Edward Bawden at The Dulwich Picture Gallery

     Way back in July my friend Penny and I went on a jaunt to Dulwich - it was her first visit and my second.  Fitting then the exhibition at the Picture Gallery was of the work of Edward Bawden the 20th century British artist who was a close friend of Eric Ravilious, whose exhibition in 2015 (eek! I didn't realise it was three years ago!) was the reason for my first visit to that oddly haunting building originally built as part gallery, part almshouse and part mausoleum, but I think the history of the building and its construction is the subject for another post.
     So looking back at our visit, over a month ago now, what is the strongest memory?  Laughter. It isn't what one has grown to expect walking around an exhibition - art appreciation is, after all, reckoned a pretty serious business, a time of proper, grown up, middle-class contemplation and communion - but in that final room Penny could contain herself no longer such was her delight in, and enthusiasm for, Bawden's work.  A laugh rang out.  And another, as she moved from exhibit to exhibit. But then that room was a place of infectious delight, charm and whimsy, categories that are quite possibly a little frowned upon in the serious world of art. Or at least where the art of the 20th century is concerned.  An artist, after all, has to have commitment.
     It is most likely these categories of charm, delight and whimsy are what are most associated with Bawden; they are - the posters, the illustrations, the applied art - after all, the most readily available, most readily recognized Bawden images. This exhibition, which was curated by James Russell, (who was also responsible for curating the Ravilious exhibition), does justice to that immense and wonderful output and gives space to Bawden the topographical and the War artist. A slightly different, perhaps more serious, certainly more rounded artist emerges, one from which we can trace more readily the development of technique and style of a an artist who has a strong element of the chameleon.
     Bawden was born in 1903.  After Cambridge Art College he attended the RCA.  There he met and became friends with Eric Ravillious.  Importantly for the stylistic development of both men Paul Nash was one of their tutors.  Nash's strong influence can be seen in early watercolours such as 'Autumn Gales, Great Bardfield' and 'Christ! I have been many times to church'. There is clarity.  Colours are on the pale side and there is none of that Baroque sensuousness you find in the work of John Piper. In many respects Bawden is a more disciplined artist. As with Ravilious paint is lain on the paper in lines rather than washes.  What Bawden seems to have also taken from Nash in these early works is a sense of detachment from the subject, but Bawden added something, which was distortion.  Nothing too wild you understand, nothing to frighten the horses, but just enough to heighten that sense of distance. I think that like, say, John Minton, Bawden was essentially a linear artist in that he thought more readily in terms of line rather than mass. Coupled with his love of pattern (which is never far away) Bawden often collapses pictoral space, some times distorting, if not fragmenting the subject for the sake of composition, conforming it to the discipline of the paper.  Perhaps it was Nash's influence but Bawden never became a Modernist as such, by which I mean like a good many other British artists of the twentieth century and beyond he remains firmly rooted in the English Romantic tradition while being influenced by, and adopting, certain Modernist techniques such as collage and linocut.  They are best seen, perhaps, as merely utilitarian, useful weapons in the arsenal, rather than signs of allegiance.  Bawden's work, with its humour, sense of place, its love of the graphic, seems a world away from that of Roger Fry and Bloomsbury.  One thing that really seems set them apart is their reaction to Victorian culture.  Bawden fits with a whole strain of twentieth British art and culture that continued to find inspiration and delight in the nineteenth century; a strain that would finally come to public attention in Pop Art and the Peacock Revolution of the Mid/Late Sixties.

    In many respects Bawden can be placed alongside the Neo-Romantics, such as Piper, but perhaps those things (apart from the sense of place) that separate Bawden from the world of Roger Fry also served to remove him too from the intense world of Neo-Romanticism.
     Bawden's work as a War artist, in particular his series of portraits he undertook in Iraq, shows him grappling with depiction of that third dimension.  The results are particularly impressive, even monumental.  I would single out his portrait of Sergeant Samson of the 1975th Bechuana Coy - a work of immense humanity, where he uses cross-hatching (as well as watercolour wash) to build up an image of an almost sculptural quality. The exigencies of War changed Bawden's topographical work.  It took on a new immediacy and drama, and possibly confidence, as can be seen in two works on display: 'The Canmore Mountain Range' and 'Houses at Ironbridge'.  Both superb, and both in their way uncompromising. And possibly that is what it is interesting in Bawden's work, that balance between the charm and the distortion, that creative friction caused by the competing interests of a man with eclectic tastes.
   My only disappointment, if it can be counted as such, was that on the day we were there it wasn't as busy as I remember the Ravilious exhibition to have been.  And that is a shame.