Frank Dobson - Exhibition Catalogue

Frank Dobson

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‘A portrait sculptor should set to work determined to produce sculpture.

The psychological element should not be lost sight of, but it should be subordinated to the aesthetic.

One must interpret. If you want a mere record, what’s wrong with a Kodak?’

Frank Dobson 1926

Price £10

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Frank Dobson

Frank Dobson 1886 -1963

Andrew Lambirth

goldmark 2016

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Frank Dobson 1886-1963 Frank Dobson was an immensely skilful and versatile artist, who started out as a painter in Newlyn, producing potboilers under a couple of pseudonyms. His achievement as a painter, from watercolour landscapes to portraits and work as a war artist, is little known and has been insufficiently studied. So it will be a revelation to many to see some of his more brightly coloured pastels and watercolours here. From 1915 he pursued his primary vocation as a sculptor with great verve and accomplishment, establishing a reputation as the leading English avant-garde artist in threedimensions. He was one of the first great sculptors of the Modern Age in this country, but his achievement has been overshadowed by those who came after him - and in particular by Henry Moore.

Although Dobson was widely acknowledged to be the successor of Gaudier-Brzeska, whose life was so tragically curtailed in the First World War, and although he enjoyed considerable success and wide acclaim in the 1920s and 30s, he was nearly 30 before he made his first serious sculpture, and nearly 40 before he properly hit his stride.

He was decidedly unfortunate in his timing. The War cut right across his development and delayed him by three or four years at a crucial point. (He enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles in 1915, saw action at the Somme and was invalided out of the Army in 1917. It took him time to recover.)

Dobson, who was modelling whales out of dough at the age of five and loved messing around with engines, was clearly a practical man

who needed to work with his hands. He soon discovered that painting and drawing, although agreeable activities, did not entirely satisfy his delight in physical processes. As he commented in 1933: ‘I found that in painting the results were achieved too soon’, and ‘the painting was done before I was.’ He also said then (in a long dialogue broadcast by the BBC) that as far as he was concerned there was no difference between modelling and carving, apart from the medium, and that people should not dogmatise about stone-carving. Dobson was both carver and modeller, and his own versatility perhaps went against him in an age which valued specialism, and when the modellers and the direct carvers tended to be divided into opposing camps.

Revealingly, he didn’t use his fingers to model, considering this to be too painterly a method, maintaining that it ‘starved’ the form. He preferred a slow build-up with tools - small wooden hammers and spatulas.

Interestingly, considering his superb command of technique, he had no formal training as a sculptor, though he did work as apprentice studio-boy to the decorative sculptor Sir William Reynolds-Stephens (1902-4). Yet the importance of his art school years should not be underestimated, for it was at Hospitalfield Art Institute in Arbroath (1906-10) that he began life-drawing, and at City & Guilds School in London (1910-12) that he continued his drawing studies. Life-drawing, and in particular the female nude, was always at the centre of his working practice. He admired the drawings of Ingres and the red chalk work of Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher and Alfred Stevens. In fact, Dobson’s own red chalk drawings (which he started to make in the 1930s) can be seen as a kind of two-dimensional counterpart to his terracotta sculptures. When beginning a sculpture, his habit was

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to make a small maquette in clay or wax to find the pose he wanted to use, then set up a life model in that pose and make dozens sometimes hundreds - of drawings on which to base the final sculpture. In this way he could explore the composition thoroughly and assemble all the possible viewpoints of his figures into a continuous whole. Although the drawings were done to provide him with information to make sculpture, he also exhibited them, and from the start they proved popular.

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In the second decade of the 20th century, the rather insular English art world opened up dramatically. At Roger Fry’s two PostImpressionist exhibitions, of 1910 and 1912, Dobson was able to see really good work by Matisse, Cezanne and Gauguin. He called the first show ‘an explosion’ and commented afterwards: ‘Anything was possible. Here was something more than just emotion. Here was work for the intelligence.’ He responded strongly to Cezanne, but it was Gauguin that sent Dobson to the British Museum to look at (in his own words) ‘Negro sculpture, Peruvian art, Egyptian, Assyrian, Polynesian, and - curiously enough, later - archaic Greek sculpture.’

He was also to be inspired by Picasso’s massive neo-classical figures and by Chinese art. The sculpture he made from the assimilation of such influences found favour with Fry and the other great formalist critic of the day, Clive Bell.

In 1920, Dobson showed with Group X along with Edward Wadsworth, McKnight Kauffer and William Roberts - in Wyndham Lewis’ post-war attempt to revive Vorticism. Lewis suggested Dobson make his work more angular and pointed, but this was not his style and he didn’t comply. He was not particularly involved with the machine aesthetic, favouring a profoundly humanist approach, despite his interest in Cubism. In later years his experimental approach calmed into a beguilingly nuanced classicism, and it is for this that he is best known. By 1924 he was chosen (along with Gaudier) to represent British sculpture at the Venice Biennale, and his work became famous in America, Italy, Belgium and especially Paris.

Dobson is celebrated for his rhythmic treatment of mass and volume, for the grandeur and complexity of his figure subjects, for their monumental architectural quality. He dealt in essential forms - distilled shapes - evoking round-limbed and broad-thighed women, as if made for motherhood. He captured in them a sense of movement in stasis, a continuous rhythm that flows through these finely rounded bodies. Besides these archaic goddesses, Dobson made portrait busts. His portraits were proper pieces of sculpture (not just an academic fee-earning exercise) which also aimed for that most demanding of qualities: a likeness of the sitter.

In the proposed Venice Biennale of 1940, cancelled because of the Second World War, Dobson was once again chosen to represent British sculpture. But by 1948, the time of the next Biennale, the tide had turned and Henry Moore was selected. Dobson had just been appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art (194653), a post for which he was recommended by Moore. This has often

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been seen as an act of support and generosity, but was it not also a way of keeping Dobson out of the limelight - by giving him a demanding teaching post to fulfil? Artists are not always generous in acknowledging influence among their near contemporaries. Both Moore and Hepworth owed a great deal to Dobson’s trail-blazing treatment of the nude. Neither said very much about him, although Ben Nicholson cited Dobson along with David Bomberg as an early influence - the only two artists then working with what he considered a ‘universal outlook’.

That universality can be seen in perhaps Dobson’s most famous sculpture, London Pride on the South Bank near the National Theatre, made for the 1951 Festival of Britain. It can also be seen in his more intimate drawings and sculptures of the nude, with their dignity and serenity, and their warming Mediterranean paganism. Did Frank Dobson want the mantle of avant-garde sculptor which was draped around his shoulders after the early death of Gaudier? In 1922, Ezra Pound (who had written the first book on Gaudier) introduced Dobson to Hemingway as ‘the saviour of sculpture in England’. That can’t have been a great help. In fact, although he enjoyed his moment of fame, Dobson was not cast down by his later eclipse. He found contentment in his work, and in his identity as a sculptor. That identity is once more of tremendous interest to us.

Andrew Lambirth Andrew Lambirth (born 1959) is a writer, critic and curator. He has written on art for a number of publications including The Sunday Telegraph, The Spectator, The Sunday Times, Modern Painters and the Royal Academy magazine. Among his many books are monographs on Craigie Aitchison, Roger Hilton, Maggi Hambling, John Hoyland, Margaret Mellis, Allen Jones, LS Lowry, RB Kitaj and Francis Davison. His reviews for The Spectator 2002-2014 have been collected in a paperback entitled A is a Critic.

Sculpture

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London Pride

Dobson working on London Pride, 1950

London Pride, The South Bank, Festival of Britain, 1951

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available in bronze

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available in bronze

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available in bronze

available in bronze

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available in bronze

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available in bronze

Drawings & Paintings

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Selected Chronology 1886 Born in London, Nov 18.

His father was a professional painter of flowers and birds.

1900-02 Won a scholarship to Leyton School of Art. 1902-04 Apprentice studio-boy with Sir William ReynoldsStephens, whose sculptures ‘consisted mostly of subjects chosen from the poems of Tennyson’.

1904-06 In Cornwall. ‘I had practically no contact with other artists. I spent most of my time in painting and sketching that very lovely country, and my spare time in swimming and sailing.’

1906-10 Won a scholarship to Hospitalfield Art Institute, Arbroath.

1910-12 In London. Further practice in drawing and modelling at the City and Guilds School, Kennington.

1913-14 In Cornwall again, shared a studio at Newlyn with Cedric Morris. A visit from Augustus John led to a one-man show (paintings and drawings only) at the Chenil Galleries, Chelsea.

1914-18 Enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles until invalided out two days before the Armistice.

1919 Moved to Chelsea,

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1922

1924

1926 1928

1931

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1933 1936

London. Contact with Wyndham Lewis, Roberts, Wadsworth, Gertler, Pound, Eliot and Orage.

Group X Exhibition at Heal's Mansard Gallery, with Dobson as the only sculptor. After this Group X broke up.

Joined the London Group (where Fry was now in and Lewis out). Visited Paris with Wyndham Lewis.

Visited Venice for the 1924 Biennale, in which he shared the representation of British sculpture with Gaudier-Brzeska.

The XV Venice Biennale included Susanna.

The London Group's Retrospective, 1914-1928 at the New Burlington Gallery included Torso, Cornucopia, Concertina Man and three drawings.

The over-lifesize bronze figure Truth was bought for the nation by the CAS and installed outside the Tate Gallery.

Again showed at the Venice Biennale (Marble Woman and Truth).

First exhibited at the Royal Academy.

Pax and three other Dobsons included, with

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1938 1940

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1947 1950

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1953 1959 1963

sculpture by Moore and Epstein, in the Dutch official exhibition 200 Years of British Art. The silver-gilt loving-cup Calix Majestatis, designed

by Dobson and presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

Elected ARBS. Moved to Bristol. The most complete exhibition of his career was held at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

Moved to Kingsley, near Borden, Hants.

First showed drawings at the Royal Academy (studies for sculpture). Elected ARA. Appointed Professor of Sculpture, Royal College of Art. Moved back to London.

Awarded CBE. Commissioned for a large plaster group (first called Leisure and later London Pride) for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

London Pride shown at the South Bank Festival of Britain Exhibition.

Elected RA. London Pride shown at Antwerp Biennale.

Died in London, July 22.

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Kneeling Figure 1.

Kneeling Woman with a Bowl chalk, 1940s, estate stamp, 38 x 28 cm.

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Lady Dorothea Ashley Cooper

terracotta, 1935, inscribed Dobson, height 22 cm.

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Study for London Pride (Leisure 3)

unique bronze, 1933, inscribed

bronze, numbered ed 9, 2016

Dobson, height 66 cm.

[1950], estate stamp, foundry

Label inside - British Council,

stamp, height 28 cm.

Venice Biennale, 1940.

A commission from the sitter.

This portrait can be seen on the floor of Dobson’s bombed Manresa Road studio in a photograph taken during the war.

Lady Dorothea was the daughter of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 9th Earl of Shaftesbury.

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Rhoda unique bronze, 1930, inscribed

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Kneeling Torso

Dobson, height 51 cm.

bronze, c1928, inscribed Dobson,

Label inside - British Council Fine

Stamped AP, height 46 cm.

Arts Committee.

10. *available in bronze Study for Large Group 2 (Two Friends) terracotta, 1940, height 14 cm.

Closely related to Study for Large Group 1 but this version is signed unlike the casts of the first edition, signifying perhaps that this was intended as the final version.

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Squatting Female Figure with Pitcher bronze, 1944, stamped Dobson

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Standing Figure sanguine, chalk, estate stamp, 45.5 x 30.5 cm.

Estate, height 39 cm.

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Noni plaster for the 1938 bronze, height 33 cm.

The sitter was Joyce Addenbrook, a dancer at the Windmill Theatre.

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Reclining Female Nude plaster, c1942-3, height 15 cm.

21. *available in bronze.

Recumbent Nude plaster, 1925, height 8 cm.

15. *available in bronze Seated Nude on a Chair

18. *available in bronze Study for Woman with a Bowl

hand-coloured plaster, c1944-5,

hand-coloured plaster, 1940,

plaster, height 33 cm.

height 23 cm.

inscribed, Dobson, height 20 cm.

12. *available in bronze Study for The Fount

The maquette for Woman with a

Study for the life size The Fount

Bowl, 1954, a large piece in

1947-8, for James Archdale.

concrete currently on loan to

One of two cast plasters. The work appears to be intentionally incomplete and not unfinished, with the head of the nude missing.

Sheffield City Art Gallery.

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Reclining Nude Figure bronze, numbered ed 12, estate

16. *available in bronze Woman with Scroll hand-coloured plaster, c1952-3, height 23 cm.

stamp, foundry stamp, inscribed

19. *available in bronze Maquette for Squatting Female Figure with Pitcher putty, 1944, height 17 cm.

Dobson on base, 2016 [c1928],

22. *available in bronze Study for Persephone 1 terracotta, 1935, height 13 cm.

The first study for the monumental figure of Persephone, intended for the new Bexhill Pavillion. It was never fully realised, possibly

height 33 cm.

because of WW2.

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Study for Large Group 1 polychrome plaster, 1940,

14. *available in bronze Freedom from Fear terracotta, c1941, height 10 cm.

One of several preparatory drawings and sculptures for figures intended for Waterloo Bridge, then being rebuilt by Giles Gilbert Scott.

height 14 cm.

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First Portrait of Auriol Salaman unique terracotta, c1934, inscribed Dobson, height 38 cm.

Auriol Salaman was an assistant in Dobson's Manresa Road studio.

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Persephone watercolour & gouache, 1930s, signed, 62.4 x 47.5 cm.

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Woman with Bowl

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Study for Steuben Glass 15

chalk and pastel,

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Study for Sculpture - Two Figures

chalk, estate stamp verso with the

chalk & pencil, 38 x 28 cm.

38 x 28 cm.

chalk, 56 x 38 cm.

signature of Anne Garvey nĂŠe

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Bather with Towel

Dobson, Frank Dobson's daughter, 38 x 28 cm.

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Large Trees watercolour, gouache & pen, 57 x 80 cm.

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Farm with Rain Cloud and Radiowave gouache, ink and chalk, 1942, signed, 49.5 x 64.7 cm.

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Landscape 31.

Woman Reclining

watercolour & gouache, 1943, signed, 44.5 x 55.8 cm.

sanguine chalk, 1940, signed, 35.5 x 50.7 cm.

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The Red House 26.

Portrait of Anne sanguine, black chalk & pencil, 1940s, estate stamp, 38 x 28 cm.

watercolour & gouache, 1940s, 45 x 56 cm.

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Standing Woman sanguine, chalk, 1943, signed, 35.7 x 25.7 cm.

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Romantic, Drawing for Cat.121 watercolour & gouache, 1935, signed, 61.5 x 56.7 cm.

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Kent Landscape chalk and pastel, estate stamp verso with the signature of Anne Garvey nĂŠe Dobson, Frank Dobson's daughter, 28 x 38.2 cm.

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Landscape with Tree chalk and pastel, estate stamp, 28 x 38 cm.

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Crouching Nude with Bird 39.

Reclining Figure

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Seated Nude

pencil & charcoal, 1947, signed,

chalk, 48 x 31.4 cm.

sanguine, black and white chalk, estate stamp, 23.8 x 31 cm.

48 x 31 cm.

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Farm Buildings, Vicarage, Newtown, Wales watercolour & gouache, 1940, signed, 35.3 x 45 cm.

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Dark Trees and Sunlight pastel, 31.7 x 24 cm.

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Woman with Fish sanguine & black chalk, estate stamp verso with the signature of Anne Garvey nĂŠe Dobson, Frank Dobson's daughter, 56 x 38.3 cm.

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Seated Group (Three figures with a baby) pastel & chalk, 56 x 76 cm.

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Woman with Towel pencil, watercolour & gouache, 1943, signed, 57 x 39 cm.

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Oast Houses watercolour & gouache, 45 x 56 cm.

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Trees watercolour & gouache, 1943, signed, 44.5 x 56 cm.

Augustus John, Constantin Brancusi, Frank Owen Dobson, by unknown photographer, circa 1925

Goldmark Gallery 14 Orange Street Uppingham Rutland LE15 9SQ 01572 821424 goldmarkart.com

With grateful thanks to Marcus Keith-Jopp and Gillian Jason for their invaluable assistance.

Text Š Andrew Lambirth 2016 Art photographs: Christian Soro Sculpture photographs: Jay Goldmark Design: Porter/Goldmark ISBN 978-1-909167-35-3 June 2016

frontispiece: Frank Dobson, late 1920s, courtesy the Dobson Estate

Frank Dobson . . . was a sculptor of immense integrity and vision, with a feeling for the female form that seemed to wrest it out of the earth and make its very earthiness not only monumental but sublime.

I would call him a great sculptor; certainly one of England’s greatest.

Duncan Grant

front cover: Reclining Nude Figure back cover: Study for London Pride (Leisure 3)

goldmark Uppingham, Rutland