LARA

CONNARD, PHILIP

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:55:37 +0000

Philip Connard was born at Southport in Lancashire on 24 March 1875. He was the son of David Connard and was given a minimum of state schooling, before joining the building trade as a house-painter. He attended evening classes in art, won a scholarship to the National Art Training School, South Kensington in 1896 and in 1898, a British Institution Prize which took him to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. Having run out of funds, he returned to London, worked as an illustrator and obtained a teachhing post at the Lambeth School of Art. That position provided him with security of means and he then began to submit work to open exhibitions. He went on to become a prolific painter of landscapes, portraits, murals and decorative interiors. His work was notable for its concentration on the fleeting effects of light, its lively Impressionistic handling of paint, and his point-blank refusal to take any account of contemporary modernist developments in painting. Connard was a great friend of the Australian artist George Bell (1878-1966), both having attended the Académie Julian. They shared ideas about how to paint, both of them enjoying the effects of loose brushwork and outdoor light. His earliest successes were with the New English Art Club, where he commenced exhibiting in 1906. Through the friendship and encouragement of the heavyweight experts Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer, he was elected to membership of the NEAC in 1909. Connard was also a Foundation Member of the National Portrait Society in 1911. He had one-man exhibitions at the Leicester Galleries in 1912 and later at Barbizon House. During the Great War, he served as an officer in the Royal Artillery, saw action in the Battle of the Somme and was invalided out, subsequently becoming an official war artist with the Royal Navy (1916-18). He was elected ARA in 1918 and it was only at that point in his career, that he began to exhibit in the RA summer exhibitions. He was elected RA in 1925 and his Diploma Work was Apollo and Daphne (c.1925). Connard painted the murals for the Queen’s Doll’s House Room at Windsor Castle in 1924 and designed posters for the London Underground Group in the period 1924-30. He is also known to have tried his hand at book illustration, having provided those for Stephen Phillips’ book Marpesa in 1928. Connard worked in oils, but showed great interest in the watercolour medium from the mid-point of his career. From 1932, he lived at Richmond in Surrey. That area’s landscape and river quickly became the subject of his subsequent works in watercolour. He was elected to membership of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1934. In 1935 he travelled up to Scotland to carry out mural decorations for the liner RMS QUEEN MARY (now permanently berthed at Long Beach, California). Connard was twice married. His first wife, Mary, died in 1927. He remarried in 1933 to Georgina Yorke, who featured in many of his later paintings. Thomas MacGreevy, reviewing a Connard exhibition at Barbizon House for The Studio in 1938 would write: ‘A small but fairly representative exhibition of works by the distinguished academician. Mr Connard has an unfailing eye for the decorative element in any subject he tackles, and so is almost invariably successful in flower pieces and interiors. In portraiture he does not go very deeply into the delineation of character and in such a picture as Sunbathing in Tyrol one was rather surprised at his indifference to the possibilities of the mountains in the background as providing an element of volume in the composition. But in such pictures as The River at Kingston and Morning Mist there was unmistakable poetry of vision and the flamingoes in Mantelpiece Decoration were finely drawn and delicately colourful.’ During the Second World War, Connard is known to have been involved with the RA’s camouflage initiatives. In the period 1945-49, he served as Keeper of the Royal Academy, being much praised for setting matters aright, after the disruption of the war years. Connard took an active role in the affairs of the RA and in November 1949 is recorded as having opposed in General Assembly the resolution that two ARAs be appointed each year to the Council from those who had been members for at least three years. In appreciation of his labours, Connard was appointed Commander of the Victorian Order upon retirement in 1950. However, his resignation from the RA could be considered supportive of the outgoing president, Sir Alfred Munnings. Connard died at Twickenham Hospital, Middlesex on 8 December 1958. An exhibition of his work was held at Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham in 1973. A considerable body of his work may be found in the collection of the Tate Gallery in London. His personal papers may be found in the archive of the RA.

MACNAB, IAIN

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:19:39 +0000

Iain MacNab was born at Iloilo in the Philippines on 21 October 1890. He was the son of an official of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. He was educated in Edinburgh and grew up in Scotland. From 1911 to 1914, he studied accountancy (which would later stand him in good stead in a number of subsequent administrative posts), then served in the army during the Great War, until 1916, when he was wounded and invalided out. In 1917 he commenced studies at the Glasgow School of Art. He then moved to Heatherley’s School of Art in London. After a brief period spent studying in Paris, he returned to Heatherley’s, serving as their joint principal in the period 1919-25. In 1925 MacNab married Helen Wingrave and purchased a property at 33 Warwick Square in Pimlico, London. He had some highly developed ideas of his own about art teaching and decided to put them into effect by establishing the Grosvenor School of Modern Art at Warwick Square that same year. By advertising in The Studio, the school attracted a wide cross-section of students from across the globe (including the Swiss artist Lill Tschudi) and became a leading force in the production and promotion of modernistic printmaking works, while teaching a solid foundation of art history, each artist lecturing on their own speciality. Claude Flight lectured on the art of lino cutting and his acolyte, the young Sybil Andrews performed the role of school secretary. The architect Cyril Power lectured on ‘The Form and Structure of Buildings, Historical Ornament and Symbolism and Outline of Architectural Styles’ and the Sunday Times art critic Frank Rutter on ‘Modern Painters from Cézanne to Picasso’. The school encouraged student’s individuality and allowed them to join and study for whatever length of time they chose. Three Antipodeans; Ethel Spowers, Dorrit Black and Eveline Syme were immensely impressed by what they learnt and became instrumental in organising exhibitions and promoting the school back home in Australia. Notable students at Warwick Square would include: Billie Waters, Emmy Bridgwater, Margaret Barnard, Alison Baily Rehfisch, Rachel Reckitt, Ronald Grierson, Eileen Mayo and the sisters Winifred and Alison McKenzie. Flight arranged annual exhibitions of Grosvenor School artists’ linocuts at the Redfern and the Ward Galleries, as well as touring exhibitions to the provincial galleries. The necessary simplicity and boldness of design required by the linocut technique characterised both his own and his pupils’ work and exerted an important influence on the artistic tastes of later generations. Flight mounted the first exhibition of British linocuts in 1929. It was declared an outstanding success and prints were purchased by key collections, including the British Museum and the V&A. The lino cuts of the Grosvenor School enjoyed a brilliant, but all too brief popularity. By the mid-1930s interest was waning and the final exhibition took place at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1939. MacNab ran the school from 1925, until a combination of conscription and the Blitz forced its closure in 1940. In the early 1930s, MacNab was much involved with the Samson Press, founded and run by Flora Lucy Margaret Grierson and Joan Mary Shelmerdine. He executed 29 wood-engravings for their first illustrated book, Nicht at Eenie or The Bairns’ Parnassus, a collection of Scottish children’s verses and lullabies. That book marked the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship and several of his pupils later joined the group of artists commissioned by Samson. In 1938 he published The Student’s Book of Wood Engraving. His book Wood Engraving was published in 1947. His work demonstrated clarity of form and composition in a vaguely Vorticist manner. MacNab exhibited at all the major public venues, including the Royal Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Glasgow Institute and the Royal Institute of Painters in Oil, of which he served as president for nearly 20 years. MacNab died in London on 24 December 1967. MacNab was one of the most important figures in the early 20th-century revival of wood engraving. He developed an original and recognisable style, and his work is noted for its technical excellence. Examples work may be found in the collections of the V&A, Manchester City Art Galleries, the British Museum and at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. During the 1970s, collectors and curators began rediscovering the work of the almost forgotten Grosvenor School of Modern Art and since that time, prices have soared.

LLEWELLYN, SIR WILLIAM

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:29:57 +0000

William Samuel Henry Llewellyn was born on 1 December 1858 at Cirencester in Gloucestershire. He studied under Edward Poynter at the Royal College of Art and in Paris. Llewellyn painted portraits and landscapes and taught at the Lambeth School of Art, where Arthur Rackham was one of his pupils. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884 and was a member of the New English Art Club in the period 1887-89. He was elected ARA in 1912, knighted in 1918 and elected RA in 1920. He succeeded Sir Frank Dicksee as President of the RA in 1928, beating William Orpen in the final ballot. Llewellyn’s tenure would be highly eventful. It has been said that he was of little distinction as an artist, but compensated for this with other virtues, ‘being tall and handsome in person, with a pleasant, lively manner, and the valuable gifts of quick observation, social tact, frank speech, and sense of humour’. These qualities helped him to supervise the arrangements for a series of loan exhibitions devoted to Dutch, French, and Persian art. The most famous was the ‘Italian Art 1200-1900’ exhibition of 1930 which contained many famous masterpieces and was mounted with the enthusiastic assistance of the facist dictator, Benito Mussolini. There were 78 loans from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence including The Birth of Venus by Botticelli and 21 from the Academia in Venice including the Tempesta by Giorgione. Some 600,000 visitors came to see the exhibition which would be described by Sidney Hutchinson in his History of the Royal Academy (1968) as ‘absolutely staggering in its content of world-famous masterpieces.’ In the 1920s relations between the RA and the Tate Gallery deteriorated and Llewellyn had to deal with the consequences of the Tate’s childish policy of refusing to hang works purchased for the nation under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest, if it adjudged them unsuitable. In 1934 Sir William convened and chaired a Constable Memorial Committee to determine how best to mark the centenary of the death of the painter John Constable (1 April 1937). It was proposed that the Dean and Chapter of St Pauls’ Cathedral be approached with the proposal to place a memorial tablet to his memory in the crypt. It was further decided to launch an appeal early in 1935, by means of a letter to The Times to establish a John Constable Prize for the encouragement of landscape painting by artists of British nationality. The sculptor Jacob Epstein’s first major commission was the 18 figures he produced in the period 1907-08 for the exterior of Charles Holdens’ British Medical Association building in The Strand (now Zimbabwe House). The English were not ready for him and the figures he produced were condemned as obscene, leading to an ill-tempered debate in the press. In May 1935 Sir William instructed RA Secretary Walter Lamb to write to the BBC, correcting statements made on the radio on 19 May concerning his refusal to sign a letter to The Times calling for the preservation of the statues. Walter Sickert (elected full academician only the previous year) resigned from the RA over the issue. (The figures were mutilated in 1937 having become: ‘a danger to the public’). Also in 1935, Stanley Spencer resigned his associateship, when two of his paintings were rejected by the Hanging Committee of the RA Summer Exhibition (he would not not return to the fold until 1950). Interviewed by the gentlemen of the press in 1936, Sir William is recorded as saying: ‘Sorry as I am to say it, to my mind, the fate of picture making is sealed. I can see no future. Already there are too many pictures in the world. . . . The life of the art student is made too easy. … In my young days the way was hard, but those who really believed in their art were content to struggle. It is not fair to youth to be so encouraging. People today are not picture-minded. Houses are smaller, decorative schemes have no use for pictures, and those who do love pictures can satisfy their love in so many of the galleries, which are free. It is a pity but true that anyone can do without a picture.’ As befitted his position as grand panjandrum of the arts, Sir William was the recipient of many foreign orders and honours. These included: Commander of the Legion of Honour, Grand Cross of the Crown of Italy and Grand Officer of the Order of Orange Nassau. As a mark of royal favour, he was appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Victorian Order by his sovereign in 1931. He also served as a Trustee of the National Gallery in the period 1933-40. In 1938 Sir William stood down from the presidency of the RA, having reached, so it was believed, the statutory retirement age of 75; in fact he was five years older, his date of birth having long been given inaccurately. Sir William died in London on 28 January 1941 and was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral. His 1911 and 1914 oil on canvas portraits of Queen Mary may both be found in the Royal Collection.

TANNER, ROBIN

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:50:54 +0000

Robin Tanner was born in Bristol in 1904. He was educated at Chippenham Grammar School in Willtshire. The year 1924 saw the publication of Laurence Binyon’s book The Followers of William Blake and in 1926, Martin Hardie organised a retrospective of Samuel Palmer’s work at the V&A. Inspired by these developments, Tanner began taking night-school classes at Goldsmiths’ College in south London. Shortly thereafter, he produced his first etching, a barn interior influenced by George Clausen. At that time, a group of full-time printmaking students at Goldsmiths’ were struggling to find their aesthetic identity by studying Old Master prints of the 16th and 17th centuries. They included Paul Drury, William Larkins and Graham Sutherland. Having commenced his studies part-time, Tanner was a late addition to their number. Some of the teaching staff expressed concern about the direction the group were taking and Tanner quickly found himself under the wing of Stanley Anderson (1884-1966), who was both a stern critic and a hard taskmaster. Tanner’s second etching Alington in Wiltshire contained many of the elements which would become his trademark: a barn, farmyard, hayricks, chapel and Wiltshire elms. The following year, Tanner produced one of his most important prints, Martin’s Hovel. Anderson criticised the composition and the sun as a ‘blasted search light’. But the print set the scene for Tanner’s career, all the more so, because it demonstrated the beginnings of William Morris’s influence in his work. It must also have been Morris’s influence which initiated a series of etchings on Wiltshire craftsmen which Anderson finally criticised out of existence. Only four of the proposed series were made and the first took three separate attempts. Some of these prints were exhibited by Molly Bernard Smith at the XXI Gallery, but while she was successful in selling Drury, Sutherland and Badmin, she never sold much in the way of Tanner. His great etching, Christmas, came too late for an etching market which would be virtually extinguished by the Great Depression. In 1930 Tanner began teaching at Chippenham. The following year, he married Heather Spackman (and designed her wedding dress). They moved to Old Chapel Field outside Chippenham and lived there for the rest of their lives. Many of Tanner’s best plates date from the 1930s, such as Harvest Festival, Autumn, Hedge Flowers and Wiltshire Rickyard. During the latter part of that decade, he worked with his wife on a book commissioned by Collins called Wiltshire Village. In 1924 Tanner discovered a pamphlet by Francesca Wilson The Child as Artist: Some Conversations with Professor Cizek. Under Tanner’s tutelage, children in the Ivy Lane School produced some quite astonishing work using Cizek’s theories. Such was the standard of work produced, that when shown at a teachers’ conference in 1936, Tanner was derided as having produced it himself. In 1935 he was appointed Inspector of Schools, in which role, he continued until 1964. Tanner believed that the study of natural things and the exploration of arts and crafts, music and poetry were essential for the development of teachers and children. At the Ministry of Education, he ran courses for primary school teachers, in concert with the progressive educationalist Christian Schiller. There were occasional further etchings up to 1946, but no more until 1970. The Tanners them worked on the book Woodland Plants, Heather writing the description of the 69 plants and Robin producing the black and white illustrations. Tanner retired from the world of work in 1964, but was prevented from getting back to etching until 1970 by a host of other distractions, including the setting up of the Crafts Study Centre in Bath. In fact, over half his etched output falls into the second half of his life and recognition began for his work when Joe Graffy republished some of his etchings in a portfolio in 1974. Tanner’s attitude to printmaking was that a print was a way of forming an image, so that it could become more widely available. While he accepted that editions have to have some form of limitation for practical reasons, he felt that the only purpose of cancelling an etching plate was to give the etching a cachet which it otherwise would not have. This was a well-accepted 19th-century view of printmaking. Tanner felt that prints could have different editions in the same way as books. All the editions have been carefully recorded in the catalogue of his work and the etching plates are now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The Catalogue Raisonné of Tanner’s etchings was published shortly after his death and was based on an irreplaceable collection of proofs and drawings. The catalogue illustrates each of the 51 prints in at least one state, together with many of the drawings and photographs used by the artist to compose the subject. Tanner died in 1988.

YEATS, JOHN BUTLER

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:06:07 +0000

John Butler Yeats was born at Tullylish, County Down in Ireland on 16 March 1839. He was the son of a Church of Ireland rector. He was educated at Atholl Academy on the Isle of Man, then under by all accounts, a brutal regime. Two of his schoolmates were Charles and George Pollexfen. He then went on to read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he sparkled and became a member of the University Philosophical Society. He married Susan Mary Pollexfen in Sligo in 1863. He failed to enter the Church for which he had originally been intended, turning instead to the study of law at King’s Inns. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1866 and devilled for Isaac Butt, before taking up painting in 1867. He then moved to London to study at Heatherley’s School of Art, although he was warned by an aunt ‘here you are somebody, there you will be nobody at all.’ He later studied at the Slade, forming friendships with John Trivett Nettleship and Edwin J Ellis, admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. For the first 20 years of his career, Yeats produced illustrations and genre and landscape paintings: Pippa Passes (1869-72; National Gallery, Dublin), a large gouache, is distinctly Pre-Raphaelite in feel. In the late 1880s he began to realise his gifts as a portrait painter, although his production was hampered by a lifelong inability to complete commissions on time. He was an admirer of George Frederick Watts and saw a similarity between Watts’s approach to portrait painting and his own. In an essay on Watts written in 1906, Yeats wrote: ‘the best portraits will be painted where the relationship of the sitter and the painter is one of friendship’. He continually moved his family between Dublin and London in the 1870s and 1880s. However, he had a poor head for business and was never financially secure. He exhibited works at both the RA and the RHA. Yeats was the father of four surviving children. Among them were the poet William Butler Yeats and Jack Butler Yeats, the painter and illustrator who holds the title of Ireland’s most famous and most expensive artist. In the 1880s and early 1890s the Yeats family lived an impoverished, somewhat Bohemian existence at Bedford Park, London. After some years of poor health, Susan Yeats died in 1900. Yeats’ platonic relationship of ten years standing with Rosa Butt then blossomed. In December 1907, at the age of 69, he accompanied his daughter Susan Mary ‘Lily’ to an embroidery exhibition at Madison Square Gardens in New York City, for what was initially intended to be a short visit. However, Yeats remained there for 14 years and never returned to Dublin. In New York, he was friendly with members of the ‘Ashcan School’ of painters and continued to paint portrait commissions. He also wrote essays for Harper’s Weekly, which were collected in ‘Essays Irish and American’. Within his circle of artistic friends in New York, he was renowned as a conversationalist and was a gifted public speaker. During his time there, he nurtured friendships with Martha Fletcher Bellinger, the writer Van Wyck Brooks, George Bellows, Mary Tower Lapsley Caughey, the miniature painter Eulabee Dix, the painter John Sloan and his wife Dolly Ann Squire and most importantly of all, the corporate lawyer and art patron, John Quinn (1870-1924). The Irish-American Quinn looms large in the story of the Yeats family at that time, principally for his prodigious generosity and tender solicitude. Yeats maintained contact with his family in Europe and friends in America through extensive correspondence. After brief illness, occasioned by long walk in the cold, Yeats died on 3 February 1922 and was buried in Chestertown Rural Cemetery in Chestertown, New York. His autobiography Early Memories: A Chapter of Autobiography was published posthumously. Over a period of half a century, Yeats produced fewer than 100 oil paintings, his greatest output being pencil drawings. There are few records of Yeats’ sales and there is no catalogue of his work in private collections, it also possible that some of his early work may have been destroyed in the Blitz. It is clear that he had no trouble getting commissions, as his sketches and oils may be found in private homes in Ireland, England and America. His later portraits show great sensitivity to the sitter. Yeats is probably best-known for his portrait of the young William Butler Yeats which is one of a number of his pictures in the Yeats Museum in the National Gallery of Ireland. His portrait of John O’Leary (1904) is considered to be his masterpiece.

OULESS, WALTER WILLIAM

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:43:10 +0000

Walter William Ouless was born 21 September 1848 at St Helier on Jersey in the Channel Islands. He was the son the son of the artist Philip John Ouless (1817-85), who specialised in painting maritime subjects. Walter entered the Royal Academy Schools as a student on 21 April 1865 at the age of 17. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1869. He initially focussed on history painting, but on the advice of John Millais, switched to portraiture. He took up residence at 12 Bryanston Square, London and embarked upon a long and distinguished career in portraiture, rarely changing his poses. His sitters included: Thomas Hardy, King Edward VII, Edward Baines, Sir Edward Holden, Bt, John Loughborough Pearson, Andrew Carnegie, John Morley, Cardinal Newman (1881; Oriel College, Oxford), Viscount Morley of Blackburn, the Very Reverend Charles Vaughan, Dean of Llandaff and Charles Darwin (1875; Christ’s College, Cambridge University). Ouless was elected ARA in January 1877 and RA in May 1881. His Diploma Work was his Portrait of Henry Stacy Marks (1877). Henry Stacy Marks, RA (1829-1898) - known to his friends as ‘Marco’ was a member of the St John’s Wood Clique, a group of London artists who shared an interest in historical genre painting. Initially, Marks specialised in everyday scenes set in medieval England but from about 1870 began painting birds, frequently sketching at London Zoo. Although there was often a humorous element in his work, Marks bitterly resented being referred to as a comic artist. Writing after his death, George D Leslie commented that in fact ‘gravity was the prevailing tone of Marco’s character’ and that Mr Ouless, in his wonderfully successful portrait’ has given Marks ‘the usual grave and thoughtful expression that was habitual to him.’ In 1859 the art student Edward Sterling convened a meeting in his studio of fellow students in the life class of Carey’s School of Art at Charlotte Street in Bloomsbury, at which the 38th Middlesex (Artists’) Rifle Volunteers was founded in 1860. The St John’s Wood Clique was entirely supportive of this development and Ouless served in No 1 Company alongside his friend Stacy Marks. Ouless appears to have cultivated strong connections with the medical community, painting portraits of their most eminent figures. These included: Sir William Ogilvie Dalgleish (Dundee University), Lord Lister (King’s College, London) and his seated portrait of the surgeon Sir William Scovell Savory may be found in the Great Hall of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in central London. The reason for this connection (and others) may be found in the fact that when he first came to London, Ouless studied at the drawing school in Princes Road (now Black Prince Road) that would eventually become the Lambeth School of Art. John Sparkes was their first Art Master. Sparkes later became the first head of South Kensington Art School (later the RCA) and wrote the first catalogue of works for the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Another early student was William Anderson who would become a surgeon, anatomist and collector of Japanese art. Ouless played an active role in the affairs of the RA and was a Governor of Dulwich Picture Gallery. Study of the minutes of the General Assembly of the RA reveal that Ouless’s motion that ‘no fundamental change in the RA’s laws be enacted, except by a majority of the whole body of Academicians’ was rejected on 30 January 1907. He sat on the RA’s Hampton Court Committee, was appointed by the Council of 8 July 1919, to investigate restorations of paintings by Mantegna at Hampton Court Palace, following receipt of a letter of complaint from Henry Woods. The committee’s report presented to the RA on 29 July 1919 described the restoration of paintings by Mategna at Hampton Court as ‘lamentable’ and as betraying ‘deplorable incompetence’, and making recommendations about their future housing. In later years, Ouless was an active member of the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution, as its honorary secretary and vice-president. His daughter Catherine was a successful painter of landscapes. Ouless died on 25 December 1933. To mark the 50th anniversary of his death, the Channel Islands reproduced his Portrait of Cardinal Newman as a postage stamp. A considerable body of Ouless’s portraiture may be found in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Tate Gallery has his Portrait of Philip Westlake (1873).

FLANAGAN, BARRY

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:47:53 +0000

Barry Flanagan was born at Prestatyn, North Wales on 11 January 1941. His father was a set designer at the Warner Brothers’ film studios at Teddington, Middlesex. Barry was one of four children and was educated at Foxhunt Manor and Mayfield College in East Sussex. He briefly read architecture at Birmingham College of Art, before studying sculpture. Of that time, he later recalled: ‘I was a fully-fledged sculptor from the age of 17. I stepped right into it and embraced the physical world.’ He made his way at first doing odd jobs as a builder, frame-maker and even as a baker. He was quick to absorb the technical skills of each of these, calling them his ‘recipes’. He also briefly studied cello at the Guildhall School of Music and worked as a chef in a restaurant in the Fulham Road. He looked at five art schools, before settling on St Martin’s in the Charing Cross Road, because he’d profited from an evening class he took there under Anthony Caro, where the students were set exercises such as being given wire and told to make a sculpture of a ‘ZABAUUUM’. His tutor, Phillip King wrote in his final assessment that he was ‘a student who thought seriously and was capable of producing surprising, challenging work’. Of necessity, Flanagan commenced his artistic career employing humble materials, such as hessian, sand, plaster, rope, sticks and stones. He was deeply interested in words. In the 1960s, near St Martin’s, the bookshop Better Books offered hospitality to a group of concrete poets, who fascinated Flanagan. Then someone gave him a copy of the May-June 1960 issue of Evergreen Review devoted to Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and Flanagan got hooked on ‘pataphysics’, the ‘science’ of imaginary solutions which embodied a paradox dear to his heart. He had his first solo show at the Rowan Gallery in London in 1966; it included 1 Ton Corner Piece, a hundredweight of sand poured onto the floor in a corner of the gallery, with four scoops removed from the centre. In 1967 his work comprising of four wobbly, tapering columns, a large linoleum ring and a rope, titled Four casb 2 ‘67, ringl 1 ‘67 and rope (gr 2sp 60) 6 ‘67 (now in the Tate Gallery) were installed at the Biennale des Jeunes in Paris. They anticipated similar work by Carl André, Robert Smithson and Eva Hesse. Flanagan’s work was championed by the writers Gene Baro and Charles Harrison and the curators Eddie de Wilde at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Harald Szeeman in Berne. Flanagan also produced a short film A Hole in the Sea shot in 1969 on a beach near The Hague. He was in several important exhibitions that year, in Amsterdam, in Berne and in an exhibition called ‘6’ at the Hayward Gallery, curated by Michael Compton, who said he’d reckoned Flanagan would produce work that was: ‘paradoxically very cheap and yet unsaleable, a parable therefore of an ideal art.’ Flanagan taught at St Martin’s and the Central School of Art in the period 1967-71. He was a private, reserved man, and an unforced eccentric, who would wear tweeds and sandals regardless of the weather, he enjoyed his international fame, and what he regarded as his unexpected good fortune. Outside the art world, he was best known for several permanent public sculptures, such as his giant bronze Hare on Bell at the Equitable Life Tower West in Manhattan, and in London, Nine Foot Hare in the Victoria Plaza Hotel and Leaping Hare on Crescent and Bell at Broadgate. At Washington University, St Louis may be found his hare titled Thinker on a Rock. These not strictly anatomically correct bronze animals, which included elephants, cougars and horses, echoed human traits and dispositions, but never in a cute or sentimental way: they display human energy and hint at human emotions, but remain animals all the same. Flanagan represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1982. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Fundación ‘La Caixa’ in Madrid in 1993, touring to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes in 1994. In his later years, Flanagan lived between Dublin and Ibiza. In 2006 the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin held a major retrospective and ten of his big bronzes paraded down O’Connell Street. Flanagan was elected ARA in 1987, RA in 1991 and a ppointed OBE that same year. In later years, he suffered from motor neurone disease. He died at Santa Eulalia, Ibiza on 31 August 2009. Flanagan gave sculptures to Jesus College, Cambridge, and a Kouros Horse to the town of Santa Eulalia.

UNDERWOOD, LEON

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:38:22 +0000

Leon George Claude Underwood was born at Shepherd’s Bush, London on 25 December 1890. He was the eldest of the three sons of Theodore George Black Underwood and Rose Ellen Cornelius. The previous three male generations of the Underwood family had been antiquaries and numismatists. George had an antique and print shop in Praed Street, Paddington. At the age of five, he attended St Michael’s Primary School, Paddington. He later attended Hampden Gurney Church of England School, until he left to work in his father’s shop. His duties mainly involved the copying and repairing of prints. In 1907 Underwood saw William Blake’s coloured engraving Glad Day and was deeply affected. That September, he moved to Goose Green, Dulwich and enrolled as full-time student at Regent Street Polytechnic under Percival Gaskel. A gifted sketcher, Underwood was awarded a scholarship to the RCA, where he studied under EC Alston, and painting under Gerald Moira. As a student, he visited Roger Fry’s (1910) Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, and while enthralled by the use of colour, judged the work neglectful of content. He felt that a neglect of subject matter was to the detriment of art, and that the embrace of abstraction for its own sake simply led to greater and greater differentiation between art and artists and an ordinary life as lived by the majority of folk. During the Great War, he worked in camouflage, eventually becoming a captain in the Sappers. In 1917 he married Mary Colman and submitted designs for repeating trench mortar to War Office. In 1919 he enrolled for year’s refresher course at the Slade and devoted himself almost exclusively to life-drawing under Henry Tonks. He became a Founder Member of Seven and Five Society and took up residence at 12 Girdler’s Road, off Brook Green, Hammersmith. He won a premium in the Rome Prize competition 1920, but instead of going out to Italy went to Iceland instead. He opened the Brook Green School of Drawing at his home. Notable pupils would include: Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Blair Hughes-Stanton, and Gertrude Hermes. In 1920 he joined the staff of RCA as assistant teacher of life drawing, but resigned the post, after falling out with William Rothenstein in 1923. Underwood had his first one-man exhibition at the Chenil Galleries, Chelsea in 1922. Other exhibitions were held at the Alpine Club Gallery (1924) and the Leicester Galleries, London (1934). In 1926 he travelled to the USA to paint murals, but received no commissions. He returned to New York that May and began work as an illustrator for Brentano, John Day Company and on Vanity Fair. He also opened a private drawing school of the 8th Street West, Greenwich Village. In 1928 he travelled down the south-eastern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, up the rivers of Tabsco and over the Sierra Madre to the Pacific east of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, with Phillips Russell, studying Mayan and Aztec art. He reopened his drawing school in London in 1931 and founded the short-lived review magazine The Island, to which Henry Moore and Christopher Nevinson contributed. Underwood wrote many articles and several books. His Animalia a book of verse, and a novel The Siamese Cat, were both illustrated with woodcuts. He also wrote the treatise ‘Art for Heaven’s Sake: Notes on the Philosophy of Art To-Day’ (1934). He travelled widely, visiting Iceland, the cave paintings of Altamira in France, and Aztec and Mayan sites in Mexico. During his travels, he became fascinated with primitive art. In ‘Art for Heaven’s Sake’ he argued that whilst abstract artists often turn to the primitive for inspiration, they as often miss its essential point: that it communicates to the masses, and does so with so much impact mainly because it avoids abstraction and concentrates instead upon subject matter. During the Second World War, Underwood deployed his skills in camouflage at The Rink in Leamington Spa. In 1954 he painted the mural London Parks, for the Shell canteen at St Swithin’s House, St Swithin’s Lane, London EC4. In 1961 he received the Jean Masson Medal from the Society of Portrait Sculptors. In 1964 he became HRBS. A retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted at the Minories, Colchester in 1969. He died in London in 1975. Examples of his work may be seen in the V&A, the Tate Gallery, London; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the National Museum and Gallery of Wales, Cardiff and the British Council Art Collection, London.

MEADOWS, BERNARD

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:38:45 +0000

Bernard William Meadows was born at Norwich, Norfolk on 19 February 1915. He was the product of a modest middle-class background and was educated at the City of Norwich School. In 1931, his father persuaded Bernard to prepare for the future, by training as an accountant. It soon became apparent that Meadows was useless at figures and he persuaded his parents to permit him to attend the Norwich School of Art, where he studied under Walter Watling. The training there was wholly conventional and a friend who knew the sculptor Henry Moore arranged for Meadows and a couple of fellow students to visit his studio. Moore rewarded Meadows’ interest by writing to him, inviting him to come and help in the holidays. Meadows worked as Moore’s assistant in his workshop outside Canterbury in the period 1936-40. As he told Moore’s biographer, Roger Berthoud, these were idyllic days: they commenced at five am by throwing buckets of cold water over each other as a wake-up call, continuing with work in the studio, then going out to shoot rabbits or poach pheasants, to swim in the sea off Deal or Reculver and to finish the day with a visit to the cinema. Meadows studied under Gilbert Spencer at the Royal College of Art from 1938 to 1940. However, his first application to the RCA was turned down, because of his association with Moore. In 1936, at the age of 21, Meadows took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition first surrealist exhibition in London: the war meant he would not exhibit again until the first Battersea Park open air exhibition during the Festival of Britain in 1951. Meadows commenced the Second World War as a registered Conscientious Objector, but when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he joined the Royal Air Force. He spent most of his war in the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, where he became fascinated by the native gigantic crabs, whose forms he would later introduce to his sculpture. He found in crabs and later, birds, a means of expressing extreme violence, without resorting to the human figure. His birds fall to earth, shattered, or metamorphose from bird form into a gun barrel, not a sportsman’s gun, but the sort that in an earlier war had drenched the banks of the Somme in blood. Meadows’ appropriation of animal forms was his way of finding his own voice as a sculptor and escaping the overwhelming influence of Moore. Meadows returned to the RCA to complete his studies in the period 1946-48. Meadows’ main work is in bronze and, like Moore, he produced drawings before sculpture. He first came to international attention at the 1952 Venice Biennale, when his work was exhibited in the British Pavilion alongside that of Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. In his catalogue introduction, Herbert Read coined the phrase ‘the geometry of fear’ for Meadows’ work was typical of 1950s British sculpture, which was characterised by forms of aggressive or wounded animals used to reflect the mood of post-war anxiety. It was only in the later part of his career, in the works of the late 1970s and early 1980s, that Meadows’ mood changed, and a more sensuous element emerged. His first one-man show was at Gimpel Fils in 1957. He then exhibited from New York City to Tokyo and produced a stream of public and private art in Britain and beyond. In the period 1948-60 he taught at Chelsea, but felt that he was hamstrung by a department he described as little more than a life-modelling class and which had no casting facilities. Meadows’ work developed in new directions in response to his teaching career and he would later confess to a two-way influence between himself and prized students like Elisabeth Frink and Robert Clatworthy. In 1960 Meadows was appointed professor of sculpture at the RCA, a post he would hold until 1980. There, he introduced a foundry, where he could cast his own and students’ work. His Public Sculpture was an assemblage of stone blocks and balls of dripping and dimpled metal. It was commissioned in 1968 for the Eastern Daily Press’s Prospect House in his native Norwich and may be seen there still. When Moore became old and, in the early 1980s, ill, Meadows returned to help him; after which, he became first, acting director and then consultant to the Henry Moore Foundation. Meadows died on 12 January 2005. A body of his work may be seen on display in the Tate Gallery at Millbank.

RECKITT, RACHEL

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:10:36 +0000

Rachel Reckitt was born in St Albans in Hertforshire in 1908. Her family moved to Golsoncott, a rambling Edwardian pile at Roadwater, Somerset in 1922. She remained there all her life and it would in time, become both her home and her studio. The house was vividly described by Reckitt’s niece, the author Penelope Lively, in her book A House Unlocked. Rachel undertook her initial artistic training under the landscape painter Alexander Carruthers Gould (1870-1948), who lived in Porlock. Reckitt hailed from a privileged background, which gave her the financial independence to pursue her own artistic direction. However, one consequence was that she never felt the need to promote her work. She then went on to study at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Pimlico in the late 1930’s, under Iain MacNab, learning wood engraving techniques. That establishment was visited by Mark Gertler and Graham Sutherland, who would both influence her artistic development. She also attended Hammersmith School of Building Crafts from 1940 to 1945 and studied lithography at the Central School of Art and Design. During the War, she performed voluntary work in London’s East End, helping families displaced by the Blitz and several Londoners were accommodated at Golsoncott. Reckitt lived an austere existence, was an avid horsewoman and loved to ride to hounds. She raised bullocks and drove a beaten-up old Landrover. She evinced no interest in fashion, or comfortable surroundings and despite her privileged background, remained an ardent Socialist all her life. Apart from her work in printmaking and paint, she demonstrated a keen interest in sculpture, working in steel, stone, aluminium and tin. Initially, her preferred medium was stone and she produced some tombstones for local churches, as well as her figurative work. In the 1960s she painted a series of conversation pieces, which included subjects such as boys on bicycles, a Nigerian student nurse combing a girl’s hair, queues at bakers, women hanging out of washing on washday and women gossiping in the street. By the late 60’s, her enthusiasm for metal drew her to blacksmiths and their forges, Harry and Jim Horrobin’s smithy in Roadwater in particular. Initially, she had drawn and painted them, but graduated to working with steel on an anvil at Horrobin’s in the period 1970-75. She was a member of the British Artists Blacksmiths’ Association and some of the earliest works she produced were pub signs for local inns. Commissions for local churches were also undertaken: the Chapel of St Bartholomew at Rodhuish has a sculpture depicting Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. St Andrew’s Church in Old Cleeve has a screen by her and the Church of St Nicholas in Withycombe, her statue of St Nicholas. Reckitt illustrated several books with her wood engravings including: Voices on the Green by A R J Wise and R A Smith in 1945, London South of the River by Sam Price Myers, English Country Short Stories by Walter de la Mare in 1949 and People with Six Legs by M Bosanquet in 1953. In 1950 Paul Elek commissioned Reckitt to engrave 16 whole-page illustrations for an edition of Eliot’s book The Mill on the Floss, largely on the strength of her engravings for London South of the River. The blocks turned out to be her finest illustrative work, but Elek went into receivership and they were never published. The images were exhibited for the first time in 1997, from proofs that she had taken, after engraving the blocks. Shortly afterwards, the blocks themselves came to light, when it was realised that the non-appearance of the engravings had been a double tragedy, for on the reverse of the blocks were parts of other much larger engravings she had produced before the war. Due to the wartime shortage of boxwood, she had sawn the blocks down to less than half size. Reckitt exhibited at the Society of Women Artists, the NEAC, the London Group, the Society of Wood Engravers and the Cooling, Westheim and Redfern Galleries in London and the Bridgwater Arts Centre in Somerset. In 2001, the Somerset County Museum held a retrospective, ‘Rachel Reckitt: Where Everything Meets the Eye.’ Titles of exhibited works included: The Farm, Roadwater, Point to Point and Combe Sydenham Agricultural Show. She sponsored the Rachell Reckitt Sculpture Award, was elected a Member of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1950 and became an Honorary Member of the Somerset Guild of Craftsmen. Reckitt died in 1995.