Goldmark 01

summer 2016

goldmark

Price ÂŁ10

goldmarkart.com 01572 821424

g summer 2016 It’s been a really busy year for us, with some very exciting exhibitions. And for the future, more projects than we can count; some great shows, new films, books and music; and, as always, a steady stream of wonderful things awaiting their new homes.

We hope you enjoy our summer offering.

Contents 2

Julian Trevelyan.

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5 Reasons Why We Love Artists’ Posters.

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John Tunnard.

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How To Start Collecting Ceramics.

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Prunella Clough.

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Buying Art For Under £1000: 6 Print Suites.

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Alistair Grant.

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Roderic Barrett.

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Urban Art.

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Henry Moore.

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A Brief History Of Japanese Ceramics.

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Contemporary Lithographs.

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Lee Kang-hyo.

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Alfred Cohen.

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Frank Dobson.

goldmark

Words by Max Waterhouse

Orange Street

except Frank Dobson essay © Andrew Lambirth.

Uppingham

Photographs by Jay Goldmark, Vicki Uttley & Christian Soro

Rutland

except page 56, courtesy the Dobson estate

LE15 9SQ

and pages 2, 45, 53, unknown.

01572 821424

Design by Porter/Goldmark, July 2016

goldmarkart.com

ISBN 978-1-909167-36-0

Julian Trevelyan A remarkable body of graphic work

An artist and printmaker with a keen eye for graphic invention, Julian Trevelyan was a major unsung figure behind the British etching revolution of the 1960s. A Surrealist in his youth, the magic of dreams and the subconscious never truly left his work. In his later prints of ostensibly ordinary, mundane scenes set in rural and industrial landscapes can be found a powerful imagination that frequently transformed the everyday into the other-worldly.

Born in 1910, Trevelyan began life in an academic family: his father was a classical scholar and poet, his uncle a historian, and his grandfather a writer and Liberal politician who had been knighted for his civil service. Unsurprisingly, Trevelyan showed equal promise as a young man and was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge to read English Literature where, under the tutelage of Wittgenstein, he first encountered the dream theories of Surrealism.

Initially experimenting with his own art after being exposed to the work of contemporary French Surrealist painters, Trevelyan exhibited his first work with the London Group in 1929 before leaving Cambridge for the bohemian streets of Paris, renting an apartment in Montparnasse with the thought of becoming a full-time artist.

Despite early success, it wasn’t until 1931 when he joined Stanley Hayter’s famous print workshop Atelier 17 (a name Trevelyan provided later in 1933) that he received any formal training. Under the guidance of Hayter, Trevelyan developed an acute understanding of printmaking, and especially of etching. Hayter’s atelier provided a heady

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environment for a young up-and-comer: colourful artists came and went as graphic innovation and experimentation was constantly underway. The etching processes Trevelyan was shown were entirely alien to him, and radically different from any work that had been done before in the medium. The skills he acquired from Hayter and his assistants would underpin a lifetime dedicated to ink and the acid bath.

The atelier also offered Trevelyan acquaintances with a host of extraordinary artists working in printmaking at the time. During this period he was introduced to the abstract artist Alexander Calder (who rented the house next door) and fellow etcher Anthony Gross, as well as working alongside the great figures of Ernst, Kokoschka, Miró, Masson, and Picasso. Though Trevelyan’s work was still experimental, with their influence and expertise he began to develop his own unique style, incorporating everyday objects and scenes in his prints and portraying them with an unusual childlike quality.

In early 1934 Trevelyan returned to England, though he continued to rely on technical advice from Hayter through correspondence. A year later he had set up his etching studio at Durham Wharf in Hammersmith, where he remained until his death in 1988. At home in his own studios, he trialled and developed new methods of etching, especially in the use of bright colour, whilst also producing occasional lithographs and continuing to draw and paint.

Though still utterly involved with the printing processes he had learnt

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in Paris, by 1938 Surrealism had run its course and Trevelyan felt moved to resign from the English branch of the movement. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he reunited with Hayter once again as part of the Industrial Camouflage Research Unit, putting his printmaker’s eye for detail and precision to work in designing and applying camouflage patterns.

In 1942 Trevelyan was posted to Africa and the Middle East to research desert camouflage; though severe depression after his return would see him invalided on the recommendation of a psychiatric officer, time spent travelling in the exotic surroundings of Cairo and Lagos would later influence much of his work, in which the landscapes and wildlife of India and the African plains would feature heavily.

After the war from 1955-63 Trevelyan worked at the Royal College of Art, where he was made Head of the Etching Department. With immense enthusiasm for his work and the desire to share his knowledge with others as Hayter had done with him, Trevelyan became a hugely influential teacher. Today he is considered by many to have been one of the major driving forces behind the etching revolution in the art schools of the 1960s and his numerous innovations spurred on notable students to produce work in the medium, including the young David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, and Norman Ackroyd, arguably its foremost users in the latter half of the 20th century.

Trevelyan’s own etching work in this later period of his life is characterised by combinations of simple forms and bold uses of

1. Aigues Mortes, £1250 2. Jets, £1500

colour, something that had been previously lacking in the genre where the greys, browns, and sepia tones of traditional aquatint were the established norm. While his later works were often more representational, depicting harbour scenes, streets and architectural monuments, or figures at work and moving through landscapes, their simple and stylised depiction lends them a magical air that harks back to his surreal and abstract compositions of the early 1930s.

In 1963, after suffering a sudden brain infection, Trevelyan lost nearly all his capacity for speech and retired from his teaching post. After several courses of speech-therapy, he made a swift recovery and turned once more to printmaking. Though no longer part of the Royal College staff, he sustained his love of education through the publication in the same year of his book Etching: Modern Methods of Intaglio Printmaking, now regarded as a key text for students of modern printmaking and graphics.

A founding member of the Printmakers’ Council in London, a later fellow of the Royal College and Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts, Trevelyan died in 1988, leaving behind him an enormous legacy in the world of art education and a remarkable body of graphic work constituting around 400 individual prints. An artist of consummate skill and power, his work is worthy of reexamination.

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3. Harbour, £2000 4. Outside Kampala, £1275 5. Palazzo Pitti, £1650

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6. Tom Among the Flowers, £1500

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7. Hay Cart, £1450 8. Duomo, £1650 9. Les Baux, £1200 10. Amsterdam, £1250

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5 Reasons Why We Love Artists’ Posters For some time now at the gallery we’ve been advocating artists’ posters as a great way to own affordable works by the very best.

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Many of the leading 20th century artists enjoyed designing their own exhibition posters, often in the form of original lithographs printed by some of the great Parisian print ateliers such as the Mourlot Frères studio.

While the poster, by nature, is ephemeral and mint copies are rare, they remain a relatively inexpensive way to buy original prints by artists like Picasso and Matisse and are hugely flexible to display, working in harmony with a broad range of other artworks, styles, and interior settings.

1. They’re Modern

2. They’re Different

One of the things we love about artists’ posters is how fresh and modern they feel.

Most posters of this kind were produced in the 1950s and ‘60s during a golden age of graphic design when the ‘adman’ was king.

Artists’ posters encapsulate an aesthetic that feels as alive and relevant today as it did when they were first issued.

Something about the combination of original art and graphic elements also lends the poster a slicker, less ‘stuffy’ feel, allowing them to hang as easily in an informal creative office as they would on your upstairs landing. We find they sit equally well alongside paintings, prints and photographs as they do other posters too, and complement modern designer furniture effortlessly.

When you buy an artists’ poster, you’re not just investing in an artwork – you’re buying something that was the result of a unique partnership between artist and printmaker and that captures the essence of that collaboration.

Artists were closely involved not just in the reproduction of their artwork but in the graphic design and layout, from choices of typography and colour to designing new images specifically for the exhibition poster itself.

Artists’ posters thus offer a very different and rewarding insight into the artist’s mind – as a designer, as well as a creator – and one that won’t be as evident in their other work as it is in this special medium.

Here are 5 reasons why we think an artists’ poster should hang in everyone’s home.

11. (opposite) Raoul Dufy, £550 12. Nicolas de Staël, £950 13. Joan Miró, £650 14. Roger Bezombes, £375

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3. They’re Generous

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One of the most obvious but most overlooked aspects of the poster is its shape and size. Because posters were designed with a specific function in mind and had to be big and interesting enough to catch a viewer’s eye, they’re invariably pretty sizable.

Where an etching or a linocut by the same artist for the same price might be half the size, a poster is almost always going to offer bigger ‘bang for your buck’ than other print media, making them a brilliant purchase for newly graduated students or first home buyers with plenty of blank wall space to fill.

There’s something to be said for the functional aspect of the poster too. Posters were designed to be attractive. They brought visitors to exhibitions because they looked good – they were well proportioned and featured exciting designs and colours – and they left you wanting to see more.

A poster’s always going to look great on your wall; that’s what they were made to do.

are beginning to catch the collecting bug, we feel artists’ posters are a no-brainer.

5. They’re Not Expensive Not only do posters look good, they’re also not going to break the bank. While the occasional, very special signed poster may tip towards the thousands of pounds, most artists’ posters can be bought for anywhere between £300 and £1300 depending on their rarity, condition and collectability.

Original paintings and sculptures by artists like Picasso, Matisse, Miró and Braque can fetch many millions of pounds in auction houses. While those prices remain stratospherically out of reach for most of us, artists’ posters offer the chance of owning an original work of art by hugely important artists for mere fractions of those prices.

4. They’re Collectible Unsurprisingly, artists’ posters have always been popular and in recent years have become incredibly sought after. Their appealing design, relative scarcity, and their built-in history and contextual background with the exhibition they were attached to have meant that posters continue to entice longtime buyers around the world.

Because of their distinctive feel and tone, with original artwork and graphic design working in tandem, posters look especially good when put alongside one another and make for wonderful collectible sets on their own, as well as special works within artistspecific collections.

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15. Fernand Léger, £750

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16. Georges Braque, £950

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17. Pablo Picasso, £750

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18. Ben Nicholson, £550 19. Paul Nash, £950 20. David Hockney, £750

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21. Sonia Delaunay £375

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22. Fernand Léger, £1750

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23. Marc Chagall, £750 24. Pablo Picasso, £1500 25. Henri Matisse, £1750

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26. Bernard Buffet, £850

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JOHN TUNNARD

Completed in 1962, John Tunnard’s mysterious Screen reveals a host of influences that would inform the artist’s final works throughout the 1960s.

Across the 1930s and ‘40s Tunnard established his reputation as a Neo-Romantic painter and printmaker, producing landscapes inhabited by biomorphic forms and surreal sculptural elements that drew inspiration from the work of contemporaries Julian Trevelyan and Henry Moore.

But with the technological advances made

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in the following decades, new shapes and designs began to enter his visual vocabulary: space-age machinery, intricately composed semi-mechanical insects, and extraterrestrial environments.

Later exhibited at the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1967, Screen presents these fresh influences in Tunnard’s typically elusive style.

Two ‘screens’ – televisions, computers, projectors – display colour in a stark room, parallel lines hinting at a depth of perspective.

Within each screen, black forms remain abstract and unidentifiable: figures with faces, perhaps, or bizarre bug-like creatures?

Though demand for Tunnard’s work declined after his death in 1971, during his lifetime his paintings were widely admired. The great collector Peggy Guggenheim recalled how Tunnard once showed us his gouaches, which were as musical as Kandinsky’s, as delicate as Klee’s, and as gay as Miró’s.

Just last month a Tunnard oil painting sold for over £70,000 at auction. We think this gouache represents remarkable value.

27. John Tunnard, Screen, £15,000

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How to Start Collecting Ceramics At the gallery we’ve been using hand-thrown pots to serve and eat our communal lunch for years and it makes every meal here feel that bit more special.

Good food looks better on good pottery; like tea from your favourite mug, it tastes better too.

Buying, owning and using ceramics is an experience that can change your life.

Whether it’s eating food from beautiful plates or seeing a woodfired vase on your windowsill, the recurring pleasure and contentment a handmade pot can bring every day is unmatched.

If you’ve ever seen our beautiful ceramics online or in our gallery and wondered where or how to start your collection, here’s a little introduction to help point you in the right direction.

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1. Buy Something Small If you’re buying art for the first time, the single most intimidating thing is the price. When the thought of bills and bank statements weigh down on your head, it can be difficult to justify making that first purchase.

One of the best things about buying pots is that the entry level for new collectors is much, much easier on the pocket. From a world-class maker you can buy a huge range of handmade pieces for anywhere between £15 – £150.

You won’t feel quite so guilty about pulling the trigger on a £20 cup or a £60 dish. And as you get to know your smaller pots better and catch the collecting bug, you’ll feel much more clued-up and comfortable about what you like when it comes to picking out bigger statement pieces to add to your ceramics collection.

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2. Buy Something Functional Almost every pot we have ever stocked at Goldmark has been functional, and a very large proportion of them domestic wares: mugs and jugs, lidded jars, breakfast bowls and many, many others.

There’s a reason for that. When you buy a piece of functional pottery you are buying something that becomes a part of your daily routines, that offers an instant return on the money you gave up for it and an immediate connection with you as you use it.

28. Mike Dodd, Stanley, £55 29. Phil Rogers, Small Bottle, £125

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30. Phil Rogers, 80 Guinomis, £6000

Functional pots enrich our lives, bringing a little beauty into daily activities like making a cup of tea or dishing up dinner. Make your first ceramics purchases something you will use every day and they might just change the way you live.

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4. Use It!

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3. Buy Something by Another Potter When you find something you like, it can be hard to branch out; why risk investing in something new when you know what you already enjoy?

We know that feeling (you wouldn’t believe how many of us at the gallery have said we could live just with pots made by our Danish potter Anne Mette Hjortshøj). It’s tempting when you’re starting a collection to stick to what you like and know.

But if you can, try making your second or third purchase something by another potter: if you’ve bought a slipware dish, try an ash-glazed mug; follow a porcelain box with a shino jar.

Living with and using work by different potters will mean you end up finding and loving things in your pots you might never have noticed, and you’ll quickly hone your eye for future purchases (you’d be surprised how well different pots sit side by side on a table or shelf, too).

It’s also a great way to start finding out what forms of each potter work best for you – whose handles fit your hand, whose glazes feel just right, or whose cups you just can’t put down.

This is probably the most important point of all when buying a new pot and the one we stress most to new customers.

Whether you end up becoming a discerning ceramics collector or never buy a pot again, use your pots. The more you do, the more you’ll see and appreciate in their surfaces – that slight blush of orange, that tiny blue drip – and the more joy you will get out of something that has been made by a hand for a hand, not just churned out of a machine.

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31. Clive Bowen, One Pint Jug, £75 32. Anne Mette Hjortshøj, Small Oval Dish, £75 33. Jean-Nicolas Gérard, Soup Tureen, £265

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34. Anne Mette Hjortshøj, Teabowl, £145

35. Clive Bowen, Square Dish, £295

36. Clive Bowen, Large Storage Jar, £575

37. Jean-Nicolas Gérard, Medium Vase, £285

38. Jean-Nicolas Gérard, Lidded Jar, £245

39. Jean-Nicolas Gérard, Small Platter, £110

40. Jim Malone, Big Bowl, £600

41. Jim Malone, Lidded Bowl, £495

42. Jim Malone, Teapot, £275

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43. Lisa Hammond, Small Leaning Jug, £215

44. Lisa Hammond, Large Teapot, £200

46. Mike Dodd, Storage Jar, £88

47. Nic Collins, Round Bottomed Bowl, £200

45. Mike Dodd, Small Oval Bottle, £195 48. Nic Collins, Lidded Jar, £250

49. Phil Rogers, Yunomi, £110

50. Phil Rogers, Dish, £265

51. Phil Rogers, Bowl, £245

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PRUNELLA CLOUGH Complex, enigmatic, idiosyncratic: the critically acclaimed work of Prunella Clough was much like the artist herself.

A student of the Chelsea School of Art in the late 1930s, Clough’s early development was, like many fellow British artists of her generation, put on hold with the interruption of the Second World War. Clough contributed her exceptional artistic skills as a military cartographer and engineer’s draughtsman, her naturally exacting hand and eye lending themselves to the strict disciplines of mapping and mechanical blueprints.

Clough’s wartime experiences handling

technical equipment may have had an immense impact on her later work as an artist. Her subject matter became the overlooked and unconsidered elements of mechanized urban environments: lorry drivers, dockland cranes, power plants, and industrial estates. Though from the 1960s and onwards her work became increasingly abstract, her heavily textured images continued to draw upon these figurative references as she sought to find beauty in ‘ugly’ things.

In this selection of prints and collages by Clough, that intent is self-evident. In Blue Bugs, a composition built around oil and

ink-stained card and rough, hemp-like paper, Clough makes us reexamine a world of colour and texture in the disused and discarded as ethereal blue wash mixes with dirty browns and beiges. Her etching prints – be they Pimento pepper still lifes or abstract forms – celebrate the grain of scratched black lines, the acid-bitten pits that litter her metal plates.

As early in her career as 1949, Clough said to an interviewer that she wanted, above all, to [say] a small thing edgily. Her extraordinary art - difficult, authentic, and infinitely rewarding - did just that.

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52. Blue Bugs, £4000

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53. Did You Say Stony Moon?, £3500 54. Untitled, £650 55. Pimentoes, £550

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Buying Art for Under £1000: 6 Print Suites As a gallery that specialises in the great print suites of the 20th century, we know a thing or two about fantastic but affordable prints.

Thanks to the master French and British ateliers of the last 100 years, many of the world’s greatest artists have produced series of works, often at the very height of their artistic powers, which we can now buy and own at minute fractions of the cost of an original oil painting.

In this article we highlight 6 of our very favourite print suites, in a variety of artistic styles, whose individual prints you can pick up for under £1000.

1. Marc Chagall The Bible Series The Russian-born painter and printmaker Marc Chagall (1887-1985) now has a deserved reputation as one of the 20th century’s best-loved artists.

A prolific artist, his work frequently drew on imagery from Russian folklore and memories of a Jewish childhood.

In 1930 Ambroise Vollard, the famed Paris art dealer, commissioned Chagall to produce a series of illustrations based upon Bible stories.

Religious iconography and biblical tales had remained a continual source of imagery throughout Chagall’s life; here those elements were brought to the fore.

Chagall travelled to Palestine in search of inspiration, but the project was a lengthy one, interrupted by Vollard’s sudden death in a car accident and the advent of World War II, and the series was not eventually completed until the early 1950s.

Writing on the thought behind the series, Chagall revealed his love for the holy text: Ever since my earliest youth I have been fascinated by the Bible. I have always believed that it is the greatest source of poetry of all time…The Bible is an echo of nature, and this I have endeavoured to transmit.

The first lithographs, printed by the great French lithographers Mourlot Frères, were published in 1956. They were met with such critical praise that Chagall produced a further set, published in 1960.

Today, they represent some of our most sought-after prints.

Chagall’s Bible Suite lithographs start at just £350 and range to £950.

2. David Hockney The Brothers Grimm Suite David Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937. A brilliant draughtsman, he became the best-known British artist of his generation and had

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gained international success by his mid-20s.

Today, he is known widely as one of Britain’s most revered painters and printmakers, famous for his thick-rimmed spectacles and lilting Yorkshire accent.

Amongst his many notable print works, his etchings of the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm are perhaps his most celebrated.

Produced in 1969, the suite includes prints from six of the Grimm tales: The Little Sea Hare, Rapunzel, The Boy Who Left Home to Learn Fear, Fundevogel, Old Rinkrank, and Rumpelstilzchen.

Possessing their maker’s unmistakable wit and gentle sense of humour, these etchings established Hockney as a young master of the medium and remain iconic to this day.

While signed Grimm etchings sell upwards of £2000, unsigned edition prints can be found ranging between £350 and £950.

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3. Eric Ravilious High Street

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Born in 1903, Eric Ravilious was one of Britain’s best-loved illustrators and graphic designers, as well as being an accomplished painter and printmaker in his own right.

In the 1920s he made his early reputation with wood-engravings, but by 1936 had started making lithographs and taking commissions for book illustration and jacket design whilst continuing to paint the southern English countryside.

High Street, a suite of 24 coloured lithographs, was commissioned in 1938 by the publishing arm of Country Life magazine.

Featuring a beautiful range of illustrations of high street shops (some, such as the ‘Submarine Engineers’, humorously fanciful), the lithographs were published as a playful children’s book introducing young people to the store fronts of British towns and cities.

Though not intended as a limited edition, the plates for Ravilious’ High Street lithographs were destroyed during the London Blitz, restricting the number produced to 2000 copies and making available prints relatively scarce.

Perfectly encapsulating the enchanting world of British illustration in the 1920s and ’30s, these lithographs are now highly collectible.

The High Street lithographs can be found here priced at £450.

4. Henri Matisse The Last Works A giant of the art world, Henri Matisse was one of the most influential and celebrated artists of the 20th century.

Famous for producing work with bold, fluid colour, he is now best known for his papiers découpés paper cutouts (as seen in the 2014 58.

56. Marc Chagall, David and Bathsheba, £950, Paradise I, £850 57. David Hockney, Riding Around on a Cooking Spoon, £500 58. Eric Ravilious, Letter Makers, £450, Saddler and Harness Maker, £450

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Tate exhibition), huge collages made from pieces of paper that Matisse cut with scissors after major operations in the early 1940s left him unable to paint.

In 1954, the same year of Matisse’s death, it was decided that lithographs should be produced after the great last cutout works making these collages more widely available.

Reduced in size so that they could be hung on a wall at home, the suite, entitled The Last Works of Henri Matisse, proved to be immensely popular following his death and remains as highly sought after as ever.

These lithographs are available from as little as £250 and range up to £950.

5. Sir John Tenniel Illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass Born in London in 1820, Sir John Tenniel was the principal political cartoonist for England’s Punch magazine for over 50 years.

Today, he is better known for having illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, widely considered to be his finest and most enduring achievement.

Tenniel originally drew his illustrations directly onto boxwood blocks, cut by master engravers. So fine were his lines, however, that the engravers feared the blocks would deteriorate before the full publishing run could be printed. Instead, metal electrotype copies were made to withstand the greater numbers of printing runs, but at a loss of definition and tone.

But in 1985 the original wood blocks were rediscovered and a new print edition was organised: 250 copies would be printed from these

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original blocks, the very first time they had been used, after which no further sets would be commissioned.

Beautifully designed and exceptionally printed, these miniature illustrations must also rank among the world’s best-known children’s images.

Prints from the 1985 edition printed from the original blocks are available from Goldmark and range between £75 and £450.

6. Fernand Léger Cirque Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Fernand Léger made an enormous contribution to the world of modern art, influencing key movements such as Cubism and the use of the artist’s poster in advertising.

Léger was himself especially interested in the circus, and the themes of acrobatic performers, clowns and high-top performances feature heavily in his work, none more so than the Cirque suite.

Léger began work on the series of lithographs after time spent in New York, returning to France in 1946 to start work translating his drawings and sketches into the full-blooded colour images of the suite.

Completed in 1950, just five years before Léger’s death, they embody the artist’s love of the circus’ theatre, its sights and sounds, characters and colours, and the bright glare of its spotlights.

Lithographs from Cirque vary in price, with many between £500 and £950.

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59. Sir John Tenniel, The Duchess, £350 60. Fernand Léger, Cirque (67), £700

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61. (opposite) Henri Matisse, La Perruche et la Sirène, £750

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Marc Chagall 62. Solomon, £950

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63. Adam and Eve and the Forbidden Fruit, £750 64. David and his Harp, £950 65. David and Absalom, £950

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David Hockney 66. The Bell Tower, £850 67. Rapunzel, Rapunzel Let Down Your Hair, £950 68. The Princess Searching, £500 69. The Princess in her Tower, £750 70. Cold Water about to Hit the Prince, £750 71. The Princess After Many Years in the Glass Mountain, £450

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Eric Ravilious 72. Pharmaceutical Chemist, £450 73. Restaurant and Grill Room, £450 74. Cheesemonger, £450

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75. Amusement Arcade, £450 76. Submarine Engineer, £450 77. Fireworks, £450

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Henri Matisse 78. Végétaux, £750 79. Nu Bleu I, £450 80. Poissons Chinois, £400 81. La Piscine - Panel B, £650 82. Lierre, £350 83. Apollon, £500

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Sir John Tenniel

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84. Look up, speak nicely, £225

85. The chessmen were walking about, £125

86. The King and Queen of Hearts, £450

87. Tut, tut, child!, £250

88. What have you got to say for yourself?, £350

89. The Queen turned crimson, £300

90. He's in prison now, being punished, £175

91. She was in a little dark shop, £300

92. The Hatter hurriedly left, £275

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Fernand Léger 93. Cirque (60), £950 94. Cirque (102), £950 95. Cirque (101), £950

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96. Cirque (50), £850

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ALISTAIR GRANT With its swirling blue sky, pink peeling buildings and sluggish waters, Alistair Grant’s Vienna brings the modern-day Viennese canals to life with painterly gusto.

After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1951, Grant returned to the school in ‘55 as a tutor in the printmaking department. A highly skilled practitioner with an experimental streak, frequently combining multiple graphic processes in the same work, he taught generations of young artists over his 35 years in the department, of which he later became Head, until his retirement in 1990.

Though he was known by most for his extraordinary teaching record, he regularly exhibited paintings too at the Royal Academy, and as en elected member of the London Group and the Royal Society of British Artists.

Painted in the mid-1960s, Vienna represents Grant on the very cusp of his transition to the abstract, having worked predominantly with figurative subjects in the preceding postwar years. While his tumultuous sky and slow-rolling river owe an obvious debt to Van Gogh’s Starry Night and the late works of Monet, in the simplified waterfront buildings and their blurred windows and walls Grant was moving closer and closer towards the colour-form abstraction that would define the latter half of his career.

An artist whose work has often been overshadowed by his immense contribution to education, the strength of Grant’s painting demonstrates a reputation deserving of reevaluation.

97. Alistair Grant, Vienna, £9500

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DON QUIXOTE

RODERIC BARRETT It is hard to believe that Roderic Barrett’s Don Quixote was painted when the artist was in his 20s. What many artists would happily call a career-defining masterpiece, Barrett produced just as he had begun to spread his wings.

Born in Colchester, 1920, Barrett was a precocious young artist, gaining a place at the Central School of Art and Design in London at the tender age of 15, despite being too young officially to apply. With an incisive draughtsmanship and a natural aptitude for graphic media, he began his career as a wood engraver – the best engraver his tutor, John Farleigh, confessed he had ever seen – before turning to oil painting before the Second World War. A conscientious objector, Barrett spent the pre and post-war period developing a distinct and evocative style of painting.

Employing a muted palette, his carefully layered subjects reflected the human condition in its most testing times: weathered by poverty, enduring illness and oppression, or mourning the loved and lost.

In Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a text that embodied these conflicting elements of hope and nihilism, Barrett found a powerful protagonist that he would return to multiple times over a period of years. Quixote’s mythological status and his steadfast idealism in a cruel and unforgiving world made him an apt tragic metaphor in light of the conflict that had shaken the world in the early 1940s.

Painted on the reverse of a student day canvas (pictured in Buckman p.18), Barrett’s brushwork in Don Quixote is undeniably

brilliant. Methodically building up a palette of blues, greens, and greys, he creates a dreamy, dusky backdrop for his melancholic knight and the distant shadow that echoes him on the horizon.

As always with Barrett’s work, however, a symbol of hope remains in the centre of the painting: a solitary pink flower, set off against the sunless landscape.

David Buckman, the preeminent expert on Barrett’s work, wrote that emotional honesty and hard work characterise his art. In this early canvas, subdued yet sublime, that evocative power is clear to see.

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98. Roderic Barrett, Don Quixote, £12,000

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s t a r d A l s o n s t a s e e b a v e r U is str sel m e e h t th

Over 2000 years ago in the ancient cities of Egypt, Rome and Greece, graffiti and street art were carved and scrawled onto the walls of market-places, public houses and brothels. They emerged in places of political disenchantment and social unrest. In their anonymity, they represented the word of the Everyman, of the voiceless many; today, those marks survive as important relics of past social consciousness.

Modern-day Urban Art has evolved a great deal since. Ancient graffiti was often direct and personal: a message from a jilted lover, curses placed on adulterous partners, or a smear against an unpopular

statesman. By contrast, today’s urban artists make images and slogans that speak to a more general sense of disenfranchisement.

Their message is often international, condemning the state surveillance in modern democracies, for example, or railing against the perceived military aggression of the western world. In times past, messages were directed at the lying politician, the conniving merchant; today, the attack is against governments and corporations, and the reach of their images is global.

Despite this internationality, however, a key theme of Urban Art remains its sense of place. As the name

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would suggest, the heart of the genre is in cities and the streets, taking art away from its traditional contexts of galleries and museums and placing it in the wider public sphere. For artists working as activists for particular causes or as saboteurs undermining corporate advertisements, making art on city walls and buildings is a way of reaching a wider audience and of reclaiming urban spaces from governments and multinationals.

But there is also a sense in much Urban Art of merging art with our surroundings, of fusing together these images and the spaces we inhabit. Unlike canvases that can be shipped around the world, street art becomes part of the city it is made in; like the cave paintings of ancient man, it unites art and environment such that they become one.

The origins of contemporary Urban Art lie in the political and cultural revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s when modern graffiti culture first found its roots.

Street Art in the following decades carried a distinctly political bent, and this

undercurrent of subversion still runs strong in today’s Urban Artists.

Blek Le Rat, born Xavier Prou, was one of the earliest to take up the mantle and pioneered the use of life-size stencils to make his images. Making his first street paintings in 1981, he adopted the moniker of the rat – the only free animal in the city – and was soon spraying stencils across the streets of Paris with politically charged antiestablishment imagery.

With the rising notoriety of artists like Banksy in the last 10 years, Urban Art has since exploded into the mainstream art market and constitutes a large part of today’s popular culture. Currently, there are as many styles and socio-political or cultural motivations within Urban Art as there are artists working in the genre. Some, such as New York’s Swoon, are distinctly socially minded, while others, such as London’s D*Face, actively embrace and undermine aspects of the mainstream, collaborating with well-known companies and music artists or incorporating major cultural icons in their work.

With access to modern print ateliers, many of these artists have also been able to fund ongoing street projects through sales of their prints, simultaneously keeping the core principles of Urban Art alive and allowing prospective buyers to purchase works without the necessary removal of original pieces painted on city walls. With Urban Art occupying such a prominent space in the current public consciousness, these street artworks are seen increasingly as genuine works of art, rather than acts of vandalism, and garner significant critical attention.

At the heart of all Urban Art, whatever its cultural or ethical flavour, is a desire to communicate with everyday people, a desire that harks back to those first messages crudely hacked into ancient stone walls and which has been perpetuated ever since.

Today’s Urban Artists create works that aim to engage with, confront, and subvert ideas in a way that ultimately promotes dialogue amongst the wider public – an objective worthy of any art genre.

99. (opposite) Swoon, Argentina, £950 100. D*Face, Statue of Liberty, £995 101. Nick Walker, A New Dawn, £750

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103. Mule, A Bullet in the Hand, £295

106. D*Face, Street Improvements I & II, £500 each

109. Brian Adam Douglas, After Goya, £850

104. Candice Tripp, Can You Smell Burning, £550

107. Blek Le Rat, Homeless in Paris, £1750

110. Blek Le Rat, David With Kalashnikoff, £850

105. Blek Le Rat, Dream But Don't Sleep, £850

108. Nick Walker, The Morning After - Hollywood, £1250

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102. (opposite) Jago, The Kiss, £245

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111.

HENRY MOORE circus etchings

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112.

Henry Moore’s High Wire Walkers and Circus Scenes remind us that, alongside a remarkable output of avant-garde sculpture, his skill as a printmaker undoubtedly helped establish him as the most celebrated British artist of his time.

Moore adored the circus, frequently attending high-top events throughout his life with a sketchbook and pen in hand. Tightrope walkers, acrobats, and contortionists were among his favourite performers, their balancing acts presenting him with new arrangements of figures and forms that offered fresh perspectives on the body in action.

In these two aquatint etchings, produced in 1975 after sketches completed in the mid ‘20s, we can see clearly how Moore’s graphic work and his sculpture interrelated and informed each other. Reduced to simple silhouettes, his wirewalkers are lent the same monumental forms as his reclining nude sculptures, their curved figures contrasting with the sharpness of the tightrope line.

Even at his most abstract, Moore remained fundamentally concerned with the natural design of the human form. In these intimate circus scenes, that fascination is brought to the fore.

Henry Moore 111. Circus Scenes, £3450 112. High Wire Walkers, £3450

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A Brief History of Modern Japanese Ceramics

Japan

Japan is home to the oldest known ceramics in the world. The story of Jomon pottery, the earliest examples of which date back some 1516,000 years ago, is strange and compelling: its creators formed their first clay vessels before their people had discovered the essential technologies of agricultural production and basic metallurgy. Its origins can be traced back to the same period in which the Shinto religion, Japan’s native faith, was born.

For Japan, the history of ceramics is the history of its belief systems, its cultural values, its wars and dynasties – to a greater or lesser extent, it is the history of its people. And yet, at the beginning of the 20th century, it looked as if Japan’s traditional ceramic production was becoming obsolete.

Extreme isolationism over the preceding centuries had had an immense impact upon the country’s ceramic industry. Shut off from cultural exchange with the world, save for the influx of teawares brought home by monks from China, ceramic spoils from invasion campaigns in Korea, and European traders peddling their earthenwares, Japanese potters were essentially left alone to their intense self-scrutiny. Heavily influenced by imported pottery, native makers constantly assessed and reassessed desirable qualities of glazes and firings in response to these new styles.

As potters gained influence navigating the strictures of the tea ceremony and the noble lords who dictated its ritual aesthetic, many of the styles of Japanese pottery we now know and celebrate – Iga, Shigaraki, Bizen, Shino, Oribe – emerged at specialist kilns, each one succeeding the next in popularity and promoting their work as the preeminent style befitting chanoyu and the ceremonies of the ‘Way of Tea’.

But by the 18th and 19th centuries, the world of international trade beckoned. The demand was for porcelain, and China had already opened its floodgates to Europe’s desires for blue and white ware.

Native porcelain works had risen in popularity since the late 1600s, and as industrialisation, urbanisation and the age of the machine reared its head in the late 19th and early 20th century, it seemed the diminishing fires of the traditional pottery kilns were to be extinguished altogether.

Had it not been for the extraordinary influence of the great potter Shoji Hamada, they may well have been. Born in 1894, Hamada studied at the Tokyo Institute of Technology before later meeting the British studio potter Bernard Leach and the critic and philosopher Soetsu Yanagi at an exhibition of Leach’s work in the city. Hamada had been one of a mere handful of pupils at the Tokyo Institute to have shown real interest in the past kilns of Japan. In an evening spent discussing the importance of handcraft, he and Leach quickly discovered a shared ideology.

After spending 3 years with Leach in St Ives, England, while Leach established his own pottery, Hamada returned to Japan in 1923 intent on building a workshop in Mashiko, a small village 60 miles north of Tokyo, where he would produce pots according to the folk-craft principles of the newly-formed mingei movement.

Mingei – meaning ‘folk arts’ – was the term coined by Yanagi to convey the essence of this emerging focus on the ‘old ways’ of making.

It incorporated a whole raft of values that stressed the importance of a potter’s locality, their working with natural resources sourced close to their workshop, and that their work – produced in anonymity, without mark or stamp – should ultimately be made for the masses to be used

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inexpensively in their daily lives.

Built on these utilitarian values, the mingei philosophy became a powerful driving force in tempting Japanese potters to return to their roots and the dormant old kilns. In part, the movement originated in and was sustained by the response to the brutal slaughter experienced throughout the First and Second World Wars.

In the early 1900s, all hopes were pinned on the future possibilities of industrial processes and the development of new machines. But after the indelible images of international mechanised warfare imprinted themselves on the public conscience, handmade pottery became one of a number of crafts through which it was believed society could reaffirm its humanity.

The Momoyama period (the latter half of the 15th century), particularly revered by historians for the quality of its wares and the first instances of Shino pottery, became the focal point for many makers who sought to revive the glazes, clay bodies and firing techniques of the past. As Hamada became ever more popular, his reputation gaining not just in Japan but overseas in Britain and the United States, more and more potters took up his challenge.

Mashiko, alongside older and more established kilns, quickly became a hotbed of ceramic production, and images of Hamada touring abroad in traditional garb or throwing long-established forms on his stick wheel soon garnered him a legendary status. His work, characterised by supremely proportioned forms and natural brushwork, was highly sought after, and by 1955 he had been designated a Living National Treasure.

But despite Hamada’s immense success in perpetuating the principles of mingei, with which he had become virtually synonymous,

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113. Ken Matsuzaki, Vase, £1100

116. Ken Matsuzaki, Vase, £750

114. Ken Matsuzaki, Yohen Vase, £1800

Water Container, £1650

115. Ken Matsuzaki, Vase, £1800

Vase, £750

Shoji Hamada and Bernard Leach

his work never fully conformed to the values of the movement. Though he seldom stamped his pots (a fact counterfeiters have exploited for the last 50 years), nonetheless they featured in major exhibitions and were sold for significant amounts of money to wealthy customers.

As influential as mingei was in stimulating a rediscovery of traditional techniques, and as attractive as its intellectual, ethical and aesthetic ideas seemed, many potters seduced by the movement needed more.

Creatively, the mingei philosophy was a dead-end; for those potters who had set their sights on making art, its dictums ultimately had to be left behind.

Since the time of Hamada’s great renaissance, modern Japanese ceramics has explored and enriched the space between these worlds – between age-old crafts and the folk-art ethos and the freedom of experimentation and expression. For today’s Japanese potters, tradition is understood not as the veneration of ashes but the passing on of the flame.

That flame now fires kilns that were at their height of production some 500 years ago, creating wares with the same tools and techniques but with a modern understanding and vision. Ken Matsuzaki, apprenticed to Shimaoka, the favoured apprentice of Hamada, continues to work from his forefathers’ Mashiko village but produces pots that bear little resemblance to the vessels of these past makers, save for their dynamic energy and their conviction of form.

Koichiro Isezaki, himself the son of current Living National Treasure Jun Isezaki, produces Bizen ware pots that channel the celebrations of pure clay and fire shared by his anagama kiln ancestors but which escape homage and pastiche through their torn edges and dramatic carving.

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117. Shinsaku Hamada, Yunomi, £370 118. Shinsaku Hamada, Lidded Box, £845 119. Tomoo Hamada, Chawan, £685

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These are just two potters from a long list of contemporaries – Masaaki Shibata, Kazuya Furutani, Ryotaro Kato and Tomoo Hamada, amongst many others – who have maintained the methods of the past while imbuing their ceramics with an awareness of the present.

Though the true history of Japanese ceramics is long and complex, fraught with political details and illuminated by a host of other important factors, what remains in these potters works, what was held at the core of Hamada’s pots and the mingei legacy, what can be found in the great pots of the Momoyama years and extends right back to those first mud bowls of the Jomon period, is a profound appreciation for the natural world.

Instilled in Japanese pottery throughout the ages has been an understanding of the spirituality of the material world that can be traced back to the earthly Shinto deities that inhabit every natural element: rivers, rocks, forests and mountains.

Pots, formed from earth, shaped with water, and hardened with fire and air, are elemental in every sense of the word. And though the Shinto religion of today may occupy a very different space in Japan’s public sphere, this fact – the specialness of all things natural and belonging to the earth – seems not to have escaped this country’s people.

This is the thread that unites Japanese ceramics, from its birth thousands of years ago to the kilns still firing today. And it is this connection that will continue to engage and inspire the potters of future generations.

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120. Ken Matsuzaki, Yohen Vase, £2500 121. Ken Matsuzaki, Yohen Vase, £1650 122. Kazuya Furutani, Two Chawans, £1365 & £1050 123. Ken Matsuzaki, Epigraphy Vase, £1800

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124. (opposite) Ken Matsuzaki, Yohen Vase, £2150

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125. Ken Matsuzaki, Big Dish, £6850 126. Kazuya Furutani, Tsukubai, £1370 127. Ryotaro Kato, Chawan, £1050 128. Ryotaro Kato, Handled Dish, £795 129. Tomoo Hamada, Mug, £145

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130. Koichiro Isezaki, Chawan, £1050

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131. Koichiro Isezaki, Chawan, £1270 132. Masaaki Shibata, Sake Cup, £140 133. Shinsaku Hamada, Yunomi, £370 134. Tomoo Hamada, Chawan, £685 135. Shinsaku Hamada, Chawan, £3700 136. Masaaki Shibata, Chawan, £740

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rarely signed

contemporary lithographs Featuring prints by the very crème-de-lacrème of British artists working in the 1920s and ‘30s, Contemporary Lithographs Ltd. remains one of the most celebrated art enterprises of the 20th century.

Published in 1937, the principle behind the series was simple: commission the best of Britain’s young artists and graphic designers to make auto-lithographs – where the plate is worked on directly by the artist, rather than reproducing a previously existing design – to be printed and sold at reasonable prices, generally to educational institutions, in an attempt to bring quality

art out of private homes and galleries and into public spaces.

Today, Contemporary Lithographs can be deemed an overwhelming success. Many of its images, such as Robert Medley’s exquisitely coloured In the Park or Barnett Freedman’s Charade, have become iconic, ranking among the artists’ best-known works. Beyond their essential ‘Art for the People’ purpose, these prints would inspire the next generation of young artists not just to look at good art but also to aspire to make it.

In the words of Ruth Artmonsky, expert

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historian of the great 20th century lithographic ventures, the Contemporary Lithographs were a landmark in British 20th century printmaking, a pioneer in raising the standards of aesthetic appreciation and, of the various lithographic series of the midcentury, are rated the best. .. by content, style and, above all, quality of printing.

Because of the nature of their social enterprise, signed lithographs from the series, such as those pictured here, are few and far between. Beautifully produced, highly original, and eminently collectible, they will continue to grace walls for years to come.

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137. (opposite) Barnett Freedman, Charade, signed, £2750 138. Edward Ardizzone, The Bus Stop, signed in plate, £1250

141. Randolph Schwabe, Greenwich Hospital, signed, £550

139. Clive Gardiner, Buckinghamshire Farm, signed, £1250

142. Robert Medley, In the Park, signed, £1250

140. Graham Sutherland, The Sick Duck, signed, £2000

143. H S Williamson, Bears at Tea, signed, £750

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lee kang-hyo In the past, I thought the important things were far away from me. So, I worked hard and thought hard every day in order to get to those things. But I soon realised these were actually close by. I was working to have a beautiful life.

Lee Kang-Hyo’s pots are not just beautiful ceramic objects: they are spiritual reflections of the natural world. They have special names – Mountain Water, Forest and The Sky – that hint at the inspirations behind their alternately calm and contemplative, dynamic and dramatic Punch’ong decoration.

Born in Seoul in 1961, Lee Kang-Hyo is widely regarded as one of the finest Korean potters working today. His work is rooted in the major Korean ceramic traditions of Onggi pottery – voluminous storage jars originally designed for holding fermented food – and Punch’ong decoration, where white slip is layered and brushed over grey clay.

Lee’s work derives its strength and energy from his unusual decorative techniques.

Dancing to the sounds of traditional Korean

music, he applies thick slips in a trance-like performance. Hurling, splashing, and sweeping the liquid clay onto his pot surfaces, initially with ladles, later with his bare hands, he remains totally abandoned to the rhythm of pounding drums.

Lee’s dedication to his decorative processes produces work that is, like its maker, supremely meditative. Scratched and splattered slipmarks on a Forest wall piece echo the dappled light of woodland trees; blushes of peach and cream-white on a Moon Jar reflect the luminescence of a full-moon in the early evening sky.

Both quiet and vital, powerful and with presence, Lee’s pots are the intimate results of his search for a beautiful life.

144. Moon Jar, £6600 145. Wall Piece, Mountain Water, £6600 146. Wall Piece, The Sky, £6600

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147. Wall Piece, Forest, £6600

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Criminally underappreciated, Cohen’s extraordinary

alfred cohen

work is now becoming increasingly sought after.

Resplendent in patchwork pantaloni and his magnificent red mask, Alfred Cohen’s Harlequin on Horseback resurrects the theatrical bravado of the Venetian commedia dell’arte in bold and brilliant colour.

An American-born artist who found his home in Europe, Cohen studied at the Art Institute of Chicago where he demonstrated serious promise. His progress briefly slowed by the outbreak of World War II, in 1949 he was awarded a scholarship that allowed him to travel across the continent to Spain, where he met and drank with Hemingway, and Paris, where he shared a bohemian studio with fellow artist Sam Francis.

After some years indulging in Mediterranean siestas and soirées, befriending Hollywood collectors Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, and James Mason to name but a few, Cohen eventually moved to London in 1960. Across the next 10 years his attention focused on the history of the 16th century commedia dell’arte and its carnival costumes, masked characters, and slapstick clowns.

In Europe Cohen had fallen in love with the heady Provençal colours of Dufy, Rouault, and Bonnard that would inform a new series of paintings. In the commedia Cohen saw a vibrancy and vitality that was intoxicating, and he soon put together an exhibition of inspired canvases for the Brook Street Gallery in 1963. London took note: these paintings were deemed formidable by the Daily Telegraph, who pronounced him one of the best draughtsmen at work today; to the art critic Peter Stone they represented a vitality that only a natural painter has.

In l’Esprit d’Arelquin, with its costumed Arlecchino, and in the plumed stallion of Harlequin on Horseback, bestriding a glorious burnt orange background, Cohen invests the Italian tradition with new life and the strength of colour and texture for which he would be remembered.

148. (opposite) Alfred Cohen, Harlequin on Horseback, £9500 149. Alfred Cohen, l'Esprit d'Arlequin, £3000

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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 three-dimensions. 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.)

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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 stonecarving. 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

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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 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.

In the second decade of the 20th century, the rather insular English art world opened up dramatically. At Roger Fry’s two Post-Impressionist 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

151. Squatting Female Figure with Pitcher, bronze, £45,000

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152. Rhoda, bronze, £45,000 153. (opposite) Lady Dorothea Ashley Cooper, bronze, £30,000

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

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 feeearning 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 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 20022014 have been collected in a paperback entitled A is a Critic.

154. (previous page) Woman Reclining, £4000 155. (opposite) Study for London Pride (Leisure 3), bronze, £14,500

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156. Persephone, £14,000 157. Woman with Towel, £12,000

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Cover: Lavender fields, near Valensole, southern France, taken by Jay Goldmark during a visit to collect new pots from Jean-Nicolas GĂŠrard, summer 2016.

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