions were held at the Leicester Galleries in 1941, Ben Uri Gallery in 1944 and Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1949. Posthumous solo exhibitions have been held at The Minories, Colchester, and tour (1971), Camden Arts Centre (1992), and Ben Uri Gallery, London (1982, 2002 and 2019), with a Tate room display in 2018.
Guidance notes on Modern British Artists
Bernard Meninsky
Family Group, c. 1940
by Bernard Meninsky (1891-1950)
Gouache on paper, 76 x 56 cm
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Meninsky’s Family Group is painted in the monumental ‘Miltonic style’ that he began to employ in the 1930s , in which the artist employed an idealised, generalised, pastoral setting peopled by monumental figures (a style also employed by his former Slade School contemporary Mark Gertler in the same period), the best-known of which are his illustrations to Milton’s poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso (published 1946). After the outbreak of the Second World War caused the closure of the London Art Schools, Meninsky (who had taught at the Westminster School of Art), found a position at the Oxford City School of Art and moved to Oxford to take up his role. Many paintings, drawings and lithographs in the Miltonic style resulted from this period, influenced by Picasso but also Samuel Palmer, who inspired a new generation of ‘neo-romantics’ in the 1940s. Meninsky had been drawn to the mother and child image since the birth of his two sons, David, in 1918, and Philip, in 1919, and his first solo exhibition in 1919 at the Goupil Gallery, London, was entitled Mother and Child Drawings.
The Artist
Bernard Meninsky (née Menushkin) was born into a Jewish family in Konotop, then within the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) in 1891 and brought to England by his parents when he was six weeks old, settling in Liverpool. After leaving school in 1902 he took evening classes in art and in 1906 won a scholarship to the Liverpool School of Art, also taking summer courses at the Royal College of Art (1909 and 1910). In 1911 he won a travel scholarship to study for three months at the Académie Julian in Paris and left Liverpool with the King’s medal. The following year he entered London’s Slade School of Fine Art on a one-year scholarship, meeting several ‘Whitechapel Boys’ including David Bomberg and Mark Gertler. Afterwards he briefly taught drawing in Italy in 1913, then returned to London to teach at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (where his pupils included Clara Klinghoffer), also joining the London Group the same year. In May 1914 Bomberg and Jacob Epstein included four Meninskys in the so-called
‘Jewish section’ in a wider show of modern art at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. In August, following the outbreak of the First World War, he enlisted, joining the Royal Fusiliers; he was posted in England as a clerk but in 1918 suffered a nervous breakdown, was discharged on medical grounds and held a six-month war artist’s appointment with the Ministry of Information.
In 1919 Meninsky returned to teaching at the Central, was elected to the London Group, and held his first solo exhibition of Mother and Child Drawings at the Goupil Gallery London; the following year he also began to teach life drawing evening classes at the Westminster School of Art. He was elected to the New English Art Club in 1923. He favoured the mother and child theme, also painting portraits, figures - latterly in a monumental, neo-classical style - and landscapes, which became dark and atmospheric in the 1920s and 1930s. He suffered several breakdowns in his mental health between 1931 and 1934. During the Second World War he moved to Oxford and taught at the City School of Art, returning to London and the Central in 1945. He suffered a further breakdown in 1949 and committed suicide in London, England on 12 February 1950. A memorial exhibition was held by the Arts Council in 1950 and further solo shows were held posthumously at Ben Uri Gallery (1957, 2001) and many other galleries; a touring retrospective was held in Oxford, Coventry, and London in 1981. His work is represented in numerous UK Collections including the Arts Council Collection, the Imperial War Museum, Victoria Gallery and Museum at the University of Liverpool and Tate.
Guidance notes on Modern British Artists
Clara Klinghoffer
Orovida Pissarro, 1962
by Clara Klinghoffer
(1900-1970)
Oil on canvas, 102.2 x 86.8 cm
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Klinghoffer painted a number of celebrated sitters including Vivien Leigh as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, and her friends Lucien and Orovida Pissarro. Her striking portrait of Orovida, Camille’s granddaughter, and herself an artist, presents Orovida as a series of ample forms including her rounded belly and face framed by her cropped pudding-basin hairstyle playfully echoed in the curves of the chair, the jug, plates, fruit and ornaments all forming a sinuous and slightly comical backdrop. The patterning of her skirt strikes a lone note of slightly controlled geometry.
The Sitter
Orovida Pissarro was born in 1893 in Epping, Essex, England, the only daughter of the Jewish émigré painter Lucien Pissarro, and granddaughter of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. She began drawing and painting at an early age and was the first woman in the Pissarro family to become a professional artist.
She lived and worked predominantly in London, where she was a prominent member of several British arts clubs and societies. She first learned to paint in the Impressionist style from her father and briefly studied with Walter Sickert in 1913; however, she soon abandoned formal art education and began experimenting with etching. Early on she became absorbed with the study of animals at London Zoo, depicting them in the style of their countries of origin combined with modernist elements, such as daring perspective and unconventional composition. Her early works in tempera are typically painted on delicate materials, such as fine-woven linen and silk.
Throughout her career, Orovida always remained outside mainstream British art movements; she was greatly influenced by an exhibition of Chinese Paintings held at the British Museum in 1924 and developed a personal style that combined elements of Japanese, Chinese, Persian, and Indian art. Her rejection of both Impressionism and her surname - she was known simply as Orovida - reflected her wish to achieve independence from the painting legacy of the
Pissarro dynasty, however, she remained proud of the family connection.
During the Second World War, she had to abandon her London studio for the countryside, Suffolk. It was during this period that she took up oil painting again due to a shortage of egg tempera and shifted towards contemporary subjects, such as scenes of rural and postwar urban life. Orovida remained active until the end of her life and died at home in London, England in 1968.
The Artist
Clara Klinghoffer was born into a Jewish family in Szerzezec, near Lwów, Polish Galicia (now Lviv Ukraine) in 1900. She moved to England with her family at the age of three, settling first in Manchester, before moving to London’s East End. She drew from a young age, briefly taking classes at the John Cass Institute in Aldgate in 1914, before moving to the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and she quickly established a reputation as the new ‘girl genius’, gaining a bursary to the Slade School of Fine Art (1918–20). While still a student, she held her first exhibition at the Hampstead Art Gallery in 1920. Further solo exhibitions at prestigious London galleries followed, where her drawings, especially studies of women and children (often based on her six sisters) were frequently likened to Raphael.
In 1926 she married Dutch journalist Joop Stoppelman and moved with him to Paris in 1928. and to Holland two years later. In 1939, aware of the imminent threat of German invasion, the family moved again, this time to America, settling in New York, where Klinghoffer continued exhibiting. In her later years, however, her work suffered from the decline in demand for figurative painting. Clara Klinghoffer died in London, England on 18 April 1970.
Guidance notes on Modern British Artists
Leon Kossoff
Portrait of N M Seedo, c. 1957 by Leon Kossoff (1926-2019)
Charcoal on paper, 103 x 71 cm
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This portrait is one of three associated works depicting émigrée Sonia Husid (1906–1985), known by her nom de plume N. M. Seedo. Possibly a distant relative of Kossoff’s, she was an important model for the artist in this period. Seedo refers to their friendship in her semiautobiographical account, In the Beginning was Fear (1964), which also movingly describes her experiences of pogroms, fear and loss in Romania. In this empathic portrait, Kossoff clearly conveys her strength through suffering.
Seedo was also known in her own right in Britain as a Yiddishist. Born in Bessarabia and educated in Vienna, she was a member of the socialist Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair and the (then illegal) Romanian Communist Party before she settled in England in 1930. Seedo married fellow immigrant and Yiddish writer Y. I. Lisky (originally Yehuda Itamar Fuchs, official name Summer Fuchs) in London in 1935; they subsequently divorced and remarried in 1970.
Portrait of N. M. Seedo bears a striking resemblance to Seated Woman, a 1957 oil painting, and a charcoal and conté drawing of the same title exhibited in Kossoff’s second and third London Group exhibitions. Heavily delineated with fluent thick black marks and depicted in three-quarters profile, N. M. Seedo sits with her hands together, and eyes downcast. The tubular arm-rest that portions off the bottom left corner is a compositional device that recurs in later works.
The
Artist
Artist Leon Kossoff was born to Jewish immigrant parents in Islington, London, England in1926. His parents were both born in what was formerly the Russian Empire, and is now the Ukraine (both emigrated as children, and met and married in London in 1924); Leon was raised in the East End, where his parents ran a bakery. During the Second World War he was evacuated to King’s Lynn in Norfolk, where his host family encouraged his passion for drawing, and he subsequently attended life classes at Toynbee Hall in the East End, and Saturday classes at St Martin’s School of Art. Following National Service with
the Royal Fusiliers Jewish Brigade (1945–48), he studied at St Martin’s School of Art (1949–53) and the Royal College of Art (1953-56), alongside Frank Auerbach, with whom he also attended David Bomberg’s evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic (1950-52), which proved a formative experience.
In 1956, the year in which he participated in the Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists at Ben Uri Gallery, he had the first of five solo shows at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Art Gallery (1957-64), followed by more than 30 further solo exhibitions hosted by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1981), the Venice Biennale (1995), Tate (1996), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2000) and the National Gallery (2007). He also participated in numerous group exhibitions including in 1976, The Human Clay, an exhibition selected by R. B. Kitaj, which brought together a loose group of figurative artists, whom he referred to as representing a ‘School of London’, a label subsequently much debated.
London was the focus of much of Kossoff’s work, from early postwar bombed cityscapes to a series based on Christ Church, Spitalfields and scenes of intense human activity including the underground, train stations, parks and swimming pools in Dalston, Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Kilburn, Willesden and the Embankment. He also drew daily from life, often in charcoal. His final exhibition ‘Leon Kossoff: A London Life’, was held at Piano Nobile, London in 2019. Leon Kossoff died in London, England on 4 July 2019, aged 92. His work is represented in numerous UK collections including the Arts Council, the Ben Uri Collection, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal College of Art and Tate, and in international collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and MoMA. A retrospective, accompanying the publication of a catalogue raisonné of paintings, edited by Andrea Rose, was held at Annely Juda Fine Art in 2021.
Guidance notes on Modern British Artists
Philip Sutton RA
Heather’s Flowers, 1985 by Philip Sutton (1928-)
Oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm
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Heather’s Flowers is a typically dynamic still-life from Philip Sutton: generous sweeps of fresh blue and green form a backdrop for the abundance of summer flowers spilling from the bouquet with colourful abandon. Here, Sutton’s imagery is clearly inspired by nature, yet there remains a significant nod to the inner workings of his imagination. ‘I’m trying to do something that I didn’t know was there till I’d seen it.When I see a cloud I try to do it as though I didn’t know what clouds are’, he has commented.The overall effect is an explosion of colour, nature, and indeed, joy.
The Artist
Philip Sutton was born to Jewish parents in Poole, Dorset, England in 1928 and grew up in Leyton, East London. He left school at fourteen and worked in a drawing office before carrying out three years of national service, during which he was involved with the Berlin Airlift. With his ex-serviceman’s grant, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1949-52) under William Coldstream, winning the 1952 Summer Composition Prize and scholarships that enabled his travel to Spain, France and Italy, and also spent some time in Israel, before he returned to teach at the Slade between 1954 and 1963. He continued to travel widely on painting trips to Australia, Fiji and Crete, as well as Ireland and Cornwall. In 1956, following an introduction by Coldstream, he held his first solo show at the art dealers Roland, Browse and Delbanco, with whom he subsequently exhibited throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as well as at the Geffrye Museum, London (1959), Leeds City Art Gallery (1960), in Newcastle, Bradford and Edinburgh (1961), and at the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield (1971). He has participated in mixed exhibitions at Ben Uri Gallery, including the Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary AngloJewish Artists (1956). He is admired as a draughtsman and for his woodcuts, but is primarily a colourist, influenced by Matisse and the German Expressionists.
In 1977 the BBC Arena Programme made a film about the artist and a retrospective was held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, followed
by his first exhibition in Paris at Galerie Joel Salaun in 1988. Sutton has received commissions including the design for two tapestries at West Dean College (1984 and 1986), a poster of Soho for London Transport, and a set of stamps for the Post Office in 1987. In 1986 he began painting ceramics and was commissioned by Pentagram to paint a wall of tiles at the Art Tile Factory, Stoke-on-Trent: an exhibition of his painted ceramics was held at Odette Gilbert Gallery, London in 1987. In 1995 he began work on a series of paintings on William Shakespeare, which continued for three years. In 1988 he was elected a Royal Academician.
Philip Sutton lives and works in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
Guidance notes on Modern British Artists
Scottie Wilson
Greedies by Scottie Wilson (1888-1972)
Pen and ink on paper, 27.5 x 36.6 cm
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After discovering his passion for art via doodling, self-taught ‘Outsider’ artist Scottie Wilson evolved a highly personal artistic style, peopled by his own characters - ‘evils and greedies’whom he juxtaposed with naturalistic symbols of goodness and truth, often playful and colourful, sometimes bizarre. His highly individual work was admired and acquired by Jean Dubuffet and Picasso.
The
Artist
Self-taught ‘outsider’ artist Scottie Wilson (Louis Freeman) was born into a Jewish family in Glasgow, Scotland in 1888. After leaving school at the age of eight to help subsidise his family’s meagre income, he later served in the army in India and South Africa, leaving in 1911 but rejoining during the First World War. Afterwards he emigrated to Ontario, Canada, where he ran a shop and discovered his passion for art via doodling. He held his first exhibition in Toronto in 1943. He became known for his highly detailed, idiosyncratic style, peopling his work with his own characters - ‘evils and greedies’ - whom he juxtaposed with naturalistic symbols of goodness and truth including fish, birds, flowers, trees, self-portraits and totem pole-like symbols. He moved to London in the 1940s, becoming a well-known character in the London arts scene. His work was admired by the Surrealists and acquired by Jean Dubuffet and Picasso. He spent his remaining years in Kilburn, North London, where he died on 26 March 1972. His work is in collections including Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland.
Guidance notes on Modern British artists
Norman Stevens
A Corner of Crathes Castle Gardens (1982) by Norman Stevens (1937-1988)
Lithograph on paper, 72.5 x 90.5 cm
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Norman Stevens’ A Corner of Croft Castle Gar-den is a masterclass in formal precision and at-mospheric subtlety, showcasing the artist’s sin-gular ability to merge observational clarity with meditative abstraction. Executed in the pains-taking medium of mezzotint—a printmaking process renowned for its depth of tone and me-ticulous craftsmanship—this work exemplifies Stevens’ command of surface, light, and spatial tension. The image presents a sharply cropped view of a manicured English garden, where monumental topiary hedges loom with nearar-chitectural presence. Their smooth, geometric formscontrastwiththeirregular texturesofpathand foliage, creating a composition that is both serene and uncanny. A student of the Royal College of Art and con-temporary of Hockney and Kitaj, Stevens devel-oped a unique visual language rooted in realism but deeply influenced by modernist composi-tionalstrategies.Hisshiftfrom paintingtoprint-making in the 1970s allowed for a refined explo-ration of tone and structure. Here, the simplified colour palette— dominated by hyper-real greens under an ominous grey sky—evokes stillness while suggesting latent narrative, a quiet theatri-cality reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico. This print reflects Stevens’ enduring engagement with English landscape traditions, reimagined through a modernist lens. His work bridges nat-uralism and formal abstraction, asserting the psychological power of place.
The Artist
Artist Norman Stevens was born in Bradford, England on 17 June 1937 and studied at Brad-ford College of Art (1952-57), alongside fellow students and friends including David Hockney and David Oxtoby. He went on to study at the Royal College of Art for a further three years, where his circle included R B Kitaj, before win-ning the Lloyd Landscape and Abbey Minor Travelling Scholarships. Stevens taught art in schools in Manchester and Maidstone, and be-came Head of Fine Art at Hornsey College, before giving up teaching in 1973 to become a fulltime artist. He was a Gregory Fellow at Leeds University (1974–75) and took up printmaking, specialising in mezzotint and becoming a celebrated master of the craft, whom The Times described as ‘one of the most distinguished and particular painters and printmakers of his gener-ation’. He won the Chichester Arts Festival Prize (1975) and a John Moore’s painting prize (1983), also exhibiting regularly at the British International Print Biennale in Bradford, winning prizes in 1979 and 1982. He also exhibited in Geneva (1974), Scandinavia (1977) and, in 1982, at the European Print Biennale at Baden Baden and the Bilbao Print Biennale. He was elected a Roy-al Academician in 1987. Norman Stevens died in Bradford, England on 20 August 1988. His work is in collections including The Arts Council, Bradford Museums and Galleries, The Tate, The V&A, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva. A posthumous exhibition of his prints was held at the Royal Academy in 2014.
Guidance notes on Modern British Artists
Jane Millican
Daytime Audience 2007 by
Jane Millican (1966-)
Pencil on paper, 28 x 37 cm
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Jane Millican’s drawing demonstrates a compelling synthesis of gestural abstraction and figural suggestion, characteristic of her nuanced interrogation of painterly mark-making and perceptual ambiguity. Composed in a monochromatic palette, the work evokes a dense, almost sculp-turalmassofintertwinedbodiesorfigures —eachsuggested rather than explicitly defined through sweeping, ribbon-like brushstrokes that resist linear clarity. The composition invites a slow, searching gaze as heads, limbs, and postures be-gin to emerge from the rich materiality of the medium,suggestingaseated crowdorcongrega-tion rendered in a state of flux.
Millican, trained at Northumbria University and the Slade, engages in a dialogue between drawing and painting, exploring how gesture can function simultaneously as form and content. Her practice interrogates traditional boundaries of representation, often using a limited palette to heighten the expressive possibilities of tone, rhythm, and texture. Here, the formal repetition and compression of the marks generate a visual tempo that verges on the musical, underscoring her interest in drawing as a performative act. This work exemplifies Millican’s engagement with ambiguity and collectivity, where figuration is not imposed but slowly teased out through process. It aligns her with a lineage of contemporary artists who blur the line between abstraction and narrative, memory and material.
The Artist
Jane Millican completed her BA at Northumbria University, Newcastle on Tyne, where she was also a Graduate Fellow in Painting 1999-2000. She studied for her MFA at the Slade. She has exhibited in London, Liverpool, Paris, Portugal, Barcelona and New York. In 2007 she exhibited as part of 2(007) Pranvere, The National Gallery of Arts, Albania, and has been shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize.
