Goldmark 13

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SUMMER 2019

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g SUMMER 2019 NUMBER 13

Contents 4

Giovanni Battista Piranesi - Vasi, Candelabri...

12 Richard Shirley Smith - Pulcinella Visits Rome 14 Takeshi Yasuda - White Gold 18 John Nash - Flowers

Our 2019 Summer magazine is one of many cross-connections. John Nash and Jacob Epstein show us the sheer joy of painting flowers, while Tiepolo, Piranesi, and Richard Shirley Smith all reveal the wealth the classical world still has to offer.

From Leonard Rosoman and Pierre Bonnard we have masterclasses in light, from Morris Kestelman beautiful, intimate insights into the circus, and in Ryotaro Kato and Takeshi Yasuda, two Japanese potters exploring very different traditions.

Something for everyone to enjoy, I hope.

26 Leonard Rosoman - Seated Figure 28 Pierre Bonnard - A Stop of Time 34 Eduardo Paolozzi - Life in Collage 42 Ralph Steadman - Gonzovation Suite 44 Ryotaro Kato - Fathers and Sons 50 Jacob Epstein - Mixed Roses 52 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo - Vari Capricci 58 Armenian Artists - Exhibition 60 Morris Kestelman - Circus

Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 15 © Sebastian Blackie 19 © Andrew Lambirth 53 © Fiona Goldmark Photographs: Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro, Vicki Uttley Design: Porter/Goldmark, July 2019 ISBN 978-1-909167-67-4

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CONTRIBUTORS Sebastian Blackie is a ceramic artist. Author of Dear Mr Leach, A&C Black, and Professor of Ceramics at the University of Derby, where he runs a Masters in Art and Design.

Andrew Lambirth is an acclaimed writer, critic and curator who 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, L.S. Lowry, R.B. Kitaj, and Francis Davison.

Lambirth’s forthcoming John Nash publication, designed by Goldmark, will be available October 2019.

Fiona Goldmark handles the increasing number of artist estates that Goldmark now represents, managing stock, organising major touring exhibitions, and promoting deserved reputations around the country. Long-suffering wife to Mike, she has played an integral part in the history of the gallery.

Over the last three years she has attended a part-time art history course at Cambridge University.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Vasi, candelabri, cippi,sarcofagi, tripodi, lucerne, ed ornamenti antichi disegnati

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi was born in Venice, but he belonged properly to Rome; not just the Rome of his time, an 18th century papal powerhouse, newly resplendent in a variety of Baroque and Rococo projects, but the Rome of antiquity, whose great, dismembered architectural relics then littered the Italian landscape – and of a new Rome that existed only in his fecund imagination and in his expansive etchings; one that, under Piranesi’s grand scheme, flourished once more with resurrected classical inventions of an abundant, exuberant, ornamental style.

Piranesi was born in 1720 and died in 1778 at the age of 58 – a longer life than some, but one that, even in the face of such profuse output, you cannot help but feel was cut short.

A trained draughtsman, etcher and engraver, set designer, and architect, the latter was his real calling. Though he only engaged in one architectural commission in his 40-year career, restoring the church of Santa Maria del Priorato on the Aventine Hill in 1764, he continued to sign his title plates ‘Gio Batta Piranesi Architetto’ to convey the seriousness and the ambition of his ‘fantasies’.

Partly owing to his own intransigence, and partly to bad fortune, he never managed to secure the necessary backing for any major construction proposals. He remained rather more popular among English and Scottish Grand Tourists than his fellow countrymen, and the series of etchings we do have – extraordinary, technically dazzling, and genre-defying though they were – represent hard-won, if not always financially successful, attempts to keep his workshops on the busy Via del Corso and, from 1761 onwards, the Palazzo Tomati afloat. Piranesi was both artistically prolific and mercatorial to the bone. He produced well over a thousand etchings, issued separately and in combination bound in

huge, expensive volumes, all in addition to his side-line deals as a restorer and dealer of antique relics. Lacking consistent patronage, he was frequently forced to self-publish his collected etching tomes; and lacking personal wealth, was moved to reissue the most popular anthologies throughout his life, sometimes over twenty or thirty years, as in the case of the Vedute. His tirelessness, compounded by four decades of working with ink and acid and their attendant toxic fumes, probably accounts for his early death. He held himself to an extraordinarily high standard. He was querulous. He was stubborn. He was capricious. He was a virtuoso. He was inventive and innovative – to a fault, according to his tutors.

Above all, he was an insuppressible dreamer: almost every endeavour to which he put his name, private and public, commercial or otherwise, was in pursuit of reshaping society in the mould of a new Rome; of making the urbs aeterna, ‘the eternal city’, a reality.

To this day, there remains no real consensus on what marks

Piranesi’s magnum opus. Some opt for the gloriously moody Carceri, invented prisons of stupefying scale and pre-Romantic self-expression; others the Roman Vedute, which gave back to Rome a view of itself that no other artist had captured, where Cyclopean stone wrecks seem to rise from a sediment sea, wreathed in wild foliage, in a vain attempt to impose their past grandeur even while crumbling into further ruin. In truth, each series of etchings reflected distinct chapters in his life: personal miseries and wonderment, and a love for the great imperial city which it seemed to leave unanswered and unrequited even at his death.

Vasi, candelabra, cippi… was one of the very last sets of prints Piranesi conceived, produced and enlarged over the last ten years of his life, the last five of which he weathered with increasing frailty while suffering from an unknown illness.

Its title speaks for itself: reproductions of vases, candelabras, grave stones, sarcophagi, tripods, lamps, cinerary urns and ornaments discovered across a number of contemporary

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excavations, notably those undertaken by the Scottish artist, dealer, and archaeologist Gavin Hamilton of Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli from around 1769. While the designs, the drawings, and the curation of the objects illustrated was all his own, Piranesi was aided in much of the later printing by his daughter, Laura, and his son, Francesco in particular; a number of prints bear the signature ‘F. Piranesi’ as testament to Francesco’s skill in reproducing his father’s designs.

Vasi is a strange collection to the modern eye; one that, during the time of its production, likely served an array of purposes. At its most practical, and particularly in latter iterations before Piranesi’s death, Vasi operated essentially as a deluxe brochure for dealers in antiquities. Reports of new excavation sites at Herculaneum, Pompeii and Paestum, among others, drew enthusiasts from Britain and the European continent, keen to add to their collections, and in Piranesi’s etchings they found sumptuous illustrations of the sort of thing on offer.

From these, Piranesi could also advertise his own services as both supplier and restorer. He was responsible for at least one major vase restoration, now known as the ‘Piranesi Vase’, which was purchased by Sir John Boyd on his Grand Tour (illustrated on the previous spread, it can be found today in the Enlightenment Gallery in the British Museum). And one series of etchings of the famous ‘Warwick Vase’, one of which is also reproduced here, was used by restorers as a reference when securing the better preserved parts of the original to a newly carved marble body. This was one of several works uncovered during Hamilton’s survey of the Hadrian villa site, first discovered when a silty pond was drained to reveal the fragments. Hamilton had employed fellow Scot, James Byres, to affix the fragments to a new model, and Byres, a friend and colleague of Piranesi’s, looked to the Vasi for assistance in determining a style of restoration.

Piranesi’s characteristic enthusiasm appears to have been ultimately overruled, as Byres wrote to a friend: ‘[Hamilton] approved much of the restoration but thought the female mask copied from that in Piranesi’s candelabro ought to be a little retouch’d to give more squareness and character, he’s of opinion that the foot ought neither to be fluted nor ornamented but left as it is being antique, and that no ornament ought to be introduced on the body of the vase behind the handles, saying that it would take away from the effect & grouping of the masks. Piranesi is of the same opinion relative to the foot, but thinks there is too great an emptyness behind the handles...’ Byres ultimately sided with his employer,

to no great surprise, but the collaboration with Piranesi appears to have been longstanding: in the Vasi etchings, Piranesi dedicated the Warwick Vase views ‘Al suo carissimo amico il signor Giacomo Byres, architteto Scozzese’ – ‘To my dearest friend Mr James Byres, Scottish architect’.

But however shrewd Piranesi’s business sense, he was first and foremost a theoretician: his etchings were the visual component of a grand, classical plan, and in the items emerging from archaeological expeditions he was blessed with a decorative programme to supplement his broader architectural polemic; to lend his civic scheme an element of the human scale and touch.

Illustrating the larger objects, he gave them purposeful fullness of form, where the curvature of an urn or the corner of an altar rounds and projects so beautifully that you feel almost as you could reach in and touch it. Faces seem to talk to each other, figures in wall pieces and on relief vases suddenly become living, breathing, dancing characters, romping in rustic bacchanalia or in grand procession, projecting as surely from their surface as did the real thing.

A number of these he exaggerated by taking circular reliefs from vases and ornaments and reproducing them as if they were single, flat reliefs, turning figures on a curve into twodimensional parades so their narrative can be experienced all at once.

Piranesi’s ancient Rome gains shape and substance in the Vasi; no longer just the constructive caprices of an architect manqué, but the fullness of a complete scheme, a philosophy of material liveliness that, as the Warwick Vase commission demonstrated, yearned for empty space to fill. Aldous Huxley wrote that, ‘His theme was always Rome; and this was true even when he abandoned the facts of ruins and baroque churches to undertake excursions into the world of fantasy.

For what he liked to imagine was still Rome—Rome as it ought to have been, as it might have been if Augustus and his successors had possessed an inexhaustible treasury and an inexhaustible supply of manpower.’

Huxley appears not to have cared for the later Roman works: ‘It is fortunate that their resources were limited; for the hypothetical Rome of Piranesi’s fancy is a depressingly pretentious place.’ He preferred the psychodrama of the Prisons, with their nihilistic vaults and zig-zagging steps, great cavernous holds with no inmates and of no apparent purpose.

But there is drama and expression aplenty here: extreme, unnatural dramatic lighting, reminiscent of the theatre, which made full tonal effect of repeated ‘bites’ in the acid bath to

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drag out the deepest, richest contrasts; the velvet black of the raised etching ink you can feel as you cast a palm over the page. Perspectival shifts are frequently employed, nominally to provide alternative views of extreme vertical pieces or the underbelly of broader objects, where vases and candelabras suddenly loom over you, their figures seizing your gaze and drawing you in as conspirator of their little rustic scenes. And in the collected still lifes of bronze and terracotta lamps, like trinkets of some imagined Vestal cult, he depicts pots encrusted with cameos, intertwining chains, and their intricate, spidery shadows in a tour de force of etching brilliance.

Piranesi obliterated earlier or contemporary versions of same models: there is simply no rival to his sheer force of will.

Whether you know or not the pieces illustrated, they seem uncannily real, and even of the now, as if he had conjured them from his own unquenchable well of inspiration. Unable as an architect to see his edifices in the flesh, or as designer to mould and carve his own decorative items, he turned to etching as his only outlet for a creativity that deserved to be applied to so much more.

Modern scholarship does not like the idea of genius: innate talents, which seem to put forth fruit purely by imposition in one art or another. Artists are the sum of their influences, their aids, their interests, their assistants. In the former, Piranesi had many, chief among them Tiepolo, who it is thought by some he visited during the few years he spent in Venice before securing his first lodgings in Rome. He was far from the first to invent fantasies and architectural capriccii – the Babiena dynasty, decades earlier, famously applied themselves to elaborate and ornate set designs of great invention. But of how many of them could it be said that they dedicated almost every work, every effort, towards a new conception of society?

Nothing of the Vasi is essentially new: but it marks the culmination of a programme that was lifelong, and to which Piranesi applied himself with a single-mindedness that is unique of his time.

Huxley thought his Roman ideal as important to Piranesi as was the Catholicism of his contemporaries. ‘Piranesi’s faith,’ he writes, ‘was that of a renaissance humanist, his god was Roman antiquity and his motivating desire was a mixture of the artist’s will to beauty, the archaeologist’s will to historical truth and the poor man’s will to make a living.’ Piranesi died in November of 1778, and was buried in the church he helped to restore; in that, at least, he was afforded some final poetic justice.

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richard shirley smith

Pulcinella visits Rome A chapter heading in Richard Shirley Smith’s self-penned monograph quotes the traditional backstory of Pulcinella in the Neapolitan Commedia dell’Arte: ‘He had two fathers, inheriting the worst traits from each. He was in the habit of finding things before their owners knew they had lost them.’

Pulcinella, cone-capped and hooknosed, has long been something of a mascot in Smith’s art. Little else is clownish in the work, which is as tautly composed and technically immaculate as a Swiss watch: but he does seem to have inherited the impish sense of humour shared of old improvisatori, a slyness that has helped him ‘steal’ from a world of classicism we seem not to have noticed we had ever lost.

Pulcinella Visits Rome is one of a number of large collages Smith produced early in his career, in search of a ‘stronger medium’.

He was particular in his materials: marbled endpapers, wallpapers, and old maps, but never newspaper; nothing that might break the pseudo-classical spell, or interrupt its strangeness. By the mid-70s, however, he had completely abandoned the technique: the many thousands of paper fragments required for each new work made for an overwhelming prospect.

Artistically, he has had more than Pulcinella’s two fathers – among them, David Jones, who as a student Smith would visit for afternoon tea. But if two forebears of this magnificent piece had to be picked, they would surely be Domenico Tiepolo,

son of Giambattista, who made several paintings of comedy ensembles, full of the theatricality of his father’s mural schemes; and the titanic Piranesi, a fellow thief of antiquity and composer of capriccios. Like Piranesi, who assembled disparate ruins as if they were stage designs, Smith’s work has a key dramatic element. His pictures are like sets: architectural quotations, set in degrees of depth from each other, like scenery in a puppet show. In this Roman visit alone, he has served up a 17th century portal from the Palazzo Barberini and a hieratic, bronze colossus head from the Musei Capitolini, thought to be of the Emperor Constantine.

Pulcinella himself hides in the colossus – hoping, no doubt, to catch a glimpse of undergarment on the donna below hanging out her laundry. It’s a lovely way of sending up both the megalomaniacal grandeur of ancient imperial projects, now part of the civic furniture, and the smutty, saccharine portraits of women in art of the new classical order: the ridiculous ladies of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, languishing in see-through tunics, or the marshmallow nymphs of Frederic Leighton, all blusher and curls and discreet nipples.

Instead, Smith opts for a classical reinvention with wit and snap. His scenes have a surreal, de Chirico edge, not without their touch of menace – all restrained by a dusty, pastel palette that makes everything seem at once real and illusory. It is a wonderful attestation to the fruits the classical mode still has to offer.

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White Gold

Takeshi yasuda

In Jiangxi province, where Gauling mountain once stood there are now just a few granite boulders scattered amongst the trees and scrub. Gauling, from which we get the word ‘kaolin’, was a mountain of naturally occurring porcelain. For over a thousand years the clay-bearing rock known as petuntse was extracted from inside the mountain and transported downriver to Jingdezhen, where it is still processed today using the same ancient water-driven technology. Most of the historic blue and white porcelain, the ‘white gold’ collected with such feverish passion in Europe, was made in Jingdezhen and exported through the inland port of Nanjing on the Yangtze river. Gauling mountain finally imploded, literally undermined – but not before Jingdezhen became established as the porcelain capital of the world.

For over a decade, at an age when most people have retired, the Japanese-born potter Takashi Yasuda has been working in China from a studio in Jingdezhen. Fascinated by this material, so different from European porcelain, Yasuda has used it to make pots that combine the depth and authority that comes from a lifetime of experience with the intensity, inquisitiveness, and passion of a new love.

Yasuda’s pots have always reflected an obsession with the soft sensuousness of wet plastic clay. For some, shaping is the first of several stages that see soft, lumpen clay transformed into a hard, fired object that bears little resemblance to its origins, but in Yasuda’s case, the finished pieces always refer us to the freshness of the initial forming: fluid rims and bases, plump generous volumes and shiny or slightly matt glazes that evoke the glistening, watery beauty of a newly thrown pot. His work also embraces ‘pyroplasticity’ – when, at the highest temperatures of a firing, the porcelain body softens as it develops the glassy phase that produces translucency, behaving in similar ways to wet plastic clay. The waste heaps of China’s kilns testify to many potters’ often vain

struggle to control this process and defy gravity. With the daring of the flying trapeze and the miraculous poise of a ballerina, Yasuda’s forms go to the edge of collapse. They have a minimalist mastery born of a lifetime of practice where skill is so innate that the artist is totally free to play.

It is common practice for throwers to use a twisted wire to cut a freshly made pot from the wheel head. This incidental decoration may be left if the pot is not subsequently turned.

There is also a history of potters cutting the walls of a leather hard pot to give it a fluted or facetted form. Yasuda has combined these ideas by using a twisted wire to cut, at considerable risk, into the soft, newly thrown pot, producing facets that have none of the stiffness normally associated with the technique. The erratic twists in the wire leave rhythmic grooves in which the pale Qingbai celadon glaze pools and darkens. Many bowls with this external decoration have been given gilded interiors. It is a brave, almost confrontational, combination that recalls the many occasions, throughout ceramic history, where clay has been used to mimic metal.

These gold-lined bowls are among the most magnificent

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pieces in the exhibition. Rims and walls have been dramatically manipulated to produce forms that uniquely celebrate the fluidity of thrown clay, but with an asymmetry that renders the wheel’s circularity a distant memory. The combination of cool glaze and dazzling gold on these forms evokes the dynamic movement of fire and water. The gilding reveals the underlying strength of the form, but also converts the vessel’s interior into a space of uncertainty and mystery. They are truly astonishing pots.

Elsewhere there seems to be a significantly greater use of calligraphic brushwork as applied decoration. Given the ubiquity of brushwork in Japanese as well as Chinese culture, it is interesting Yasuda has only started using the brush since his return to Asia. Perhaps because brushwork is so engrained in these cultures, it is difficult to see it afresh; nevertheless, this is exactly what he has managed. The flicks and daubs have all the vitality of historical oriental calligraphy yet, as with the form, offer something new and exhilarating. They embrace the same aesthetic of ‘Wu’ (empty space), what in the West we might call ‘negative space’, but with marks that

in a different context might be completely overlooked. Unlike their antecedents, these almost artless gestures carry no literary or visually representative meaning; yet the medium of silver, platinum, gold, and red enamel, floating on the very surface of the glaze, provides a dynamic which challenges our perception of value.

The first image inside Takeshi Yasuda’s 2013 Goldmark catalogue is of a street crossing in Jingdezhen. Vehicles weave through pedestrians, moving in every direction so that disaster seems inevitable. It is a scene of great purpose but apparent chaos that is encountered all over China, to the alarm and bewilderment of foreigners. It is also a brilliant visual metaphor for Yasuda’s work, of the kind that makes Goldmark monographs so outstanding. Yasuda’s pots work: visually, aesthetically, intellectually, and practically, but it is difficult to explain how. They embrace risk but demonstrate success as if it were effortless. His pots can be used but do not stipulate how, so that we are invited to continue the play that he has already initiated. To live with Yasuda’s pots is to be enlightened.

Sebastian Blackie 2019

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john nash Flowers John Nash became expert at depicting the decorative structure of plants and flowers.

His whole approach to drawing was essentially about being really alive in nature – tuned in to the rhythm and pulse of it.

Andrew Lambirth

Although always text-book accurate, he was also able to draw plants as if they were really alive and capable of wilting or flourishing.

The following concentrated and telegraphic phrases come from Nash’s unpublished notes on plant illustration and give an indication of the seriousness he attached to the discipline.

The artist who wanted to draw plants was, he considered, the ‘servant of two masters, Science and Art. Must serve both.’ To his mind, too many botanical drawings were dead or mechanical. As he observed: ‘Greatest have found Beauty in Truth. Have understood botanically and seen and drawn them with the artist’s eye. Must have a passion for the subject.’ Objective study of plants was essential, especially of their structure. ‘No limit in the abstract forms available,’ he asserted.

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He never used photos as research material, Traditionally, Nash’s book illustrations have been viewed as being his greatest achievements, and some of his more literary admirers still subscribe to this notion. John Rothenstein wrote in his 1983 monograph on Nash that he was ‘perhaps most highly regarded today’ as a book illustrator. And though flower illustration was only one aspect of his complete achievement as a painter and draughtsman of the countryside, it was undoubtedly at the heart of Nash’s activity. The case is aptly put by Ronald Blythe, writing of Nash in The Countryman magazine in 1967: ‘It was in the shape and pattern of leaf and stalk, petal and calyx that he was to discover design principles which he could turn to exciting new uses in his landscapes. The graphics of botany have always had an intense meaning for him.’

Close study of his plant drawings reveals his originality of style, which is modern, edgy, and very contemporary. His botanical drawing has real personality. The weight of the line, the treatment of the line is exceptional, plus the absolute observational accuracy. His was a direct intuitive approach.

Much botanical art is entirely mechanical and rather boring (with the exception of great mavericks like Rory McEwen).

John Nash showed what could be done with the discipline.

He turned it into an extension of all his other interests and it became part of his identity as a countryman.

In 1948 Nash was finally to see his book English Garden Flowers published, after a wait of 10 years. (It was first mooted in 1938 when the publisher Lindsay Drummond heard of a portfolio of plant drawings Nash had put together.) The second book Nash published with John Lewis as designer, it was produced in that age of postwar austerity when good materials were a luxury and printed on inferior paper.

Nevertheless, the lithographs achieve all sorts of delicate and lovely effects. The renowned horticulturalist and Nash’s longtime friend Clarence Elliott praised it highly, calling it

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considering the slightest sketch to be more valuable ‘truly masterful’ and writing: ‘It really is a superb bit of work – surely one of, if not the best you have ever done.’ Despite the substantial disadvantages of the paper, the 12 images contain some very lovely designs, among them the Great Cone Flower, the Blue Passion Flower and Rose ‘Mermaid’.

Not all are grand plants: a double-page spread is given to the humble periwinkle which Nash thought ‘greatly undervalued’.

All the plants came from Nash’s garden in Meadle, so he not only chose them but also illustrated them and wrote about them too. The writing is good. This is from the foreword when he writes about his Buckinghamshire garden: ‘The soil in that particular part of the country was not a kindly one and, on demobilization, the wilderness that confronted me after five years of neglect was enough excuse for me to move to one of the small rich valleys of East Anglia and start another garden.

Here, among others, the same company of twelve plants seems to have mobilised itself again, so that they must be in the nature of “favourite plants”.’ He continued: ‘I do not claim that these are strictly botanical drawings - that is a branch of flower-drawing often quite apart, a kingdom in which the botanist rules supreme and the artist can take few liberties.

The artist’s interest in plants is chiefly expressed, I think, in his appreciation of their formal beauty and, in depicting this, some botanical details may well be disregarded.’ Nash’s comments on the individual plants are equally forthright and amusing. He is very disparaging of that ‘particularly revolting blue in the flowers [of hydrangeas] with which no known surroundings will harmonise.’ And he characterises the Petunia as ‘a favourite alike of the Humming-Bird Hawk Moth and of the Parks Superintendent.’

As a plant illustrator Nash preferred to use live specimens whenever possible, or, failing that (and commissions often came when plants were out-of-season), his own drawings.

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He is particularly careful to give each plant its

poise, which he believes to be as inimitable to a species as its shape.

Ronald Blythe

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For this reason he never heedlessly disposed of a plant drawing, preferring to keep a reference library of his own work to call upon in time of need. Only towards the end of his life did he permit some of these to be exhibited and sold. He never used photos as research material, considering the slightest sketch to be more valuable. Among his favourite subjects were roses, irises, gentians and hellebores, and he had a genius for searching out and capturing, and then conveying to a delighted audience, the structure of a plant.

As Ronald Blythe commented of Nash’s style of plant drawing: ‘He is particularly careful to give each plant its poise, which he believes to be as inimitable to a species as its shape.’

By the time English Garden Flowers was eventually published after the war, the Nashes had sold their house in Meadle and moved to Bottengoms, a derelict farmhouse at the end of a lane in Wormingford, near Colchester, in the county of Essex where it shares a border with Suffolk in the Stour Valley. The garden, which undoubtedly helped rekindle Nash’s interest in painting, had first to be constructed out of the wilderness that had taken over in the long years the house had been tenantless. It was overgrown with nettles and elders and Blythe recounts that ‘Italian prisoners of war had to help [Nash] beat a path to it.’ A succession of helpers from the village turned the derelict farmyard into a garden, and at Nash’s instruction carved out many flowerbeds including a large palette-shaped one in front of the house. This was crammed with pink and yellow peonies, carpets of cyclamen, and tea-roses.

Ronald Blythe always maintained that he never actually saw John digging – jobbing gardeners and other helpers were employed for such rough work. Hattie Bawden, the wife of Edward’s son, Richard, remembers seeing Nash working in his garden. The notion that he never actually did anything in the garden himself is another aspect of the John Nash myth which has grown up. Of course he had a gardener for the rough work – most people with sizeable gardens did. Edward Bawden had a gardener. But that didn’t mean that the gardener did everything. And of course Nash remained the guiding mind behind it all. The horse ponds were planted with bamboo, gunnera, flag irises and huge marsh marigolds.

Natural irrigation was excellent: there were streams and springs and ditches all across the garden. Paths linked areas of wilderness with areas of cultivation, which included a vegetable garden and an orchard of fruit trees. The greenhouse had once belonged to Ravilious, who had kept his bike in it. Indoors there were pots of flowers in every room,

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‘not so much arranged as perfectly tumbled together by Christine’, as Blythe puts it.

‘John loved a pond as much as anything’, observed Blythe. ‘“Never pass up a good pond”, was his motto. The four in his garden are tiny but crammed with fish and plants…. He often painted these ponds in their catholic thickets of bamboo, crab-apple, giant dock, guilders, willow and hemlocks.

Nightingales would sing there as he drew, though these have gone now.’ Blythe pinpointed what Nash really liked: ‘Winding, irregular paths, particularly with plants flopping over the edges, secret dank corners, walks mown between tall grass in which a sequence of flowers appeared from February to November, everything from precious things such as fritillaries and martagon or Turk’s cap lilies, to lords and ladies, and especially handsome stands of sheep’s parsley, and dead trees clothed in climbers. Wildness and cultivation were lured into hobnobbing.’

It would be wrong to separate Nash’s flower painting and drawing too much from his landscape work. Each is part and parcel of the other. The infinite variation of plant shapes and textures is echoed and reiterated, modified and amplified in the fields and hollows, trees and ponds. Wilfrid Blunt, author of the classic Art of Botanical Illustration, contributed a foreword to John Lewis’ 1978 study of Nash, asserting that Nash had charisma, in the sense of ‘divinely conferred talent’.

And he pointed out that Nash made portraits of individual plants that were not generalised in any way. But however highly admirers of his botanical drawing may praise his skill as a draughtsman, his whole approach to drawing (and by extension to painting) was essentially about being really alive in nature – tuned in to the rhythm and pulse of it.

John Nash lived a country life, and this was the secret of his success. His work is so authoritative and convincing precisely because he lived in the landscape he painted. A painter who comes out of the country, not to it, knows that the ancient seasonal cycle of the countryside is a powerful mystery, though understanding of it may be garnered from an individual’s inner resources. Nash talked of his drawings as ‘scratchings’, and we also speak of ploughing as scratching the earth’s surface.

He took as a fundamental subject man’s effect on the environment, and the identification of man with the landscape.

And recognising his place in the landscape, he devoted a lifetime to sharing that knowledge with us.

Andrew Lambirth Abridged and edited excerpt taken from the upcoming John Nash, Artist & Countryman, Unicorn Press, 2019

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leonard R0soman Seated Figure

You suspect, on looking at Leonard Rosoman’s paintings, that he had a mind that wandered. In even the chirpiest of picnic settings, or the emptiest of interiors, there is an inexplicable emanescence; a kind of shining, supersaturation that makes you feel that the scene before you had consumed him totally, had stuck in the brain in the way that bright light burns your vision, and that the longer it stayed there, swilling around in his head, the more he had enlarged and amplified it, investing even the most straightforward of scenarios with the significance of a premonitory dream.

Seated Figure – not an official title – dates to the early 1970s, when a newly divorced Rosoman was then embarking on a relationship with his muse, the pianist Roxanne Wruble. They decided to consummate their liaison with travels to Greece: Corfu first, then Vouliagmeni, south of Athens, and Crete the summer next.

Greece fascinated Rosoman, and Crete especially: watching gaggles of tourists shuffle around its violent cliffs, he felt doused in ancient, mythic spirit. He began to have visions of the place: palatial assaults on the terrace, hero figures flung and choked amid foam and rocks. The visual richness of the islands seemed to prompt psychic reimaginings of his relationship with Roxanne. They became, in his eyes, Odysseus and Penelope – he the adrift husband, hurled back over and again, tossed about on the sea.

Perhaps it is Roxanne who sits in Seated Figure; the Ithacan queen awaiting her husband’s return, bathed in the thrumming ambers, azures, and jades that are so quintessentially Rosoman’s own. The relentless of light colours all of his paintings after Crete: it streamed through shutter slats, pried between the blinds, striated in bars of light and shade that threw paintings of their hideaways into a hallucinatory half-light. The device quickly became a favourite, taking on, as all things did in Rosoman’s work, a psychological significance: so intensely felt is the light in Seated Figure, so heavy the heat, that it streams down from the sky itself, as if the sun had split the air beneath it.

The light that normally glows in Rosoman’s paintings, transparent in jewel-like washes, sits thicker and heavier and hotter here – no less bright, but with a gravity that is inescapable. This is a picture that irradiates its experience; that bakes into you the force of what was, for Rosoman, a private voyage of intimate fantasy.

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pierre bonnard The visitor’s guide to the Tate’s recent show of Pierre Bonnard paintings – its first major Bonnard exhibition for twenty years – opens with a quote from the artist: ‘I leave it…I come back…I do not let myself become absorbed by the object itself.’

Bonnard was uneasy painting direct from a scene. He found incidental details, or changes in the pitch of light, an unbearable distraction, and to avoid diverting his focus from the ‘essence’ of a subject – the image at the heart of the painting – he devised a method of working from memory, supplemented by preparatory working sketches.

Distraction instead seems to have been his own essential characteristic. What he supposed might sharpen his attention instead diverted it to details of a different kind: pigments and brushstrokes of an almost inexhaustible range, and the slowly, very slowly, emerging vision on the canvas. In the privacy of his studio, he would work for hours, weeks, months, and even years on the same painting; initially from recollection, and then exclusively in the paint, protractedly muddling and fiddling with no end in sight. Asked by one visitor when he thought he might complete one painting, he replied despondently, brush on the canvas, ‘I finished it this morning.’

The Tate show, now on tour to the Copenhagen Glyptotek, is titled ‘The Colour of Memory’. It understandably positions Bonnard as a master of colour and light, ‘one of the greatest colourists of the early 20th century’: ‘Exquisite colour on canvas from the artist who captured moments in time’, reads the headline. So you could be forgiven for forgetting that Bonnard began his career as an illustrator and a printmaker; and that, wartime aside, illustration provided a consistent outlet to manifest his obsessive drawing. Years before he developed the vibrant palette for which he is best known, he refined a graphic style that penetrated to the very roots of his

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Impressionism; that captured, in the duochrome tone of black and white, the cast of light on a scene. It would be no exaggeration to say that every painting, every luminescent work in colour, traced back to that discovery in the drawn impression. ‘You have a distinct quality of charm,’ wrote Renoir, who first sensed it in Bonnard’s illustrations to Peter Nansen’s Marie in 1896: ‘Do not neglect it. You will encounter better painters than yourself. But yours is a rare gift.’

Ambroise Vollard, the Parisian collector and publisher who seemed to have his finger in every artist’s pie, helped nurture that gift. After the success of Marie, and with Bonnard’s growing celebrity as a poster designer, Vollard commissioned two early illustrated books. The first, Verlaine’s Parallèlement (1900), a racy volume of erotic poetry, only escaped the censor’s office because they mistook the title for a text on geometry. Bonnard’s languorous lithographic nudes, all in an amarous pink sanguine, cast his future wife Marthe in a series of slinky, feline bedside poses interpreted from a number of home photographs, seductively sprawled across Verlaine’s text. It was not a commercial success; but it did confirm for Vollard Bonnard’s exceptional graphic talents, and his enthusiasm for the work. Their second outing was far better received: a translation of Longus’ Daphnis et Chloé (1902), an ancient romantic novel from the late 2nd century BC, for which Bonnard prepared once more by stripping naked with Marthe and photographing themselves in the garden, dipping into ponds, cavorting on the grass and lazing in the midafternoon sun.

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His spontaneous drawing, profoundly original, sharp and unforgettable, is particularly evocative.

Octave Mirbeau Painting lured Bonnard back for a number of intervening years as he ventured out of Paris, flitting between a house in Normandy and the coastlines of southern France, pootling about in the little Renault CV he had bought in 1912. But it was with Vollard again that he returned to illustration with a third commission, La Vie de Sainte Monique – this time Vollard’s own text – which, rather typically, took another ten years til completion, during which time he produced his first major sequence of etchings for Octave Mirbeau’s Dingo.

Dingo, published in 1924, centred on its titular dog, a wayward companion of the narrator who begins to take on, in his master’s eyes, a kind of mythical aura. Mirbeau was a little lupine himself: a radical writer with an anarchist spirit, who in Dingo – a semi-autobiographical outing – strained orthodox rules of fiction to breaking point. His hero is an animal living outside of social norms, whose puppyish playfulness Mirbeau punctures with delirious, murderous sprees. Like the ancient Cynics (the word derives from the Greek word for dog) who felt that to live in virtue meant to live among society but apart from its conventions, Dingo exists to show up the bureaucracies of the narrator’s tedious country town and the bucolia its inhabitants try rigorously to maintain. For Bonnard, who had spent years back-and-forth between north and south countryside, travelling between exactly those towns, it made for an enticing project; one reflective of the artist’s position as both participant and outside observer of a society that rarely welcomed his presence.

This was the first time he had properly spent time with etching. A fluid line in wax ground is far harder to achieve than with a lithographic crayon, but Bonnard turned the lack of flourish to his advantage. His line is hot, scratchy, rough and inviting, like the hair on a dog’s neck. In Dingo some of his human characters even look dog-like: the accusé at the docks, his nose and moustache sketched into a shaggy muzzle, black, penitent eyes the very picture of a guilty mutt being reprimanded. Bonnard liked dogs (he liked and kept cats, too); prim little dachshunds, propped up on their paws, or labradors sitting dumbly at tables resting their snouts on the tablecloth: animals at once tame and quietly wild.

Mirbeau had died in 1917, and so never got to see

Bonnard’s interpretations of his own work, but he had admired the artist’s illustrations long before: ‘His spontaneous drawing,’ he writes, ‘profoundly original, sharp and unforgettable, is particularly evocative. It is also delightfully wicked, of surpassing grace, and bold to a fault. But his singularly discriminating taste, and an exquisite sense of what is right, give him that relaxed skill that brings forms to life and creates the most unexpected harmonies. The sense of purpose that is evident in the faintest line and palest hint of colour makes even a minor sketch a complete and autonomous whole.’

Bonnard had meanwhile begun work on Vollard’s La Vie de Sainte Monique, which eventually met publication in 1930.

With text by Vollard himself, Bonnard took advantage of its dramatic structure to combine a number of illustrative disciplines, from engraving to etching and his favoured lithography: ‘Vollard had conceived it in the form of dialogues, like a play. To follow the rhythm of the text and break the monotony of a uniform technique throughout the volume, I introduced etchings and wood engravings. It’s a book that was a long time in the making.’

Sainte Monique tells the story of Saint Monica, mother of Saint Augustine, who documented her life of piety and dedication to her son in his Confessions. In the illustrations, Bonnard captures the notion at the very heart of his drawings of human vision as a fluctuating thing, inflecting with every environmental shift. As light changes, lines change; curve and distort, blur, fatten, thin and diminish, light coronating objects as it slips behind them. The impressionistic nature of light and sensation, as when one’s vision de- and re-focuses when the head turns on its axis, Bonnard felt lent the everyday experience a great mysteriousness. ‘What I am after is the first impression,’ he wrote: ‘I want to show all one sees on entering a room…what the eye takes in at first glance.’ In the drawings, the movement of the artist’s hand over the page seems almost to reflect the movement of light on the subject, its direction and dimension intimately linked to the first-hand experience. Amazingly, this he maintained even in the printing plates. Some of the lithographs are only distinguishable from pen or pencil drawings by the raised flatness of the ink and its uniform tone.

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‘Drawing is sensation,’ Bonnard wrote – ‘Colour is reasoning.’ Just as he used colour in the paintings to give meaningful presence, structure and resonance to the moments he captured in his drawings, printmaking offered a way of committing the spontaneous moment to a fixed medium, officiating private drawings in their marriage to text and their binding in a book. Illustration in particular gave the opportunity to expand and to fritter, and with greater range than he could on canvas. And though the dimensions of a given project forced him to work to predefined spaces, sizes, and formats, ever the flâneur, he delighted in the peripheral details of book design, producing illustrated tables of contents, smaller drawings that bookend chapters, little etched marginalia, and the wonderful drop-caps set in miniature boulevards or entwined in tiny streetlights.

Bonnard’s last illustrated text, the Crepescule des Nymphs, was published in 1946. Four years in the making, the commission required images to accompany text by Pierre Louys – a kind of Ovidian pastoral, woodland romp through

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tales of Nymphs pursued by Olympian gods. Bonnard was to make a series of designs which would then be transferred to stone by the skilled printer Jacques Villon, all to Bonnard’s specifications. He was by then 79 years old, living in the southern commune of Le Cannet, and with little left to prove.

The marks and lines are sparser, sylvan faces and limbs wrought in single loops of lithographic pencil. The photographs produced for Daphnis et Chloé must undoubtedly have come into play here, revisited perhaps, much as he would revisit paintings from decades ago, to transport the aging artist back to days of naked youth. The garden in those pictures he transforms into overgrown clearings – dark trysting places under shivering canopies of leaves, the rough impress of the crayon echoing the light breaking on surrounding foliage. It is a delicate, whispering final account, with its moments of violent drama (Leda ravished by the swan); a kind of pictorial myopia that fades into its author’s final year. Art, he once wrote in his diary, was a ‘stop of time’; in this last suite, you sense the end of his.

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eduardo paolozzi The head, as a sculptural object, is about the only anatomical subject the sculptor has in his repertoire that can at once present a person and represent the fullness of the human psyche; the incredible, electric nexus of information and emotion that makes up an individual mind.

In the 1990s, Paolozzi must have sensed that the sphere of machine influence and automation was changing: that machines were increasingly not just the lumbering assemblies of nuts and bolts that conveyed us places, remodelled our land and cityscapes, printed our newspapers, and hurled us on tracks or through air from one country to another. The machine of this new age was ever less visible, ever less tangible: it was the mechanism that drove not people but

data; that served invisible ‘markets’; that constructed not buildings but simulations; and which spoke to us not in print but through screens. By 1995, the internet in the United States had been fully de-restricted and de-regulated, ready for commercial use. It can hardly be a coincidence that it was around this time that Paolozzi began to make heads – hundreds of them – inspired by graphics modelled on a computer. They made clear the connection: that the interconnected interior of the brain was more and more mirrored in the invisible, interconnected machines that now constituted the foundation of a new social era: the online epoch.

Illustrated here is one such head; a self-portrait. It is as much a summation of the man’s views on art as it is the man

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But the world Paolozzi shows us – our not-so distant past – is one where human imagination has yet to catch up with manmade techno-potential. himself. The thick brow and full lips are his, but cut with angular facets the face instantly recalls West African iconography; or rather, a received version of traditional African carving, as processed by the modernist sculptors of the early 20th century. The shape is similar to several such geometric heads Paolozzi made, many of which he deconstructed by sawing into cross-sections and then reassembled with inserted pegs, turning the head into a slotting puzzle that reminded him of a Mondrian painting.

These he described as a ‘successful amalgam of something I’ve been striving for, which is African art, psychopathic art, geometric art, art which takes care of the machine and in addition to that, lubricated and bound together by Broadway boogie woogie, saying in other words that you can’t evade modernism; if you try and avoid modernism you’re dead.’ Some were enlarged, or used as the basis in full figure sculptures: the artist in the guise of Hephaestus or Vulcan, Olympian gods of construction who worked metals in mysterious, immortal ways.

If Paolozzi, who died in 2005, were apotheosised today as a modern god for our modern era, his reincarnation would undoubtedly be as a search engine: a great digital spider, finding and feeding references, accumulating connections and modelling behaviours, assorting vast libraries of still and moving pictures.

Paolozzi’s screenprints and photolithographs, even the very earliest, are like a kind of Google image ‘result’; the process of some intercultural computation. Some-

times, it is as if the wrong terms have been entered, and the result is a garbled, discombobulating array of images that seems to bear little resemblance to the original input. The titles of his suites read just this way – Universal Electronic Vaccuum; Moonstrips Empire News; Cloud Atomic Library; General Dynamic F.U.N. – like newsite and network headlines that have glitched in some vast data retrieval.

Paolozzi was an inveterate collector – of machine scraps, printed material, postcards, plastic bits, fashion magazines, pulp fiction volumes, pamphlets, and instruction manuals. He boasted a collection of diffuse ‘Pop’ and mechanical material that in twenty or thirty years should be seen as vitally important a cultural reference for the anthropologist as was Epstein’s collection of West African and Polynesian art to mid-century museum curators. Richard Hamilton, a fellow Pop Art giant, said that it was Paolozzi, of all of them, who really looked at the world around them: ‘wherever you go you are on the alert for visual stimulants…it’s always you who notices something that ought to be looked at again.

I tend not to use my eyes when I walk around; I only think of visual things when I come to a studio.’ But critically, and just like a search engine, Paolozzi retorted that it was as much about what was refused as what was discovered: ‘To reject as much as one accepts, I think, is part of experience.’

Paolozzi’s collaged art was not just the collection of any old disparate thing or image: it was curated for maximum impact.

Paolozzi would no doubt have apprec-

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iated the new language of our online era.

What we call search ‘engines’ reveal no whirring cogs, no fans, no fuel injection ports: the mechanical side of much of the computer sphere is now hidden in centralised basements and plasticised wires.

When we use it, the machine is no longer present: but it is all pervasive. The machine is no longer mechanical; it is simulated in interface, once and twice removed; and it is often human. Online profiles, social media platforms, video games, Amazon Echoes and Apple Siris, and now AI programming all blend real and virtual life to the point where it is almost impossible to disengage with a virtual self of some kind. There was much talk at the time when hostile computer programmes were first described as ‘viruses’; when the computer became a living thing, under threat from an outside agent. Now, when something becomes popular on the web, we say it has gone ‘viral’: infection is the new norm. Paolozzi, of course, can hardly have foreseen this development some thirty or forty years in advance; but suites like General Dynamic F.U.N., with its dissonant blend of photography and graphics, its familiar images in unfamiliar, unsettling, uncorrected colour, do bear the early intimations of a kind of ‘technocreep’; the way in which mechanisation and computerisation have not just infiltrated our lives, but that we have become willing hosts of their proxies. Given the surrender of real autonomy and privacy that comes with that surrogation, Paolozzi would likely caution us that this is not a reversible process.

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‘Pop’ was never the right term for Paolozzi’s art – or for the art movement to which it is generally attributed. To the artist it conjured only ‘barrels of Cola’ and purposeless fizziness. It fit only in the sense that it was ‘popular’ – that is, an art that really surveyed people, in their broadest spectrum of preferences; a properly ethnographic art. Colours pop, balloons pop, but Paolozzi’s art plugs right into you like a livewire cable. It is as cerebral as it is visual or literary, as real ‘Pop’ art always was.

It went beyond merely fetishizing the aesthetics of technology and commercialism to look at how the expansion of these worlds, their incursion into our lives – a far more persuasive influence than any single artist has managed to conjure – has fundamentally altered the human sensory and intellectual experience. To do so, the objects of this world had to be removed from their context – to be placed in front of us on slides, in portfolios, on screens,

to be inspected isolated, like a bacterial specimen, from a larger culture strain.

The collaged prints, and many of the sculptures, Paolozzi composed of individual components, as per the assembly of a machine. Collage, in fact, barely covered it: ‘The word collage is inadequate as a description because the concept should include ‘damage, erase, destroy, deface and transform’, all parts of a metaphor for the creative act itself.’ That act of destructive creation depended on the human brain to conceptualise and manage, but no longer needed the human hand to phsyically create. The processes of photo-stencilling in the prints and welding in the sculptures were used precisely because they resembled – in fact they were the processes of mass manufacturing. ‘Manufacture’, as Paolozzi demonstrated, is of course a euphemism; it translates to ‘handmade’, which is really the opposite of what we mean by the term. This was the irony central to

suites like Universal Electronic Vacuum, which were editioned as if by automation or algorithm, the stencils set up so that multiple different colourways could be applied to produce sets of almost random variety. These works required combinations of extraordinary hand skills and high-process mechanisation to produce objects that looked like both Fine Art, with a capital ‘F’, and throwaway commercial or journalistic copy. Almost more importantly, Paolozzi noted, these methods of working in collage provided extreme directness: ‘To try and get to the idea as quickly as possible…One is able to manipulate, to move, and use certain laws which are in a way blocked off if you try and do a pencil drawing, say, and then fill in the coloured areas.’ In both three and two dimensions, he was working towards an immediacy of concept-tocreation – not unlike image doctoring in the now universal Photoshop knock-offs, Instagram filters, or the programmable

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matrices of 3D printers. What might Paolozzi have made of these technologies?

J.G. Ballard, the dystopian and science fiction writer who authored the preface to the General Dynamic F.U.N. portfolio, pointed out that Paolozzi’s art reversed the Surrealist rule where the fictions of the inner mind are applied to the external world. In Paolozzi’s work, the external world is more strange, more visually rich than the imagination could ever process. ‘The environment is filled with more fiction and fantasy than any of us can singly isolate,’

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Ballard noted in conversation with the artist: ‘It’s no longer necessary for us individually to dream.’ But the world Paolozzi shows us – our not-so distant past – is one where human imagination has yet to catch up with manmade techno-potential. The satellite he gave as the perfect example: a technology capable of streaming live, around the world, rapid, moving, coloured images; but the programmes that ended up filling TV stations plunged to new depths of banality.

Paolozzi showed not just the excitable presence of ‘future’ technologies, but

exposed the incompetency of those tasked with making that futurism a liveable part of our present.

Paolozzi suffered a massive stroke in 2001, and was left wheelchair bound until his death four years later. Though he must have seen the emergence of the modern internet, he could not make art that dealt with its extraordinary impact on human interaction and interconnection. But how prescient that small, white plaster head feels to a citizen of the 21st century: an avatar from the pre-online age.

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ralph Steadman & ceri levy

The set comprises: Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Vaquita, California Condor, Dodo, Luristan Newt, Hula Painted Frog, Siberian Crane, Maned Three-toed Sloth, Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Petrels, plus manifesto and notes.

A BOxED SET OF 10 ExTRAORDINARY PRINTS 50 sets only, 25 reserved for UK & Europe, 25 reserved for the US Each stunning print features one of Steadman’s captivating animals or boids, accompanied by Levy’s subtly imprinted words which encapsulate the species’ plights and will raise funds for species protector, WildAid. The set of 10 signed prints is presented in a specially crafted, hand-made box. Paper size is 71 x 54 cm.

PUBLISHED BY GOLDMARK - BOxED SET PRICE £5000

Special pre-launch offer £4500

ryotaro kato A recent article described Ryotaro Kato as the ‘son of the seventh master of Kobe Kiln’.

‘Son of the seventh master’ – not the ‘eighth master’.

That distinction is important, for it points to two critical aspects of traditional Japanese familial culture: the honouring of elders; and continuation of the family legacy.

Japan has, for a great many years, been a country of ‘Fathers and Sons’; whether imperial families, dynastic businesses, or inherited trades. In a nation that has undergone monumental shifts in infrastructure over the centuries, it has ensured the passage of craft skills between generations; and it has maintained longstanding traditions on an island that, for all its apparent insularity and uniformity, built its collective identity from a great many independent peoples and outside influences. Only in the last hundred years or so has that culture begun to lift – and to open itself to daughters, mothers, and adoptee apprentices. But in a great many areas, the command of lineage remains vitally important – and none more so than the ever-fragile world of ceramics.

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The pottery dynasty to which Ryotaro belongs traces its roots back to the early 19 th century, when in 1804 Kobe Kato founded the Kobe-gama, ‘Kobe kiln’, in Tajimi, Gifu prefecture, formerly the province of Mino. Kato’s workshop were major suppliers to the Shogunate in Edo, modern day Tokyo, and quickly established a reputation for their exceptional tablewares. After a century in production with five generations at the helm, the sixth master, Ryotaro’s grandfather, the late Living National Treasure Takuo Kato (1917-2005), took the kiln in a new direction when he rediscovered the ancient links between Japanese pottery and old Persian lusterware: bright, turquoise blue glazes, particular to the Middle Eastern, Egypt and North Africa, and a scintillating chromatic pottery that was the source of China’s legendary Sancai (‘three colours’) ware.

The kaleidoscopic qualities of this new pottery, which seemed to change colour with the light, were in great demand in China, where it was bought in bulk on the Silk Road and occasionally exported to Japan. But to recreate its effects, as Takuo sought to do, required a totally different approach than that practised by the Mino potters of old. Persian clay does not fire to high temperatures, and its glazes used elements not often found in Asian ceramics.

It necessitated new kilns, far smaller than the Japanese were used to working with, fired at low temperatures (and producing even lower yields) where the flames could not be allowed to come into contact with the pots. The local humidity (Japan is well

known for its rain) often ruined firings that would have survived in the dry Iranian heat.

Anyone familiar with Japan’s roaring dragon kilns – huge multi-chambered slugs built on hillsides, fired with wood for days on end – knows just how great a change in discipline Takuo was engineering; but engineer it he did, developing new techniques with a high-fired Japanese clay that produced far harder wearing pots than their Persian equivalent. Ryotaro’s father continued the work, and Ryotaro (45) himself still maintains the kiln’s production, with research links and cross-continental collaboration with potters in Iran. But in his own pottery, Ryotaro sought to revive a quite different ceramic tradition – a return to the local Mino style.

Mino pottery was born in the Momoyama period, the late 1500s, at a time of violent feudal conflict. As control slipped from the hands of the previous shogunate, belligerent ‘daimyo’ warlords battled rival clans across Japan to take advantage of the power vacuum, driving artisanal craftsmen from the most war-torn regions into nearby Mino. One warlord, Oda Nobunaga, and his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, rose above the rest, launching a long and bloody campaign to re-establish peace and usher in an era of unification under a new shogun.

Pottery masters were then highly prized by their warlords, for whom the tea ceremony provided important opportunities to parley with fellow lords, or to demonstrate power, wealth, and superior taste. Some, like the famed samurai tea master Furuta Oribe, even gave their names

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to the styles their subjects innovated under their rule. A Kato of a different line, Kagemitsu Kato, was one of many potters to flee the warring of Owari province and establish premises in Mino. Kato was afforded personal protection under Nobunaga, and from the safety of his new workshop helped develop some of the most important styles and glazes of contemporary Japanese pottery, from rich, black-glazed wares to yellow ‘Ki-Seto’ and snow-white Shinos.

The changes that occurred in Japanese ceramics between the death throes of the Muromachi period and the splendour of Momoyama are sometimes referred to as the ‘Japanese renaissance’ – and indeed they were monumental. Previously, sombre, symmetrical, modest black and white glazed bowls, inspired by or imported from China and Korea, were the desired standard in tea ceremony. But from the crucible of a wartorn country, Japan’s potters reinvigorated traditional pottery with extraordinary stylistic change. Out went the clean edges, smooth sides, and textureless glazes; in came a world of strange distortions, bright colours, high-fired brushwork embellishment, and brilliant, encrusted, thick, sugary glazes, all of it inspired by a wealth of foreign influx, from Venetian glass and Chinese ornament to ‘barbarian’ Portuguese traders in strange fancy dress. Usually, the avant-garde pushes conservative aesthetics further and further from restrained or formally rigorous traditions; in Japan, original Momoyama pottery remains among the most daring, loose, and technically virtuosic on display –

a standard potters strive for, not just politely venerate or disown with disinterest.

If you have ever attended a Japanese tea ceremony, it is not difficult to see how its calm, mannered ritual would suit its place in this turbulent history. The idea of a spiritual, neutral space, in which the politics is one of intensely laboured equality and equanimity, provided a vital arena in feudal diplomacy. A ‘chawan’, or ‘tea bowl’, is warmed and cleaned with water before matcha (ground green tea leaves) is added with a small, hooked spoon. Hot water is ladled in, and the bowl beaten with a bamboo whisk until the matcha turns to a vibrant green effervescence. The attendant passes the bowl to its recipient with a particular side of the bowl facing towards them – an offer to enjoy an especially beautiful aspect of the bowl. As the recipient drinks, he or she turns the bowl again, returning the favour. Reciprocity lies at the heart of the ceremony: every movement, from both host and guest, is intended to pay respect to one another and the sanctity of the experience.

Ryotaro Kato’s recent tea ceremony at the Goldmark Gallery is centuries removed from that period of instability in Japan – and in light of our own uncertainty which we currently face in the UK, it offered a welcome, calm respite from our own feuding politicians. Kato’s ceremony is in its essence traditional, for which he dons traditional dress, but he manages to speak to a contemporary audience. Every movement is considered: a hand, crossing

his chest to hold a sleeve back, the exquisitely delicate replacement of a bamboo ladle over a hot water pot; it is like a ballet for the hands, every gesture measured in relation to the sharing audience.

In the quiet, light-filled space conjured from screens in the gallery front room, we were offered the perfect opportunity to enjoy Ryotaro’s latest work. Deep, lake-black ‘guro’ chawan, their colour produced by ‘hikidashi’ – a spectacularly theatrical technique, in which a white-hot pot is removed from the kiln with a pair of tongs at the height of a firing. The thermal shock of the change in temperature engenders its silky dark finish, perhaps as true a black as you can achieve in ceramics. ‘Inside the kiln is a world of fire,’ Ryotaro says, ‘A world of death. This side is the world of living things.

There is a clear separation.’ He has spoken of pulling work from his kiln as being like delivering his children – a powerful metaphor for the responsibility he feels for his labour, and a reminder of what an emotional, painful toll the work of a potter must be, where miscarriage is not just a worry but an inevitability.

Ryotaro has established something of a reputation for his Oribe-ware, the beautiful, glassy-green glaze which he has combined in the past with traditional rust-coloured iron brushwork. But it is the Shino here – as it was in ancient Mino – which is the real showstopper, especially when combined with the lush green of fresh-whisked matcha.

A thick, white feldspathic glaze, Shino’s history is shrouded in mystery; even its name

has no clear etymology. You could hardly believe, given its ubiquity in international ceramics, that it once fell out of favour for an age, only to have been recovered in the last century. Ryotaro offers us several classic Shino varieties – ‘Akane’ (bright red), ‘Beni’ (deep red), ‘Ogura’ (named after the maplecovered mountain) and ‘Nezumi’ (gray, literally ‘mouse’) Shino – each with the delightful ‘yuzuhada’ (‘citrus skin’) effect on the surface, where tiny potholes lend the pot the feel of a waxy lemon rind. One especially beautiful chawan is almost entirely white, save for a peach flush round the rim, the glaze deliciously thick, with a face where the Shino has been applied more thinly. The result is a gorgeous ‘crawl’ in the surface, where the glaze appears to have peeled back, lending a deep, seductive ‘okoge’ (scorched) blush.

It is often said by chawan collectors that you can tell everything about a potter from the foot, or ‘kodai’, of their bowl (a rather less snobbish version of the Western expression that you can tell a gentleman by his shoes). Ryotaro Kato throws a chawan that is low; the belly of the bowl is wide and deep, the walls straight, overhanging its base to cast a pool of shadow beneath, almost as if it were floating. The foot is short and hidden from view – not courting approval, but sitting, quietly and coolly, for the right person to come along.

Ryotaro Kato may not see himself inherit the mantle of ‘eighth master’ for years; but he seems more than happy to wait, as do his masterful pots.

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jacob Epstein mixed roses ‘...I went on painting, giving up sculpture for the time being, and painted three hundred more. I lived and painted flowers. My rooms were piled with flowers, and this was a wonderful and colourful period.’

In 1933, Jacob Epstein was approached by the Dutch-Jewish London dealers Asscher, Koetser and Welcker with a commission to paint a series of gouache flower studies. What they supposed would be a short-term project Epstein made an obsession. Tens of paintings turned to hundreds; perfumed bouquets carpeted the studio floor. So delighted were they with the results, the story goes, that the firm freighted crates of flowers to Epstein’s rooms on a weekly basis as they publicised his new work. By the time they were ready for exhibition, word of their popularity had spread and London’s galleries had blossomed into a veritable Chelsea show.

John Nash thought every flower to have its own, particular ‘poise’. To a sculptor more used to the human figure, they certainly presented a peculiar anatomy of lush crimps and curls and heads lilting and wilting, from bright, fertile crests to firework blooms. In Mixed Roses, these Epstein not so much posed as threw to the page in wild, summery tangles.

Not for him the self-conscious orchestration of the Netherlandish Old Masters, none of their memento mori symbolism: just a woozy, pear-yellow swell of efflorescence.

Rarely was Epstein afforded the opportunity to work in colour, and in the flower paintings he duly indulged himself.

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The yellow is of that heady, inebriating kind, full of warmness and sweetness and overripe aroma; a pungent bed of colour checked only by the sober blue of Epstein’s outline, with which it blends into the satisfying sopor of a deep, drowsy green.

But the real stars of the show are the rose heads themselves – each one of them furnished with almost no paint at all. With just a little white, a little pink, and a few attentively placed pencil lines, he has somehow made the skin of the paper appear as plump and peachy as the real thing.

To his detractors, Epstein was enjoying himself rather too much. The paintings, they cried, came too thick and too fast – ‘To the sterile and unproductive person a hundred paintings all done in a couple of months is disgusting, a kind of littering’ – and what decadence to abandon his tools: ‘I was, of course, told that the shoemaker should stick to his last.’ But their criticism did little to dissuade him. ‘A sculptor is supposed to be a dull dog anyway,’ he wrote, ‘so why should he not break out in colour sometimes; and in any case I’d as soon be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. Blake says: “The Gateway of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.”’ – and what a wonderful exercise in excess this is.

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giovanni battista

tiepolo

Vari Capricci

In his essay on the origin of human knowledge, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac states that ‘a single gesture is often equivalent to a whole sentence.’ This idea that words or objects have no meaning apart from the context, or sentences, in which they are used became important in eighteenth century thought. In many ways, it sums up the art of de Condillac’s contemporary Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770).

Master of the Rococo Grand Manner, Tiepolo was one of the most remarkable painters of his day. His art is a celebration of invenzione, transposing the world of ancient history and myth, the scriptures, and sacred legends into a grandiose, even theatrical language.

Tiepolo’s art encapsulates the notion of artistic caprice and fantasy, his style characterised by luminous effects of light, translucent colours in shades of sugared almonds describing figures full of vitality and grace. He was prolific, in high demand throughout Europe as well as his native Venice, completing enormous decorative commissions for prestigious patrons and at the end of his life in Madrid at the court of Charles III. In this enormous oeuvre there are just 38 etchings, the ten Vari Capricci being the first of these.

Eighteenth century Venice was a hotbed of artistic output and enjoyed commissions from the church, the nobility, and the bourgeoisie, as well as foreign travellers on the Grand Tour. It had also been an important centre for printing for many centuries. Local cognoscenti and foreign tourists bought prints of the city (especially if

their budgets could not stretch to paintings), and this proliferation of printing activity prompted many, including Canaletto, Marco Ricci and Tiepolo, to experiment with etching. Encouraged by the Venetian artist and publisher Anton Maria Zanetti (1679-1767) Tiepolo worked on the Vari Capricci throughout the 1730s. They were published and distributed with Zanetti’s own woodcuts around 1742.

The capriccio, a placing together of disparate elements to make a fictional work, was the natural vehicle for Tiepolo’s artistic expression: fantasies full of whimsy and playful invention. Architectural capricci were common place in Venice (Marieschi and Carlevarijs) and popular amongst Grand Tourists and erudite connoisseurs alike, but Tiepolo’s differed in being almost exclusively figurative. In contrast to his grand decorative schemes the etchings are small and intimate, peopled with soldiers and young boys, a horse and rider with a groom, women and children with goats and other animals in a pastoral landscape. The ancient or Arcadian world is occasionally evoked, with figures set beside

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tombstones, classical urns and fragments of obelisks, but there is no narrative and no specific order – just a mysterious moment frozen in a timeless setting.

Despite their size, the etchings have a quiet, enigmatic strength which derives from their exquisitely balanced conception and composition. The mark making is the impetuous, spontaneous line of a consummate draughtsman at the height of his powers and creates an effect analogous to drawing with a pen. This is especially noticeable in his rendering of the surroundings, sketched loosely in an almost frenzied fashion in ‘A Woman with Her Arms in Chains’. This ‘quiver’ of light is an idiosyncrasy of Tiepolo’s etching style; foliage shivers, drapery is in rags and books tattered, breathing light and air into the compact figurative groupings. Tiepolo’s consistent handling of light and shade and the balance of the

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strong contrasts between un-inked passages and dark, delineated areas across the printed surface (as in ‘Three Soldiers and a Boy’) give the prints an innate vibrancy and the placing of shadows evokes the bright Italian sunlight, changing by the hour as it plays upon the landscape. This combination of precision, apparent ease and liveliness referred to as sprezzatura was a much sought-after quality, and one that defines all of Tiepolo’s artistic output.

This sprightliness and ease of invention in composition that has the power to charm and amuse, or disarm and disturb, is at the heart of the Capricci. The influence of Castiglione and Salvatore Rosa is apparent in Tiepolo’s choice of actors: soldiers, sages, astrologers and nymphs, but these are generic types rather than specific characters, which he isolates and reconfigures to achieve novel visual effects. The meaning is

diffuse, the drama of the scene more evocative than it is concrete. Costumes are a restrained mix of the antique, the contemporary, and the exotic, but they are effective at transporting the event depicted from its proper historical period to the mythic time of the stage where history becomes poetic fiction. Tiepolo consistently plays off the world of the imagination with the world of nature. It is an art of allusion rather than statement, intentionally open-ended, a sparsely staged set, actors and props with no script where the viewer is free to exercise their imagination. To the modern eye the groupings are puzzlingly arbitrary: a resolute, standing philosopher and a soldier being spoken to by an anxious third person; an astrologer in conversation with a young soldier while a seated woman looks on. As Max Kozloff remarked, ‘they are among each other because of an opaque necessity

that we cannot grasp.’ Each capriccio is the bearer of a totally distinct essence.

There is always a keen wit at play: the echoing of the philosopher’s pose with the statue above, the repetition of the audaciously beautiful soldier’s banner with the cypress trees. The few symbols Tiepolo does employ are cloaked in ambiguity. Is the snake a signifier of evil or salvation, or is it the Rod of Asclepius, a deity associated with healing and medicine? What is the significance of the half-buried stones, the tomb lids, the urns and the truncated pyramids?

Several of the prints exhibit an undertone of the transience of life and the mystery of death, where a sense of enigmatic searching and muted melancholy is dominant, most expressly in ‘Seated Youth Leaning on an Urn’ and ‘Two Soldiers and Two Women’, where a handsome youth seated on a tomb

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slab stares poignantly out at the viewer while two women fret anxiously beside him. Death is explicitly manifest in ‘Death Gives an Audience’: an elegantly drawn skeleton sits back nonchalantly, regaling his rapt audience. These were common themes in Western art and literature, but Tiepolo is not so specific in his content – the characters are types, inscriptions do not occur, symbolic paraphernalia is reduced to a minimum, and the actions of the figures must be ascertained through the viewer’s intuitive response. Gestures are not generally strident but muted, and we are reduced to analysing the masterly facial expressions, often surprised in a moment of amazement or dismay, to gain some enlightenment. The result is a heightened psychological tension as the viewer scrutinises the scene but a solution does not readily present itself.

In the best Venetian tradition, Tiepolo did not subscribe

to the Neo-Platonic fallacy that to be great, art must aspire to be erudite and accessible only to the initiate; for him, art was as much a craft as an intellectual activity. He sought to please, and his unsurpassed gifts as a draughtsman and a colourist were for him tools of seduction. They admit the viewer into an enchanted garden: a place that, on casual inspection, can appear merely beautiful but that, on closer examination, reveals itself to be scented with irony and, at times, overcast with dark tragedy. For a painter who spent his life responding to religious and secular patrons, nobles and monarchs across Europe, the Capricci and Scherzi etchings were the only occasions when he permitted himself to compose a body of work without patron or buyer; in other words, to please himself. Some art historians claim their enigmatic qualities will one day be deciphered, others that

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they are subjects devoid of specific significance – fantasies put together for his own amusement. The number of drawings, and the complicated interrelationships between them and the prints, suggest being occupied with the material over a protracted period of time, rather than things created on a mere whim.

The legacy of the Vari Capricci is wide reaching. Piranesi visited Tiepolo’s studio when they were in production and went on to etch his grotesques, which Calasso claims are ‘an extended and denser version of the Capricci with Amazonian like vegetation.’ The influence on Goya’s Caprichos and Disasters of War is unquestionable: the young Spaniard encountered Tiepolo in the court of Charles III when he was nearing the end of his life. And we can see elements of De Chirico in the way Tiepolo generates a feeling of malaise and

enigma with his arbitrary combinations of costume and juxtapositions of seemingly disconnected elements.

Tiepolo was the final Rococo flight of fancy before the advent of Neo-classicism which culminated in the work of David. The Capricci give us privileged access to the inner workings of Tiepolo’s imagination. Typical of him that their utterly conventional subjects – as old as Venetian art itself – should provide material for deeply personal ruminations.

Tiepolo’s etchings received great acclaim among contemporary collectors and connoisseurs, their enigmatic meanings considered a mark of his brilliance and a successful rendering of the term ‘capriccio’. In 1774 Pierre-Jean Mariette wrote of Tiepolo’s ‘rich and fertile genius...it shines above all in his prints.’

Fiona Goldmark

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Forthcoming Exhibition

three Armenian artists Armenia has an illustrious history of artistic achievement.

Armenian textiles, books, reliquaries and illuminated manuscripts have provoked wonder and excitement since the fourth century. However, their modern art has also made waves and been no less ground-breaking.

The most celebrated Armenian artist of the 20th century, Arshile Gorky, is seen by many as having laid the foundations for the development of American Abstract Expressionism.

Armenian Art at Goldmark has been curated by Baykar Demir, Istanbul based Armenian art historian and curator, who adds, ‘Tigran Asatryan, Arthur Hovhannisyan and Ashot Yan are each unique artists in their own right and their styles range from the sophisticated to the naturalistic, from portraiture to fairy like iconography with influences of The Renaissance, Surrealism, Mythology and Russia. However each is rooted in the very individual cultural heritage of Armenia and British visitors to Goldmark are guaranteed a long overdue insight into that culture and the passion that drives modern Armenian Art.' Between them, these three artists have exhibited in New York, Paris, Moscow, Istanbul, Cairo and the Venice Biennale as well as many in their own homeland. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has just staged a major exhibition of Armenian culture. This September will be the first time that any of their work has been shown in the UK.

Tigran Asatryan

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Forthcoming Exhibition

Arthur Hovhannisyan

Ashot Yan

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Circus

Morris kestelman Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev is the tale of an orthodox Jewish artist whose painting disturbs his community. It is a story of unbearable dilemmas, conflicting values and divided loves: Asher, between his people and his art; and his mother, between her husband, a Talmudic scholar and assistant to the Rebbe, and her only son. As Asher grows as a painter, he finds there exists no true Jewish iconography; and of the icons in Western, Christian art, there is none so powerful to describe his mother’s anguish as the crucifixion. This he eventually paints, only to be ostracised by the Ladover Hasidim and to leave in self-exile. By the end of the book, the artist Asher Lev is alone.

The same could never be said of Morris Kestelman. He was one of many first and secondgeneration East European immigrant Jews to come to Britain at the turn of the 20th century and establish themselves as artists, among them Mark Gertler, David Bomberg and Josef Herman (Poland), Jacob Kramer, Bernard Meninsky and Horace Brodzky (Ukraine), and Jacob Epstein (Poland, via America).

Some, like Meninsky, were at the least privately, or irregularly, practising Jews; for others, like Kestelman, their Jewishness was largely secular, and emerged in the fostering of community. ‘They moved into Belsize Park Gardens before the war,’ his actor-daughter, Sara Kestelman recalled – ‘my whole upbringing was Hampstead and Swiss Cottage. We were connected to a large Jewish community, though none of this was religious. It was humanitarian. There were deep friends: artists, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers.’

Potok, himself the observant Jewish son of Polish refugees to the Bronx, once noted that all his writing

took as its fundamental principle the ‘culture clash’ any member of a close community must experience in encountering the wider world. ‘One of the things we are taught very early,’ he writes, ‘is that each of us is a unique creature. We need that sense of uniqueness to take us through the travail of existence. We are taught that we count as individuals, that the group we belong to is a unique group, and that this group counts in the spectrum of the broader community in which all of us live.

That uniqueness is then challenged by ideas that inevitably impinge upon us from other kinds of uniqueness.’

Kestelman soon encountered those ‘other kinds of uniqueness’ when, as a young man in 1922, he accepted a scholarship to the Central School of Art and began his career as a painter. It was here that he was introduced to Bernard Meninsky – then an older tutor, who quickly became a lifelong friend.

Meninsky was quite unlike Kestelman: a little stern, small ‘c’ conservative, somewhat opinionated, and of painfully exacting standards – not just of his pupils’ art, but of every influence they saw fit to embrace. John Russell Taylor, Meninsky’s biographer, suggests that at the time they first met Kestelman was indulging a socialist streak.

Meninsky, Taylor writes, chided his early reading habits – ‘respectable, middlebrow general-interest magazines’ – as ‘beneath the dignity of an aspiring artist’; Bernard Shaw was dismissed outright as altogether too revolutionary. And when Kestelman informed him that he wished to visit the French Riviera, which had so energised early 20th century painters, Meninsky warned him of the ‘seductions of the place’ and declared he was at risk of

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The circus pictures fall somewhere between an early social realism and the kind of magic realism beloved of Chagall.

becoming a ‘flâneur’. (Southern France, as it so happens, was the place of Asher Lev’s exile in Potok’s sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev.) Kestelman paid little attention to his mewling, insincere as it was: Meninsky, after all, had been profoundly influenced himself by the Cézannesque palette: middle greens and ripe depths of orange, with dusky blues, browns and pinks to soften and provide depth. Ignoring Meninsky’s request, he made straight for Cagnes-sur-Mer, where he spent his first visit in the old studio of Chaim Soutine.

France was to Kestelman what the crucifixion was to Asher Lev, and he revisited almost every year in the 1930s and late 1940s. For even contemplating its interest, he was rebuked

by Meninsky – who thought this new ‘core-culture clash’, as Potok might describe it, would suffocate or prompt only pastiche in such a young painter. Kestelman quickly proved him wrong. In the schools of late French figurative painting he discovered a divide between works that idealised and those that realised; those that transformed scenes into moments of intense, transcendent beauty, and those like Soutine who made glorious grotesquefications of their models. Of Meninsky’s art, he later wrote how ‘his drawing struck one by its attack by contrast with the more tentative mode of, say, a Bonnard or a Sickert.’ Kestelman instead found a middle ground that suited his Europeanism; a style not quite as rough as Rouault or as savage as Soutine, but that found and sung the lyricism of the everyday in a broad-stroke postImpressionism. He continued his training at the Royal College of Art, where he first encountered the world of theatre and costume design, and later took on a number of important production design assignments, among them stagings of Carmen at Sadler’s Wells and Richard III at the Old Vic with Laurence Olivier in the titular role. But in the late 1930s, he received what was then his most important commission to date: to illustrate a major new book on the circus.

Noel Carrington, then editor for Country Life books, had made the appointment. Two years later, he helped found the Puffin publications, inspired in part by the colourful children’s books produced in the USSR and distributed to families on the streets – so bringing the Soviet European connection full circle. Kestelman attended numerous performances at the Bertram Mills Circus in his preparations, just a year before the big-top entrepreneur passed away with pneumonia. Mills had been lauded as the saviour of the British circus, raising the genre’s profile, defending his performers’ social status, and

securing royal patronage from Edward VIII, future king and Duke of Windsor. He was almost as revered in France as he was at home, and hired a large host of foreign performers and trainers in his troupe, particularly from Eastern Europe.

The book would never be issued – the advent of war left the project unfinished – but Kestelman’s paintings and sketches, many of them in bright, chalky pastels, remained the most popular pictures of his whole career. The melancholia which Meninsky had made a personal virtue Kestelman instilled in his circus art. The portraits he made of acrobats, clowns and equestriennes waiting in the wings, away from the glare of the floodlights, glow with a moonlit enchantment to rival Toulouse-Lautrec; and in the ring, an artificial cast of purple and lilac light, illuminating the cavernous gloom of the circus tent, floods the canopy and throws dark, looming shadows across each performance.

The intimate portraits are among the strongest: spectator girls with flat button noses like the consorts of Gauguin, but without any of the leeriness; a clown with a monocle – almost ministerial, like one of those Whitehall portraits caked in the grubby, deposited soot of cigar smoke, his cheeks and nose rouged as if ruddied from decadeslong brandy consumption.

The quieter portrayals of the young female performers, Elysian garlands tied in their hair, approach the magic of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play which brought Kestelman’s daughter her greatest renown; they appear at once full-blooded individuals and allegorical personae, characters of old fable and fantasy.

The circus pictures fall somewhere between an early social realism and the kind of magic realism beloved of Chagall, another Jewish émigré and lover of the circus. Thier sense of ‘outsiderness’, which is a common trope surrounding both circus performers and artists, takes on a particular force in the history of international Jewry and the diaspora: a nomadism not unlike that of the travelling circus, one that extends beyond national bounds and finds its identity in scripture and prayer, ritual and performance, costume, fraternity, community, and not geography. Kestelman did not feel his Jewishness as keenly as Meninsky did; it was a thing he inherited and felt moved to cherish, more than an essential tension in his person.

But to be an immigrant Jew in pre-war Britain was to be doubly ‘other’; and when it came to subjects like the circus, field peasants, and fishermen, cast on the fringes of suburban society, his experience as an outsider in his own country must have surely informed the authentic tenor of these paintings.

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After the war, Kestelman’s work became more and more abstract, until in his final years it was almost totemic and totally non-representational. The more abstract the figures became, the closer he seemed to approach the shadow of Picasso, in which the likes of Jankel Adler and Meninsky were already working. The bolder, broader figures of his mid-career paintings lose some of their originality in pursuit of a more obvious modernism; but in these circus drawings and paintings, you can find the real heart of the figurative painting which set Kestelman on his way.

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Like Meninsky, Kestelman taught for much of his working life, initially at the Wimbledon School of Art before taking the position of Head of Painting and Sculpture at the Central School of Art, where he had first started as a student. He held the post for twenty years, almost certainly to the detriment of commercial success – Kestelman enjoyed only nine solo shows in his whole career – but he remained an extraordinarily instrumental teacher and influencer, noted for his kindness and his generosity. Both qualities are self-evident in these strange, beautiful paintings.

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cover image: detail, Christopher P Wood, Illumination 2, oil on canvas, 2008

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