goldmark
WINTER 2018/19 1 |
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Price ÂŁ10
goldmarkart.com 01572 821424
g wintER 2018/19 NUMBER 11
Contents 4
Michael Rothenstein - Cockerel
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Mike Dodd - Potter
12 George Grosz - Ecce Homo 20 Anne Mette Hjortshøj - Square Bottles
Though the trees have grown bare, the nights drawn in, and a chill frost cuts the air, winter at Goldmark is always a season of plenty. In our latest quarterly offering, we bring news of no fewer than three upcoming exhibitions for your diary next year: come Spring, we will be looking back at the extraordinary career of the inimitable Ron King, master of print, paper and more besides; then in March, a fantastic double bill: a major new show from draughtsman extraordinaire David Suff, and slipware potter Clive Bowen returning for his fourth Goldmark show. We hope you can join us in celebrating all three in the months ahead.
22 David Suff - River of Life 30 Frank Dobson - New Bronzes 32 John Allen - Spirit of Place
CONTRIBUTORS
40 George Chapman - Queue at the Butcher’s
Mel Gooding is a writer, critic, and curator who has written and edited a number of books on the work of artists including Ceri Richards, John Hoyland, Patrick Heron, Michael Upton, Bruce McLean, Mary Fedden, Gillian Ayres, the sculptor F.E. McWilliam, and the architect William Alsop. He has recently been commissioned by Goldmark to write a major new publication on the printed works of Michael Rothenstein to be published later this year.
42 Larry Rivers - The Boston Massacre 50 Clive Bowen - Interview 56 Ron King - An Alphabet 58 Edward Middleditch - Poet of Appearances
Words: Max Waterhouse Except pages: 4 © Mel Gooding 6 © David Whiting 22 © David Suff Photographs: Jay Goldmark, Christian Soro, Vicki Uttley Design: Porter/Goldmark, December 2018 ISBN 978-1-909167-58-2
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Orange Street, Uppingham, Rutland LE15 9SQ 01572 821424 info@goldmarkart.com www.goldmarkart.com
David Whiting is an art critic and curator who has written extensively about 20th century art and studio ceramics. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the International Association of Art Critics, writes regularly for magazines such as Ceramic Review, and has made contributions to the Guardian. Whiting has authored the first book on the life and work of the landscape painter Robert Dawson, published by Goldmark. David Suff is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work has been exhibited around the world. He specialises in works on paper, and is well-known for his remarkably rich drawings in coloured pencil. He has also, in recent years, been guardian of Topic Records, the oldest independent record company in the world.
Cockerel
MICHAEL ROTHENSTEIN Rothenstein was predisposed from the beginning to an emblematic art. A highly imaginative and impressionable cast of mind ensured that he irresistibly perceived in everyday and even banal objects and events the possibilities of symbolic transformation. Any image might stand for something other. Among those subjects and motifs that most recur, as if compulsively, in Rothenstein’s work is that of the farmyard cockerel. In the late woodcuts it is joined by other emblematic creatures, more exotic than erotic, parrots and macaws, garden birds, tigers, cats, and butterflies as grandly stylised as the Chinese butterfly paper kites that the artist loved and collected. But the cockerel is everywhere present. Rothenstein recalled that in his childhood, farmyard cockerels always impressed him: ‘First of all . .. by the extraordinary drama of their appearance: the tail of the cockerel in sunlight was a sort of sheeny blue and black, and the wattles and comb of the cockerel were a sort of scarlet crown, something so extraordinary added to their head... Also, the cockerels were the violent inhabitants of the farmyard, they were always fighting . . . I think the cockerel became for me an image of drama, an image of violence .. .’ ‘It was also connected in my mind with the idea of the fighter, because some of the German cast-lead soldiers that had been given to me, of armoured knights, also carried plumes on their heads. . . beyond that there was a connection with the violent Indian miniatures [in his father’s collection] that I loved so much, and I do think that some of those elements seem to meet in the image of the cockerel.’ Rothenstein was acutely conscious of the ineradicable presence in the creatures of field and farmyard − cockerel and turkey, bull and horse – of primordial energies of blood and sex. The cockerel in his art is a spectacular emblem of sexual splendour and violent domination: a force of nature, cacophonous herald of the dawn. Mel Gooding
price guide inside back cover
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Recent Exhibition
M I K E DODD Po t t e r
Art enables us to find ourselves and to lose ourselves at the same time. Thomas Merton When E.M. Forster wrote the prescient words ‘only connect’ in the early years of the 20th century, he foresaw the ways in which a technological revolution would happen at the expense of a deeper human connection. Modern communication has never been greater, while personal isolation has never been more acute. The irony is that the more personal technology we have, the less inclined we are to actually talk to one another. There is in fact a disconnect, disconnected to a large degree from our physical world, a world we continue to abuse and too often take for granted. Going down in the train to Somerset to see Mike Dodd a few weeks back I noticed how few people were looking out of the window at the changing landscape (parched an arid yellow by the long hot summer), not even in discussion with each other. Most were absorbed by their iPads and smart phones, seemingly trapped in their own
view more Mike Dodd at goldmarkart.com
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cyber space. More and more we see the world secondhand, filtered for us by Silicon Valley. Never has access to information been so easy, never have we been so separated from more direct and individual sensory experience. Thus it seems to me that the work of the potter has become more vital and relevant than ever. The acts of making and using are part of that conversation with each other and with the world which means we can link with it at a deeper level, one that involves so much. Thinking about the continuous revelation of the materials being sourced from our planet, of the way the pot evolves on the wheel, each time something different and fresh rising, of how that pot can make the everyday special (‘ordinary but with the possibility of joy’ as the late Gwyn Hanssen Pigott memorably put it). Daily acts of using can actually deepen experience. For Mike Dodd this exploration also focuses on the possibilities presented by his clays, slips and glazes, and seeing how they can offer up unexpected interactions each time. This process is nothing short of miraculous. As Mike says, rather modestly, of himself, ‘Everything is about form. All I am doing is working with glazes and trying to get the best out of them, to find something new. You experiment. Some things work. Some don’t’. On the subject of form he goes on to say: Form is all we know, whether it is the form of pots, of words, of music, of composition (in art) or of course in all life forms. If, in the creative fields, the form is ‘good’, it can correspond to our deepest vitality and we can experience beauty or enrichment in some way if we are sensitive to that type of form. If the form is ‘bad’ we can experience ‘expiration’ rather than ‘inspiration’, so it’s the opposite of being enriched. It is also about that sense of connection with something wider, the chemistry and physics and geology of pottery, as well as art and aesthetics. His modesty is genuine. He sees the potter as a catalyst, an enabler. Natural processes do the rest. Mike makes you realise that you can only ever really scratch the surface with ceramics, quoting the dictum that a craftsman knows what he is doing, but an artist doesn’t, bringing to mind too the Hamada principle that you have to master and then un-master your practice, as much an unconscious as conscious happening. The art of pottery is much more about intuition, a broader exploration. It is there in both the discipline and release of form and surface, the discipline of your craft in
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combination with the freedom and search of your art. What W.H. Auden wrote about good poetry is equally relevant to good pottery: The trouble today with so-many would-be artists is that they see – quite correctly, that many of the greatest works are so extraordinarily free and easy... and they think they can start off writing like that. But that sort of grace is the end point of a long process, first of learning technique (every technique is a convention and therefore dangerous) – and then unlearning. It is much easier to learn than un-learn; and most of us will never get further than learning. But there is no other route to Greatness, even if we get stuck halfway. And for Mike Dodd it is also about how you can augment and enrich a ceramic lineage, how you contribute to the continuing vitality of something bigger and lasting. Mike points to another poet's words, that of T.S. Eliot in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), recently introduced to him by a collector friend (and which echoes many of the sentiments Mike expressed in his formative article of 1974, ‘In Defence of Tradition’). Eliot points to the timeless qualities of creative shared inheritance, and goes on: No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism . .. ...The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living. Mike (who is actually 75 this year, rather difficult to believe given his general demeanour and continually fresh outlook) has his own family lineage now, with his son Ben quickly establishing himself as a very interesting potter in his own right, continuing the ethos of his father’s work, but already with his own distinct voice and way of doing things. Mike showed me a very nice yunomi Ben had made, with the slip
quickly brushed through upwards, not down, a variation Mike thought had worked well. I have always found Mike Dodd to be one of the most selfquestioning of potters. There is a strong context for his work in his sense of environmental concern (though he would be the last person to stress this; it is implicit in what he does, not explicit), the Earth about which he is endlessly curious is also of course his source material, quite literally. This gives him an awareness and sense of responsibility, and what Mike’s work continues to convey is a sense of the wealth of the Earth’s minerals, of the raw components of his clays and glazes, the various ashes, the testing and re-testing of substances found on estuaries, of material on riverbeds which may have been washed down and refined from higher ground, from the hills and mountains. He is strong on shapes. Look at his continually fine baluster jugs and cut-sided teapots, his jars and bottles, often with faceted or fluted elaboration. But Mike remains for me primarily a glaze potter, who uses them in combination with generous slips to strengthen form, and as the best expression of what our geology can provide. There is always a sense of unity, a sort of balancing act of different elements; the extent to which overlying glazes cover the neck of a bottle, how they pool and thicken on ridges, the manner in which they trickle down or ‘bleed’ into one another. Then there is the movement and direction of combing, engraving or finger decoration across a surface, the way resist brushwork motifs enliven a piece. He often likes to add texture with impressing or brushing over, and he marks abstractly with trails of slip too, but it is the nuanced colour and varied surface of glaze, often breaking from matt to lustrous, which gives the work a particular frisson. Every strong pot becomes an event or a series of events, each object offering infinite variations and subtleties we can discover and enjoy over many years. Mike Dodd is good as a miniaturist too: for example his yunomi, his tiny cups (still called ‘stanleys’, after his grandson) and crisply engraved boxes condense so much of his art. Also very typical is the way slips thicken up surfaces so clay and glaze combine into something of particular opulence. His pots contradict the idea that to work in what is often called the Leach tradition implies a certain austerity of character, of purpose or style. Mike is one of the most open-handed of people and his pots can be as sensuous as any you are likely to find. They celebrate and reanimate his natural materials, and they can help us to re-engage with our world, both in the touching and in the seeing. We find ourselves again. David Whiting
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price guide inside back cover
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GEORGE GROSZ ECCE HOMO It is a full and comprehensive object lesson, a panoramic view of life, at once art and historical document, a chronicle and not an entertainment… Max Herrmann-Neisse, Expressionist critic and longtime friend and sitter for George Grosz.
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Ecce Homo, perhaps George Grosz’s most enduring collection of images, has with retrospect acquired that same journalistic intensity that characterises the etchings of Goya’s Disasters of War. As writers Ruth Berenson and Norbert Muhlen have jointly noted, Grosz, like Goya, ‘tried to show that man’s self-destructiveness is the totality of evil. The ruins are not those of specific places but the mirror of crumbling civilisation . . .’ That these images pre-date the years of Nazi rule in Germany lends them a powerful feeling of prescience: Grosz’s social ruins are not ‘crumbling’, but rather seething beneath the surface. A portfolio of 84 lithographs and 16 coloured reproductions printed by offset lithography, Ecce Homo was published in January of 1923, though many of the original drawings were completed some years before. Produced at the height of the Wimar Republic’s post-war crises, mired by reparations payments and a currency inflated almost a trillion times in value, the suite depicts a decrepit Berlin, its sole inhabitants the lecherous and begrimed, middleaged, middle-class society whose grotesque lives spill wantonly from boudoirs and bar rooms into the city streets. Though he did not see combat, Grosz had been drafted twice during the war and experienced firsthand the stultifying incompetence of the military bureaucracy and its bloody collateral of limbless soldiers recuperating in hospital units. Returning to Berlin in 1917, in his hatred for the nationalism that had led Germany into this meaningless war, Grosz turned to Dada and the allure of Communism; but six months spent in Russia, where the abject squalor suffered by the proletariat was as morbidly depressing as that experienced at home, soon convinced him that partisan puppetry could be found at either end of the political spectrum. ‘If he had abandoned Marxism,’ wrote Berenson, ‘he had lost none of his loathing of the existing system which had prompted it; and he seemed to have an
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inner need to pour salt on the open wound of his disgust by seeking out those places – the luxurious restaurants, the theatres, the flop houses, the slums – which showed it at its worst.’ Grosz’s title, ‘Behold the Man’, refers to the pronouncement made by Pontius Pilate as he presented a bloodied Christ to the hostile masses of Jerusalem. Recalling the virtuous religious woodcuts and engravings of his printmaker forebears, Altdorfer and Dürer, Grosz’s allusion is apt: just as Christ, who had been proclaimed as the Messiah six days before the crucifixion, was brought to his knees, the stoic prewar image of German personification – the brave soldier, the just judge, the peacekeeper – is similarly presented to the public as broken, immoral, debauched and depraved. Grosz’s Berlin has its flies undone, a fat cigar wedged between fatter fingers while, in the background, wrinkled women sit naked waiting to attend their clientele; this is not a messianic city. The eroticism of Ecce Homo becomes the central element of the suite, but it is not an eroticism to entice; though Grosz was just 30 years old when he published the series, and younger still when the original drawings for the lithographs were completed, the inhabitants of Ecce Homo are all middleaged and older, defined by gaunt eyes and rounded, sagging bellies. Plate IV, the fourth of the colour reproductions and the titular image in the series, even appears to feature a ghostly self-portrait in the foreground of Grosz imagined as an elderly man. For all its orgiastic shamelessness, the sex in Grosz’s images is tired, rather than sensual – sordid, rather than erotic. Unsurprisingly, the explicit sleaze of Ecce Homo’s imagery did not go unnoticed by the judiciary when the local authorities brought charges against Grosz for what was deemed ‘pornographic material.’ Grosz’s overt focus on the depiction of genitalia in particular was brought up in the trial. His response was simple: ‘I see things as I have described them.’ Though Grosz’s images of pig-like military officials and bloated businessmen captured the ubiquitous corruption, sleaze, and everyday sadism that had grown out of hyperinflation and the political turmoil of the early 1920s, they were ill-received by the authorities. Following their publication, Grosz was prosecuted for ‘offending the sense of modesty and morality of the German public’: 24 of the plates were confiscated, most of the original drawings were destroyed, and Grosz and his associates were each fined, Grosz’s total penalties across the trial amounting to 6,000 marks (loose change, thanks to the inflation rate). And while the suite was
‘My drawings will naturally stay true – they are fireproof. They will later be seen as Goya’s work. They are not documents of the class struggle, but eternally living documents of human stupidity and brutality.’
price guide inside back cover
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a resounding commercial success, it put him at serious risk from both the establishment and the general public. After Ecce Homo’s publication, Grosz was shouted at and attacked in the streets, in broad daylight and with such frequency that he applied for a personal pistol licence. The attention Ecce Homo received from the judiciary was in part due to its huge edition size: the series was published in 5 editions, with a total of 10,000 printings. Of these, the first two ‘deluxe’ editions and countless copies of the latter three have almost entirely been lost to the public bookburnings of the Nazis in 1933, though in 1965 the printing firm Brussel and Brussel reproduced the third edition on smaller paper and at a reduced edition size, as did the Grove Press a year later. The prints illustrated here are from the original and more scarce 1922 printing of that edition, their colour and depth of line much richer for it. Grosz was now firmly on the government radar and in the later years of the 1920s he feared for his and his wife’s safety, especially with the growing influence of the Nazi party. In the year before they came into power, Grosz had a premonitory dream urging him to leave Germany; the very next day a telegram arrived inviting him to teach in America that coming summer. Just 18 days after Grosz left permanently for the US, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the houses of antiestablishment artists were broken into, studio windows smashed and paintings burned while their painters were taken away to be jailed, tortured and beaten to death. In his autobiography, Grosz describes his bewilderment at being saved from imminent arrest under Nazi rule: ‘I know today that a definite Power wanted to save me from annihilation. Why I was to be spared, I do not know. Perhaps it was to serve as a witness. But so it was that I came to America.’ It is remarkable that in such a hostile environment and with such provocative material he survived the wrath of those he lampooned. Writing on the volatile Germany of the 1920s, Grosz remarked that he was ‘a minute part of this chaos...the splinter that was miraculously saved when the wood went up in the flames of barbarism.’ We can be thankful, too, that some of his work escaped with him.
view more George Grosz at goldmarkart.com
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Square Bottles
/ ANNE METTE HJORTSHOJ White slip landscapes of pillowy snow; dappled salt-glaze frostings on claret red fields; each square bottle by Anne Mette Hjortshøj becomes a potter’s canvas, reflecting the ethereal beauty of her island surroundings. Born on the Danish mainland, Anne Mette now pots from her studio workshop just a few miles from the west coast of Bornholm, a small island in the Baltic Sea renowned for its natural clay deposits. A potter’s haven since the 17th century, the call of Bornholm has persuaded some of Denmark’s most celebrated ceramic artists to dig clay from its native cliffs and beaches. Amongst her many beautiful forms, drawing inspiration from native Scandinavian ceramics to traditions as far flung as Japan and Korea, it is her square bottles that receive perhaps the most attention. As fellow potter and former mentor Phil Rogers has written of her work, ‘Though all her pots exhibit her desire to challenge herself in glaze and form, her slab bottles are certainly Anne Mette’s tour de force.’ To Anne Mette, these strong yet quiet forms offer new perspectives on the visual communion between clay, glaze, and decoration: I don’t usually invent shapes or techniques: I like to understand those that people have made in generations before me. I think that’s what keeps me going,
why I am still working as a potter. I spend most of my time in the studio working on my wheel, and I like the process, but sometimes it’s nice to get away from the wheel and do something different. So I started making these square bottles, in which you have a flat canvas that you can work on and that can show off the glazes. I see the materials in a different way when I see this canvas, when I see a picture more than I see a threedimensional object. Formed by shaping clay between custom handmade moulds, each bottle is pried from its casing when leather-hard. Subtle changes in the final shape are achieved by coaxing shifts in the angles of walls, scraping excess clay from the sides of the bottle, and are enhanced by choice of an accompanying neck. The resulting square bottle offers a blank canvas for experimentation with glaze, slip, and decorative marks: from abstract shapes to loosely drawn wheat husks, patchwork fields to rows of smoked fish dangling from their lines, each new ceramic canvas evocatively captures the essence of life on this calm, rural island. Modern, proud, yet gentle and generous of form, Anne Mette’s square bottles demonstrate just why she remains one of our most popular makers among collectors and newcomers alike.
view more at goldmarkart.com
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Exhibition in March
DAVID SUFF
David Suff is a devout keeper of sketchbooks. In his upcoming 2019 exhibition, one which sees him tackling new themes from imagined conversations with William Blake to the myriad pieces of plastic now poisoning our oceans, one such book will take centre stage: an autobiographical ‘River of Life’. Here Suff talks us through what has been one of his most personal projects to date.
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Around four years ago, I bought this sketchbook in an artist supplies shop. It’s like an Italian leporello really – all folded paper – and opens up to be nearly 15 feet long. And although the paper’s not the best (it’s a paper for mass printing rather than drawing) I began to draw on it because I was fascinated by the format. I loved the idea that you didn’t turn a page
over, that you opened the book out: not quite like an oriental scroll drawing, but something similar. I started in the middle: testing, experimenting, seeing how the paper would work, how it would respond to the pen and ink and what kind of marks I could make. I drew a few boulders, some splashing water, and began to draw a river. From there,
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I quite quickly developed the idea that I might draw the river of my life: that this long, outstretched drawing could be autobiographical, and that the river would represent my life, in a simplistic kind of way. Each fold, each page in the book, represents one year of my life: and since I began two thirds of the way through the
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volume, where I first drew now represents the 40th year. The riverbank in the foreground deals generally with my thoughts, my interior life; the bank on the far side of the river the outside, external world. Once I imagined that the drawing could become a film, with a musical accompaniment underscoring the journey, then all of a sudden it had to have a beginning
and an end: and so the final panel here is year 60, which seemed for now like a reasonable point to stop. Along the path of the river are marked significant moments in my personal history: periods of miserableness and happiness, events represented by particular imagery or symbolism. Where I began drawing there is a caged bird, a
fruit tree overlooking the river, and the head of a Greek god of sleep. I have tended to draw this sketchbook in the evenings, or in the middle of the night when I’m awake, and that idea of recording these significant events that I remember in my life is now bound up with that sleeplessness, being halfawake while the rest of the world is in bed. When I reached
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the year I married my wife, I drew a bridge across the river, a link between the two banks signifying those imagined and physical worlds. And now as I approach the unknown of the future, in the final panels of the sketchbook I’ve drawn a figure personifying memory pushing through a curtain, through something semi-transparent, into the next stage of one’s life.
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The way I draw, the technique is quite laborious: it takes a very long time, and now that I’ve reached this last panel or two it really is one dot at a time. Meanwhile, my head is full of the next thing that I want to do. The exciting thing is always the new idea, the next thing, the beginning something. Many writers and artists talk about the blank page and how scary
that is – and I think it is – but it’s a challenge. There’s this white piece of paper, and the first marks can determine everything else that follows. That can be quite inhibiting, in a way, almost frightening: where do you begin, what do you do first? And in a sense, something like this, something that’s grown over months and months, doesn’t present that challenge anymore,
because it’s all predetermined: how I’m drawing it, what kind of marks I’m making, the logic of the composition. Interestingly though, as I’ve approached these final pages, the foreground bank, which has represented my interior thoughts, my imaginings, my creativity, seems strangely enough to be disappearing – I seem to have run out of
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thought, and I’m not quite sure what that means. I have to hope that if I were to continue this drawing, if I went on recording my life year by year, some kind of imaginary life – something of the imaginative, creative, spiritual, philosophical stuff that goes on in your head – would re-emerge.
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It’s difficult not to sound too portentous – this drawing is, ultimately, some kind of record from my memory of the life that I’ve had. But it doesn’t feel like it’s any kind of stop. It feels quite exciting that out here, somewhere, beyond the last page, there is more still to come.
A highly-anticipated film of this sketchbook, featuring music from Martin Simpson and Kathryn Tickell, will be available to view alongside the original at the opening of this exhibition. This is a show not to be missed.
view more David Suff at goldmarkart.com
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NEW BRONZES FRANK DOBSON ‘I would call him a great sculptor; certainly one of England’s greatest’
Duncan Grant
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Success in the art historical canon depends on a variety of factors, chief among them luck and talent. And while Frank Dobson had the latter in spades – ‘true sculpture and pure sculpture’ said Roger Fry of his work, ‘almost the first time that such a thing has been even attempted in England’ – his career fell awkwardly between two world wars, condemning him to the titanic shadow cast by his junior colleague Henry Moore. Since holding a major Dobson retrospective back in 2016, we have worked closely with the family estate to restore to the sculptor the kind of recognition he once enjoyed and has always deserved. We are especially excited to have made three new cast editions of a trio of works: Study for Fount (1944-5), a tender maquette for the life-size version completed two years later; Recumbent Nude (1925), the very first casting of this delicate plaster study; and Study for Large Group 2 (1940), closely related to an earlier work but signed, unlike its predecessor, indicating that this was the intended final version. Each bronze, produced to an exceptionally high standard by the Black Isle Bronze foundry, confirms Dobson’s ability to combine classical theme and form – the tilted pitcher; the intentionally unfinished nude – with his own rounded, billowy feel for the human figure. ‘A sculptor of immense integrity and vision,’ wrote Duncan Grant, ‘with a feeling for the female form that seemed to wrest it out of the earth, and make its very earthiness not only monumental but sublime.’
price guide inside back cover
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Recent Exhibition
John Allen
Spirit of Place
All artists work hard in pursuit of their craft, but John Allen makes the efforts of most seem like hobbyism. To watch him detail the genesis of his carpets, from first thought to sketchbook, technical graph to weaver’s loom, is to experience a man compelled from the very depths of his core by total and incomparable passion.
view more John Allen at goldmarkart.com
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It is a work ethic that charts back to a working class upbringing on the edgelands of the Peak District. His has been, in many ways, a life of self-sacrifice. Conventional wisdom dictated that he initially forego art college in favour of a trade (first as a dental technician, then in the family coal business). Eventually graduating from undergraduate and masters courses in textile design at Camberwell and the Royal College, for much of his career he has juggled professorship at the latter with freelance commission for some of the fashion world’s biggest names, all the while ceding the limelight to egos louder (and invariably less talented) than himself. Now furiously making up for lost time, he has since launched himself full-throttle into a solo career and in the last two decades become one of the most sought-after designers in the industry. A recent Louis Vuitton-owned Loewe collection of bags and towels bearing Allen’s designs, produced in an edition of 200, sold out to VIP customers before they had a chance to stock the shelves. A stunned production team hastily issued another edition of 200 – only for the same thing to happen again. When the directors flew Allen out to their Tokyo flagship store to promote the collection, he discovered their head of design, Jonathan Anderson, had given him top billing: Japanese fashion editors were stopping him in the street for autographs. Most of us take retirement as a chance to step back from the working world, but to Allen the idea of withdrawal – in its every sense of the word – holds very little cache. Allen’s current collection, inspired by the mutable land, sea and cityscapes of the British Isles, is called ‘Spirit of Place’ – a title that, deliberately or not, pairs him with the great NeoRomantic painters for whom local geography was a vital conduit of self-expression. Writing of one such artist in his book Unquiet Landscape, the author Christopher Neve described Paul Nash as a man with a view of the world that was ‘part poetry and part graphic design’, for whom ‘geometry was the trap... landscape the occasion and the vessel.’ His description is as apt for Allen, for whom Nash has been one of many personal heroes – ‘A very English painter. I think he felt about British landscapes as I do; he loved them in an almost unreasonable way.’ Allen’s Hampshire Clump or the vertiginous Bluebell Wood, replete with surreal, transplanted croquet hoops, is every bit the brothers Nash, while Cerne Abbas’ mythic chalk giant and the estuary of the Birling Gap,
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snaking past the Seven Sisters cliffs, recall Ravilious’ misted views of the same coastal stretch. One Romantic motif recurs again and again, as if half-dreamed: a Samuel Palmer sun or moon, lucent and round, haloed in Pink Sea, Red Boat, Dales and Lone Sailor, doubly imposed in Stone Henge and apparition white in Railway Lines, hung faceless in the sky. Despite Allen’s obvious affinity for place, he is seldom sentimental. Projects go undocumented, dissatisfying ideas scrapped with hardnosed honesty. He also denies himself the title of ‘colourist’, though to look at these carpets is to sense a life lived in technicolour. He reserves the term for the rare geniuses – he names Matisse as an example – for whom pure chroma was instinctive. Allen’s relationship with colour is decidedly more torturous: some combinations are tested with more than 30 variations of a particular shade before a final colourway is selected. Like a magpie, Allen collects colours: from topographical scenes and vistas, but from paintings and curios too. And his deployment of tones is as thought-out and finicky as their coarrangement: his capriccio of Christopher Wren church spires, Lenin-red in the snow, turns a London skyline into a Russian Revolution propaganda poster with a single hue. Whether the echo is conscious or not, it reveals an aspect of the self-taught, an autodidactic absorption of references and reflections that has shaped Allen’s career: here is someone who really looks. Apply the same observation to his carpets and you soon find there is more here too – the floral patterns that festoon virtually every surface in Allen’s Victorian London house, the extraordinary collection of British art that appears there at every turn, the every colour scheme snatched and flash of inspiration that is spun together, revived, and revitalised in these woven canvases that shock like a defibrillator for the soul. While gestating designs emerge and take shape on paper, it is in Nepal, where Allen has flown at least once, and sometimes twice or three times every year for the last 20 years, that every carpet is properly born. Allen’s vast technical versing in the processes involved – one which previously saw him in conflict with senior tutors whose own practical
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‘I fell in love with the colours.
I thought they were the most incredible, modern thing that I’ve seen.’ Jonathan Anderson - Creative Director, Loewe
knowledge was lacking – has helped establish a critical rapport with the native weavers. Their engagement is much a twoway channel: observing them at work, Allen broadens his understanding of the scope of their craft skills, and at his instigation innovations are trialled and added to an everexpanding technical repertoire. One recent new technique, on display in the likes of Lavender Field and Blue Moon, involves cutting into the carpet ground to achieve threedimensional sunken passages. Trimming the top of the pile away, the shorn yarn also appears deeper in colour, effectively cheating two shades from one dye and dividing an otherwise ostensibly flat surface into shifting pitches of shadow and texture. The art of weaving has for many thousands of years held a mystic air. Since the age of Homer and beyond it has stood as a metaphor for authorship, the stitching of stories, the layering of times and places, people and cultures, intangible narrative and felt material. And so Allen’s kaleidoscopic views of England are now inextricably intertwined with the threads of the Himalayas; and with the memories of other travels, snapshots and flashbacks, some invocations deliberate, others automatic and instinctive, all potent distillations of a profound ‘spirit of place’. Next year John Allen turns 85; just two weeks ago, he eagerly discussed plans for his next collection. His energy and commitment, both boundless, are like his carpets a treasure to behold.
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view more George Chapman at goldmarkart.com
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GEORGE CHAPMAN Every George Chapman painting is, in some sense, a portrait. Even his most barren Welsh townscapes, peopled as they are with the cruciform telegraph poles, colliery stacks, pumps and slurry pipes that spider their way through suburban housing, give voice to those communities who gave their lives to the coal industry and, with its collapse, lived on amid the graveyard of its decommissioned apparatus. People were the real subject, portrayed through a record of place: and in descriptions like Robert Meyrick’s of the ‘close-built terraces’ that Chapman painted, ‘dwarfed by heavy industry and chapels, enclosed cheek by jowl in the steep-sided, cloudshrouded valleys’, you sense how the two elided in Chapman’s art; the one inhabiting, inspiriting the other. Long before Chapman ever stepped foot in the Rhondda, where he made his best-known paintings, character studies like Queue at the Butcher’s were a regular exercise. Painted during the early 1940s, this example dates among the earliest, produced at a time when, with the advent of war, Chapman was persuaded to take on a senior position at the Worcester School of Art. Fresh from two years’ surplus study at the Slade and the Royal College of Art, Queue at the Butcher’s reads as an homage to his favourite painters: the meaty portraits of Soutine, whose own visits to the slaughterhouse triggered existential crises in impasto, or those dusty reds and yellows and bluebottle greens beloved of Rouault. But beneath its Gallic vigour, Queue at the Butcher’s is a painting of quite deliberate, refined technique. Working on paper, Chapman has carefully built up the painted surface, making a wartime
Queue at the Butcher’s economy of materials seem more painterly than they are. Like Sickert and other Camden town contemporaries who exploited the open weave of stretched linen, Chapman has left small patches of paper minimally covered, the fine ‘tooth’ of the pulp visible through the paint. And to the oils have been added loose ink strokes and sparing highlights of pastel, crushed like cochineals into the painted surface. Look closer still and you find a microscopic symphony of textures. Paint cracked and split like mud. Cockles, creases, and bubbles stood proud of their backing, inadvertently introduced by laying the paper down on board. That delight in paint as a tactile medium, at once pliable, sticky and dry, spills over in the subject too, the faces of Chapman’s customers as ludicrously pinched and pulled as any Goya witch or clay Daumier bust. Like Daumier, Chapman’s sympathy for the working man meant his humour was rarely mean-spirited. Observing in later years miners emerging from the cage, he found their faces, smeared with coal dust, to resemble those of clowns; he appears here to have enjoyed the same effect, a winter chill turning outsized pink noses and flushed cheeks into a Pagliacci masquerade. But for all its playful indelicacy, there is warmth, a solidarity in this painting of the sort which never escaped Chapman’s work, even at its very bleakest. ‘Out of the squalid, Chapman can squeeze poetry till the pips squeak,’ wrote The Guardian reviewer John Dalton of an exhibition in 1959: ‘For him people are not crowds, swarming like ants, but individuals...isolated, purposeful, looking as though they will be the last pedestrians in the world.’
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THE BOSTON LARRY MASSACRE RIVERS The front and back covers of Larry Rivers’ Boston Massacre portfolio, and a number of the inside pages too, are made from reflective card. Picking up the folder, leafing through the prints within, you catch occasional glimpses of yourself: fuzzy and blurred, indistinct, but inescapably there in the background. Whether deliberate or not, the effect is uncanny, for Boston Massacre is that rare thing: an ‘historical’ artwork which tells us as much – if not more – about ourselves, our behaviours, our perpetual relationships and transgressions, as it does the events it is depicting. Identity lies at the core of much of Rivers’ art – and for good reason. A white secular Jew, brought up in Harlem, who played black music, spoke and smoked like a hippy, swung both ways, and rubbed shoulders with everyone from de Kooning to Miles Davis, Larry Rivers was the kind of personality for whom biography is not enough. The term ‘polymath’ does not begin to describe the plurality of his experimenting: a painter, printmaker, sculptor, musician, one-time actor, flirter with avant-garde film, East coast cowboy
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and purveyor of all things kink and kitsch, Rivers tried his hand at anything that came his way, not always successfully: ‘He would stab out at different things,’ recalled one friend, ‘like Picasso – except that more of Picasso’s things worked out.’ A man of endless curiosity, as inseparable from the subculture coteries of camp and queerness as he was from his own art, more than one critic has suggested that he too frequently stole the limelight from his own work, which, at its worst, degenerated into self-parody and pastiche. ‘If I have inherited bad taste,’ Rivers infamously said, ‘it is at least compounded with an obnoxious sense of who I am.’ Who he was, ironically, was not in fact Larry Rivers but Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg, born in 1923 to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. A talented musician, before discovering the art world he was an established jazz saxophonist known to the likes of Charlie Parker. Playing a club one night with his band, he was jokingly introduced by the host as Larry Rivers and the Mudcats and, liking the name, decided to keep it. He was first introduced to modern art through his
pianist’s wife, herself a painter who lent him a brush and tubes. Within weeks he had caught the bug and decided to enrol on classes through the GI bill, having briefly served in the Second World War. Rivers came to painting at a time in America when figurative art was giving way to abstraction, but it was the human figure, more than anything, which had attracted him to paint in the first place. His commitment to figuration, throughout his career but especially in those earliest years, was all the more impressive given his teacher, Hans Hofmann, was one of the most vocal proponents of American Abstract Expressionism. From Hofmann he learnt how to put colours together, and to the egotism of abstraction added an ironic selfawareness it was otherwise lacking (if art was going to be masturbatory, Rivers surmised, one might as well enjoy it). Though Rivers has been at once undervalued and overstated as among the progenitors of American Pop, his art was, as Warhol remembered, caught somewhere in an aesthetic limbo. Most compellingly, in a number of paintings Rivers felt his
competition not to be contemporaries but masters of the past. Courbet, Géricault, Degas and Ingres were all cited as important forebears, Rivers meeting the challenge of their virtuosic blending of oils with vigorous, modernist history paintings of his own interpretation. In works like Last Civil War Veteran, painted after a photo-graph of the
last disputed participant of the American civil war, Walter Williams, Rivers gave America an emphatic portrait of a divided national history and a fractured collective identity, a statement made all the more ballsy through blank swathes of unfinished canvas and a phallic-shaped face smeared like a Francis Bacon scream, painted almost
contemporaneously some 3,500 miles away. Other formative works included Olympia in Blackface, in which Manet’s masterpiece is taken to task for its racist overtones, and a bathetic send-up in Washington Crossing the Delaware of Emanuel Leutze’s triumphant painting of same name. Boston Massacre continued Rivers’
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convention of re-examining American history, as well as the broader art historical tradition of history painters past. Published two years after embarking on a travelogue project in Africa which nearly saw him and his collaborator, Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau executed in Lagos after being arrested as suspected mercenaries, the suite was likely
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produced in the run up to Rivers’ 1971 exhibition Some American History, a ground-breaking show held in Houston, Texas, that examined the portrayal and treatment of black people in America over the last 300 years. The influence of both projects are evident in Boston Massacre: Rivers’ photojournalistic, pseudo-cinematic
style seeps in through collaged newspaper clips and photographs, as well as a series of variant colourways marked up on one print as if part of a photoshoot edit or a film storyboard. In fact, the suite bears all the filmic and photographic hallmarks of Pop – photomontage, silkscreen reproduction, with a healthy dash of neon colour – but like
much of Rivers’ work, the whole seems too distracted, too idiosyncratic, too personally diverted for straightforward classification. The massacre itself dates back to 1770. On March 5th, a British sentry and eight supporting soldiers stationed in King Street were harassed by indignant locals angered by recently introduced colonial legislation
which the troops were there to enforce. As tensions escalated, the company captain ordered his men to load their muskets and shouted at the growing crowd to disperse. One private, struck by a rock thrown from the mob, then fired into the crowd, prompting the rest of the company – unordered – to discharge their weapons. In
the ensuing imbroglio, three people were killed and two more died later from their injuries. The scandal became an instant sensation as a propaganda war erupted between revolutionaries and loyalists. One local artist, the engraver Henry Pelham, was among the very first to produce a striking account of
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the event. Before publishing his drawing, however, Pelham showed his proposed print to a fellow engraver and silversmith, Paul Revere. Shortly after witnessing Pelham’s design, Revere produced his own identical, revisionist, pro-Bostonian engraving, printed and distributed before Pelham had even seen his version come off the press. Revere’s print went on to become one of the most significant examples of American propaganda, much to Pelham’s chagrin, helping promulgate widespread anti-British dissent: ‘If you are insensible of the Dishonour you have brought on yourself by this Act,’ Pelham wrote to his former friend, ‘the World will not be so. However, I leave you to reflect upon and consider of one of the most dishonorable Actions you could well be guilty of.’ Rivers’ suite was produced 200 years on, and takes Revere’s print as its visual touchstone, with collaged elements of the original, as well as later lithographs depicting the same scenes, scattered throughout. Across twelve silkscreen prints Rivers offers us some ‘after thoughts’ on the events, revealing through key correspondences the continuing importance of the event and its historical implications. As an example of the power of propaganda, even on the right side of history, to conceal a more complex picture, Rivers relates Revere’s retelling of the original massacre (in which the British captain is shown ordering his smiling troops to fire upon a placid, gentrified audience) to the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, at a time
when public support for the war was at its lowest and army morale at breaking point. The moral muddiness between depictions of oppressor powers and the indigenous population is highlighted through images of traumatised Vietcong and American forces tending their wounded. This particular correspondence is made even more apparent in the historical figure of Crispus Attucks, the half black, half Native American stevedore who was the first victim to be hit in the crossfire. Rivers adopts Attucks as a symbol of the contemporary plight of the Civil Rights Movement: here he corresponds with montaged photographs of James Meredith, the young black activist who pledged a solo March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, only to be shot by a white supremacist on his second day. The conflation of Attucks with other poets and politicians associated with the movement seems all the more potent to a modern day spectator, speaking powerfully of the continued systemic violence against black people in the US, and especially of police violence, weaponised law and order, and the treatment of black citizens more broadly by authoritarian bodies. Wide format, folded prints with the rows of Redcoats stood facing the viewer takes the content beyond Revere, placing us directly in the firing line and in the shoes of a massacre victim. Invigorating these political inferences is Rivers’ sensational distribution of colour and kink throughout the suite, injecting vibrant underground camp culture into a retelling
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of an event otherwise confined to staid history books. With overt focus on soldiers’ crotches, troops bent on knees in submissive positions, or clutching flesh-pink, priapic rifles thrust into our faces, Rivers coopts the queer subversion of authority figures into sex fetishes in images vaguely reminiscent of the black leather truncheons, assless chaps, sailor boys, and BDSM subculture immortalised ten years later by Robert Mapplethorpe. Great history art, like good journalism, does not languish in the regurgitation of facts or the simple resetting of contexts: rather, it presents us a story only to expand it and reveal to us the broader implications, the universal thematic content, the varying aspects of the human condition embedded within every major historical moment. In Boston Massacre, the enduring message is of the perpetuity of violence: violence between warring states, perpetrated by governing powers, the violence to which fringe and mainstream minorities alike are subjected, violence in sex, today’s ‘toxic’ masculinity, all packaged and conveyed through the lurid colour that imprints Rivers’ imagery on the brain. Willem de Kooning, in typically enigmatic fashion, said of Larry Rivers’ art that to experience it was ‘like pressing your face in wet grass.’ If he meant being at once discomforted and tickled, feeling somewhat ridiculous, yet somehow profoundly put in touch with the taproot of our multiplicitous national and international identities, he may well have been onto something.
view more Larry Rivers at goldmarkart.com
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Interview
CLIVE BOWEN
With a fourth exhibition at Goldmark on the horizon, we spoke to slipware potter Clive Bowen about his love of clay.
Looking around the studio, we’re surrounded by jugs and mugs, plates, dishes, platters, jars – all eminently usable. I’ve always made functional pots, pots for use in the kitchen or the home. This is my great love: how to present that meal, how to offer food. I think it’s so important. The first time I had a meal at Michael Cardew’s, for example, I was presented with a large bowl of coffee in one of his stem cups, and it was such a great moment. When you have friends and family around, and you lay the table up and you’ve got all these wonderful pots to serve food and drink, it’s just what I love doing. The whole idea of function, to me, is vital to what I make. Whether then that enters the argument of art versus function, I just think it’s all the same: beautiful things to use in your daily life. You mentioned the great Michael Cardew – what was it like apprenticing with him? Well initially I went to work for Michael Leach, who was the second son of Bernard Leach. I had a four-year apprenticeship with him, and he taught me everything about studio practice. It was at the tail end of my apprenticeship that I was introduced to Cardew. I used to help him fire his kiln, and this was my first introduction to wood firing. He was a major influence. I wanted, really, to be slightly English in my approach. You must remember, I’d trained with Michael Leach, who like his father was looking towards the East, towards Japan and at pots from China, so meeting Cardew was really the turning point: looking instead at English slipware, English medieval pots. At the time I felt I couldn’t use Japanese brushes – that
delicacy wasn’t in my nature. I needed something like sgraffito, or combing. I also remember reading that Yanagi, the Japanese philosopher, said to Bernard Leach, ‘We love your English slipware: it’s born, and not made.’ And I thought, ‘Yes! I like that.’ It is a lovely phrase. Do you think having that tangible history to work from has helped you as a potter? The beauty of living and working where I do is the fact that the North Devon pottery tradition stretches back to the 17th century. The clay was already established, the local slips were available – the whole idea of having everything traditionally worked out for me meant that I had a kick-start. I didn’t have to test anything. There is a stream, in fact, running through our wood where we dig clay to make one of the decorating slips. It has this rich, ochre colour which gives you a wonderful terracotta under the glaze. It’s also a very nice clay to make pots with, though I don’t tend to use it in the main part of the pottery production. We actually had a famous Japanese potter here, Shiro Tsuijmura, who came down and used the clay straight from the stream and made wonderful pots, back in the early ‘90s. It’s a very plastic clay; lovely stuff. For the pots themselves, I use two clays: the famous Fremington clay, which the local potters have always thrown with, and a much redder Stoke-On-Trent clay. I blend the two in order to eke out my Fremington supplies. Using the old pug mill, I also mix in this waste grit from the nearby China clay industry in Cornwall, which they locally call ‘silver sand’. It’s mainly mica and feldspar, but it gives it a wonderful texture.
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Is that important to you, being in such direct contact with local materials, local traditions? The idea of being anti-tradition is a very, very tricky one, really, because no matter what you do I think you have to bring the past with you. If you’ve no past to bring with you, where do you start working from? You have old musicians who worked a hundred years ago, you listen to them to go with the new, or you look to old pots and paintings – I think it’s just something you carry on in your life, looking back. When you’re a young man and full of enthusiasm, in your 20s, you want to be the greatest potter or the greatest person in the world, full of ambition; and then when you reach your 70s, you look back and you think, ‘No, you were just too young.’ I think in the time I’ve been making pots – you know, fifty years now – in that great time everything becomes automatic: I’m not thinking too much. It’s a sort of gut reaction of what you like, and what kind of pot you like, what hits the spot. For example, there is a very influential, favourite pot of mine, an early North Devon jug, made by an unknown potter. They didn’t worry about the clay being kneaded, they didn’t worry about cleaning the bottom – it’s just a perfectly functional jug, made for use, made in quantity. There’s no ego there, there’s no ‘I made this’ sign anywhere. It was this kind of jug, really, that set me on my course. Looking back, then, what was it like starting out as that ambitious young potter? I had two children by the time I moved here. We hunted around for a property and found this old, small farm, with plenty of chicken shacks to convert into kiln sheds. I borrowed the money to buy the house, moved in, and started building my first kiln, which was easily done in those days because I just went to the local power station and came back with a pile of scrap bricks. I remember my first firing – in fact Svend [Bayer, renowned wood-firing potter], when he was an apprentice with Cardew, came up to help me and we fired the kiln together. We totally melted half the load, but the
other half was salvageable. I immediately drove them in my van to the Chagford gallery and, I’ll never forget, the lady who ran it actually took my first pots. I’ll always remember that. After about five years, I realised that I couldn’t fit any large pots in this small kiln, so I decided then to build a bigger one. Of course, when you have a big kiln you suddenly need help to fire it, because it takes at least 30 hours to fire, so you need to organise a team of helpers. Some people become regulars, others drop by for just one or two firings. I’m ever so grateful that family members come back and help out occasionally, so we have a wonderful atmosphere here. Are there aspects of the making process that you especially enjoy? I really enjoy making things off the wheel occasionally, things like square dishes and tiles. The tile especially gives me a flat, square surface to decorate, like a canvas to play with. To make these I’ve got this rather ancient tile press, which must be at least a hundred years old. It was designed originally for drypressing tiles, but I’ve adapted it so that I can slip-trail on the softer, leather-hard clay. I found that the slips would flake off the bone-dry pot, so I’ve had to modify the machinery accordingly. Pottery is such a therapeutic thing to do. When you’re working, you have to concentrate, and you soon slip into a routine. Out of all the pots I make, I think my favourites are probably the jugs and storage jars; I think the jug in particular is a form that you’ve got to get right. It’s got to feel right, you’ve got to fill it with liquid, if it’s too heavy you can’t lift it from the table – there are all these considerations. And on top of all that, there is the decoration of course, which is fundamental to your pottery. There’s that old thing about ‘less is more’, and I find it very hard not to decorate. When I see a pot in front of me and I cover it with slip, I just can’t help touching that slip, making
view more Clive Bowen at goldmarkart.com
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a mark, scratching through it: it’s just something I have to do. Decorating, for me, is part of the pleasure of making pots. Although you’ve got to hold back: you make a mark, and sometimes that mark is it, you’ve got to leave it alone. You can quite easily go over the top and spoil something, you can over-decorate. You’ve got to know when instinctively to stop, and that’s the trick. But I just love the gestures of sliptrailing, mark-making, the whole feel of slipware. You’ve recently had a lot of success showing in Japan, where slipware seems to be having a bit of a moment. When I was here as a young man, starting the pottery, a lot of my friends were travelling on gap years. They would say, ‘Oh Clive never likes to go anywhere’, but now it’s kind of reversed! We’re always off somewhere or other. Over the last ten years I’ve been invited abroad to demonstrate and talk about pots, especially in Japan over the last six or seven years, where there’s been a great resurgence in slipware. Back about ten years ago, they had a major slipware exhibition which was so influential that many young Japanese potters are now starting to make their own slipware. It’s just such an exciting thing to go to Japan eventually, after all these years, but especially to go and be able to introduce slipware there. This will be your fourth show at the Goldmark Gallery. Do you enjoy working towards an exhibition? Unpacking the kiln is always exciting. I always like to work right on the edge, so most of the pots are fired for exhibition. I can never keep things back too far: I like them to be as fresh as possible, out of the kiln and into the gallery as fast as possible. Some of the pots I know I’ll probably never see again – just a memory of something I’ve done.
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Forthcoming Exhibition
An Alphabet
RON KING
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Like much of Ron King’s work, what seemed in the folded alphabet a relatively simple proposal proved to be devilishly complex. The idea originated in 1978, shortly after King finished work on the pioneering ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’, a pop-up book based on Bartok’s opera of the same name made in collaboration with poet and long-time colleague Roy Fisher. ‘Fisher said to me “I don’t want any of your coloured stuff in here”, so I suggested we do an ABC poem instead, just putting a simple, folded A, B, C down the gutter,’ recalls King: ‘He later turned to me and said, “Well why don’t you do the whole alphabet?”’ At Fisher’s instigation, from ‘Scenes from the Alphabet’ King developed the initial ABC pamphlet into a full alphabet, eventually presented in a Frenchfold, concertina-style booklet that ran on both sides of the paper. ‘That’s probably the most difficult book I’ve ever made. The way it flips over – that was a fluke. I had this Mexican bark book and opened it up, turned it over and there was nothing on the other side. I thought, “That’s a ridiculous waste of space! What can we do on the other side?” Of course we can carry on. I hit on things like that every now and then. They’re nice to come across, and they only come from actually doing the thing yourself.’ The project was partly driven by a Crafts Council grant – the only one he has ever been awarded – bestowed in 1979. It would be another three full years before all 26 letters came to fruition: for months rejected designs littered the studio floor as King worked towards a uniform, gridded system from which each letter could be cut and folded. As he got closer to finalising the cutting schemes, King took notice of the paper letters strewn about the workshop and struck on the idea for an alphabet poster. Even with the hard work finished, technical woes continued to plague the project as flooding at King’s Circle Press premises rusted the metal cutters used in the first edition of the poster. Making the most of an awkward situation, King took the opportunity to rework a number of the letters, giving us the final, honed version of the alphabet celebrated in the Crafts Council’s 40:40 exhibition, a collection of forty objects reflecting the best in British design. As the fundamental building blocks of type, critical components of both language and the world of print, the symbols of the alphabet occupy a special place in Ron King’s art. His poster offers a visually thrilling paradigm of how working within rigorous limitations, using only projection and the fall of light to suggest space and form, can give the simplest, most abstract idea concrete shape and dimension.
EDWARD MIDDLEDITCH He is, as purely as can be, a poet, a lyrical poet, of appearances.
In 1956 the artist John Minton wrote an essay for an issue of ARK, the seminal student-run journal produced by young artists and designers from the ‘50s to the late ‘70s at the Royal College of Art, where Minton was then a tutor. Entitled ‘Three Young Contemporaries’, Minton’s exhibition review, through thinly-veiled exasperation, contrasted the literary navel-gazing of the modern art critic with the more formal considerations that concern practicing artists: ‘No painter wears his heart on his sleeve and no painter explains himself except by his painting. Set a questionnaire he will do everything to lose it; putting on his solemn mask for bureaucracy, sighing with ennui. Is that the ageless Venice, Mr G? Are you a social realist, Mr M? Is that the Child of Europe, Mr S? Here are presented three young painters; self-aware, ambitious. Doom being in, and Hope being out, the search amongst the cosmic dustbins is on, the atomic theme is unravelled: the existentialist railway station to which there is no more arrival and from which there is no more departure. Only a limbo
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for those who took the wrong train, and the uninformed ticket collector who announces, Moi, je suis Le Destin. Is it valid? Does it relate? Is it socially significant? The critics cry and in answering themselves fill their columns. Giving the painter time to get the nose drawn right, the foot reshaped, the foreground redrawn, the middle distance reconsidered. Yes but isn’t it too descriptive? Or not descriptive enough? Or too theatrical? No, but I mean, is it timeless? And the painter has time to buy more paints, to catch the train, even for a short delay in the station bar, and he is away…’ The three young contemporaries in question – Messrs G, M, and S – were all ex-students of Minton’s: Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch, and Jack Smith. Together with a fourth, John Bratby, they shared a gallerist in Helen Lessore (they were known briefly as the ‘Beaux Arts Quartet’ after her eponymous Mayfair premises) and early promoters in the writers John Berger and David Sylvester. Both, among other commentators of the time, detected features of ‘social realism’ within
their work – a withdrawal from the grandiose and the hysterical, an inward turn to the domestic, the unheroic, the dun and fallowbrown depictions of interiors and tabletops, weathered skin, bedcovers, bathing pans and swaddling cloth that quickly, and against his better judgement, assumed Sylvester’s description as ‘Kitchen-Sink’ painting. In truth, their grouping was as much a strategically successful marketing ploy as it was a statement on the congruity between their art, and in the unavoidable acrimony of Minton’s words you sense the envy of a teacher coming to terms with the surpassing critical and commercial acclaim of his former pupils. A year later and Minton was dead by overdose, the quartet-thathad-never-been disbanded, his three young contemporaries headed in resolutely new directions: Greaves, from the patronage of Lessore to Anton Zwemmer, and a period of rehabilitative revaluation in Braque-like still lifes; Smith, to strange, analytical paintings deconstructing the optics of light; and Middleditch, to Spain, where the heat of the sun, the parched severity of the vegetation, the sheer, ragged faces of rock provoked an altogether more angular
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response on the page. Each would find in their brief solace the birth of a new chapter in their careers. Minton’s essay comes as a warning to us, as writers on art, who tend often to ‘set the questionnaire’, to start from the bigger questions: who wish to plot in artists’ efforts an over-arching narrative, read thematic profundity in formal construction, subsume into broader, sweeping cultural contexts works more frequently produced in apparently self-imposed, self-critical isolation. To do so can be invaluable: teasing out unconscious connections between images and sources, building a framework of the social, moral, and cultural landscapes from which an artist’s work emerges. But there is always the danger in this approach that we ignore the practical and the particular – and, as any self-effacing artist will tell you, art almost always begins with the particular. This is especially so in the case of Middleditch, inarguably the black sheep of the Kitchen-Sink scene, who seemed so much his own man, who, as Helen Lessore wrote in later years, ‘has never been interested in Realism, social or of any other kind, nor in any “cause”, or movement, or fashion’, and in whose work the particularity of an image and the practicality of capturing it faithfully, with all of its transitory frisson, were of fundamental importance. There is another way to read Minton’s words: not as he intended them, but as a similar criticism of the self-projection practised by the Neo-Romantic artists, of whom he was arguably one and to whose landscape tradition Middleditch was, subconsciously or not, responding. Landscape was as literary for the Neo-Romantics as was commentary for Minton’s art critic:
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geography as scenery, a stage set to be retrodden again and again, as did Sutherland in Pembrokeshire and Nash in Avebury, each new performance wrenching from the gut some new emotional expression. Compare Graham Sutherland’s anguished thorn crosses with Middleditch’s sketches of Spanish cacti and there is a restraint, not in vigour, line, or movement but in personal injection, in these early drawings, many of which are among his most outwardly self-expressive. Where NeoRomantics treated the landscape like theatre, Middleditch has the fixity of the camera, the exactitude of the cinematic frame. To contrast the two, working either side of a war in which Middleditch fought and was wounded (but which he seldom spoke about), is to compare an art of narrative and image, pathetic fallacy and tragic pathos versus suspension of the moment, position and relation, the dynamics of light and shade. In Minton’s words, Neo-Romanticism was the art of the ‘theatrical’, the ‘timeless’, the ‘existential’, a movement that foresaw the angst-ridden atomic theme; Middleditch, by comparison, was the post-war artist of ‘middle distance’ and ‘foreground’. This is not to say that Middleditch’s work is without its drama, its introspection, or its personal communion. Illustrated here are charcoal drawings produced by Middleditch across the breadth of his career. They date between that earliest departure from the ‘social realist’ misnomer, his escape to the Costa Brava in 1957 with former students of Bomberg (the influence is clear to see), to carefully worked drawings from the late 1970s as he entered the last decade of his life. Like Greaves and Smith, Middleditch tended to prefer charcoal to pencil; for a
view more Edward Middleditch at goldmarkart.com
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generation reacting to the enduring strictures of Henry Tonks (whose pupils included a young Helen Lessore), it must have felt the bigger medium: soot-black and brittle, one that chipped, bled and burred with an organic quality that satisfied that early desire to convey, somehow, in the use of each medium something of the authenticity of their chosen subject matter. In Middleditch’s hands it became instinctive, as immediate and impactive as a polaroid: and tellingly, in his studio supplementing these charcoal studies, which were often produced as precursors to paintings, were endless home photographs of wheat fields and furrows, horizons cropped close, the ploughed troughs in banded lines, pictures of leaves intentionally blurred, or of trees casting shadows that pool and break like spilt water dragging on stone. Many of these tell of the formal arrangements that Middleditch actively sought and which recur throughout his work, both in paint and on paper. Thin, vertical paintings and drawings, almost twice as high as they are wide, divided by a horizontal line of some kind around a third of the way down, with a swooping mid-toforeground that cascades from the bisection to the bottom of the page. Broad, landscape works dominated by heavy horizontal bands. Elsewhere, in melancholic images of flowers, bushes, a pond reflections the densest details of foliage are pushed unusually close to the edge of the page. Frame was of huge importance to Middleditch: there is a precision to his compositions which, like the photographs, were chosen for a particular angle and its accompanying contrasts. The impact of this structuring was often heightened by scale. Middleditch worked big – a reflection,
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perhaps, of the ‘largeness’ of the original image in his head, the way in which it seems to have dominated his subconscious. Landscapes from memory and from sketches appear also to have overlapped in Middleditch’s imagination with images and patterns discovered elsewhere – and so in later years, we see woven kilim provoking paintings of corn fields or branches in
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overcast hedgerows, floral chintz prompting diaphanous arrangements of flower heads, the latter so light and delicate as to recall Keats’ mourning the transience of beauty, or our mortality reflected back to us in rose heads wilting over a garden pond. Beyond formalism, what is there that binds Middleditch’s art? ‘The fountain-head of his inspiration,’ wrote Helen Lessore – an apt
choice of word, for a man who was frequently drawn to portray pools, rivers, weirs and rushing water – ‘has always been what, until comparatively recently, was understood by “Nature” – with a capital N; that is…the whole physical creation, as perceived by our normal sight: the surface of the earth, in all its variety of flatness, hills, and rocks, and including its waters; moonrise or sunset, the night sky full of stars, atmospheric phenomena – clouds, rain, snow; every kind of vegetation; and any animal life – except humankind.’ The human element in Middleditch, for whom people posed a subject too morally fractious to even contemplate, emerges in the framing of the image itself; in the architecture of the view, the imposition of the boundaries of the page on the boundless openness of the environments in which he made his best work. ‘He is,’ Lessore continues, ‘as purely as can be, a poet, a lyrical poet, of appearances.’ What is the work of an artist? Ultimately, it must be to give back to us the world in a new light: to feed us an aspect of it which we had not seen before, had not thought or felt, had not even sensed to be there or had understood only superficially. It is to look – and to look with focus and discipline, directly and obliquely, to see in the very particular the spark of the profoundly universal, all without ever losing that primitive sense of having opened one’s eyes for the very first time. It is the kind of looking we, as writers on art, do not do enough; and it is what defined Middleditch’s work in a career of over forty years.
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cover image: detail, Joe Tilson, Ziggurat 5, screenprint, 1966
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