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.

Eric Ravillious at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

   Strange, I suppose, to be writing a review of an exhibition just as it's closing, but I left my visit to the Ravilious exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery pretty late.  There is no real point therefore in me urging you to go, but I'm inclined to do so because this exhibition is an absolute stunner.  All my hopes, all those anticipations, for it were amply met.
   As I talked about obliquely in my first post about King's Lynn there is always a risk of disappointment when you see, or meet something or somebody, that has occupied such a special place in one's mental life, in one's imagination, for so long; and the work of Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) has occupied such a position for a long time ever since, as a teenager, when I came across an article about him in 'House and Gardens'.  That was in the early/mid eighties, and I still have that article.  This was however my first encounter with the real thing, and it was, at times, an emotional, even overwhelming, experience.  That was partly due to the number of visitors, and the number of actual work on display.  The four smallish galleries were crammed with both.  But mainly it was the sight of these large and beautiful paintings themselves in all their subtle, muted intensity.  Although there were examples of his wood-engravings and lithographs the exhibition overwhelmingly, and rightly, concentrated on his watercolours which were produced between c1930 and his death off the coast of Iceland twelve years later - twelve years of a quiet and growing mastery of technique.  Learning from the 18th century British masters of watercolour such as Cotman, Ravilious produced work that is highly organised, thought through.  There appears to be little of the spontaneity we associate with, say, the work of his contemporary John Piper.  The influence here is of Paul Nash. However don't let that put you off from searching out Ravilious's work for yourself.  His work is not strained, but it does have a haunted, slightly uneasy melancholic quality, which is partly down to his choice of subject.  His method of working establishes a distance between the viewer and the subject.  There is a delicacy and transience to them that I find hard to grasp let alone define
   When I started this blog it was merely a way of publicizing my writing, particularly my novel 'Chameleon', however over time it has grown in directions I hadn't envisaged.  One of the themes that has emerged is that of the everyday, the mundane and the over looked whether it is a street in a Suffolk village, a parish church, or the carved street signs in Bath.  And it is that in Ravilious's work that both resonates with, and informs, my taste.
   As I write these words I am reminded (perhaps oddly) of the architectural drawings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh I saw in the eponymous RIBA exhibition this summer; there is the same interest in light - at times it appears that Ravilious paints with light (I was upbraided at college for doing that.  My tutor said I was too young (!) to do that.  A curious and deflating, disabling statement.  He had probably never seen a Ravilious) Both are drawn to the idea of the North; an idea we also find in the work of Ravilious's literary contemporaries W H Auden and J R R Tokien.  It was Tolkien who, I think, came up with that haunting phrase: 'the Nameless North'. Perhaps, it can be argued, that the Picturesque (and Romantic) tradition in which both men stand is a rejection of the 'South'.
 Like Mackintosh Ravilious too is essentially a linear artist in that he is inclined to think in line, rather than mass.  The technical problem resulting from that thought pattern - how therefore to represent mass - he answers with the use of cross-hatching, analogous in technique to that of his wood engravings.  This allows Ravilious the necessary illusion of the 3 dimensions, but also to build up rich colour and texture (where needed).  On the whole, though, Ravilious's colours are muted, subdued.  He also uses wax resist, and scratching out, to let in the light.  A pencil is used not only to outline forms but to help describe shadow.  (His pencil shading is actually quite loose.)  In a sense Ravilious is a pattern maker, and he is both drawn to it as a subject (his love for the mundane and the domestic) and to its utility as a way of describing volume and mass whether it is the wallpaper of a farmhouse bedroom or the seat of a third class railway carriage.  It is unsurprising therefore that Ravilious also designed things himself, including patterned papers.
   Ravilious has been slowly gaining in popularity over recent years, and I'm tempted to say that in these politically uncertain days his art, which is perceived as very English (in its understatement) and nostalgic, answers a need in the viewing public.  However I don't think that is the whole truth, or even some of it - I'm not somebody who believes in the 'zeitgeist'.  The work of Ravilious talks to us in a quiet voice, using very often the mundane, the commonplace, the everyday, of things that are in fact quite profound.  And I'm certain that his subject matter is a deliberate choice; his choice of subject is not immaterial as in, say, the work of Roger Fry.  His work, including that produced as an official War Artist, is rooted in the everyday, the uneventful.  The human figure is largely absent.  And it is in that rootedness in the undramatic, the common experience of us; which in its particularity is related to the Romantic tradition of British Art and what he, perhaps, picked up from Paul Nash, who was his tutor briefly at the RCA, which also partly explains his current popularity.  However, by painting them, and thereby changing them, Ravilious has endued them with a power that is emblematic and imaginal.