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By the end of John Cecil Stephenson's art school training - first a
scholarship to Leeds Art School then to The Royal College of Art -
he was in a position to produce still lives, landscapes and
portraits in a professional capacity. Like many painters of his
generation, who had received similarly conventional instruction, he
became a competent teacher, appointed in 1922, as Head of Art at
The Northern Polytechnic. In this mould Stephenson might have
remained a largely undistinguished painter - but in the early 1930s
he found himself at the centre of a group of artists with
avant-garde credentials, and his own art underwent a remarkable
transformation. By 1934 he was exhibiting groundbreaking works such
as Mask (CAT. 7), at the 7 & 5 Society, and in 1937 was a key
contributor to the watershed publication and exhibition Circle,
where his work was showcased alongside that of luminaries such as
Kazimir Malevich, Le Corbusier, Fernand Leger, Alberto Giacometti
and Pablo Picasso. What led Stephenson to become, in the words of
the celebrated art critic Herbert Read, 'one of the earliest
artists in the country to develop a completely abstract style'?
Between March 1919 and November 1965, John Cecil Stephenson lived
in London at No. 6 Mall Studios, off Tasker Road, Hampstead. As the
father figure of what Read christened 'a nest of gentle artists',
his next door neighbours included, during the course of the decade
leading up to World War II, Barbara Hepworth, John Skeaping, Ben
Nicholson and Henry Moore. Such fertile ground was further enriched
by visits from artists fleeing persecution - including Piet, Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Calder - just a few of the many
internationally acclaimed artists who, whilst passing through
London, formed part of the art set who congregated around Read's
house at No. 3 Mall Studios.
WOW - a collaboration between Liss Llewellyn and the Laing Art
Gallery - showcases 38 British women artists working on paper
between 1905 and 1975, a transformative period for women in the
arts. The featured artists approached the medium in vari ous ways,
using traditional as well as innovative techniques to transform
paper into beautiful and complex works of art. The exhibition
celebrates the diversity of these approaches and highlights the
ways in which paper provided artists with a rich arena for artistic
innovation. Paper's adaptability allows for a multitude of
techniques. Using paper in its traditional role as a support for
drawings and prints, or creating collage and sculpture, the fea
tured artists responded to the medium's inherent qualities -
malleable, smooth and sensuous - to test ideas, express feelings or
create a finished work. It is often in the more formative moments
that the works in this exhibition most resonate; through these
studies we bear witness to the seed of an idea in germination, as
in Clare Leigh ton's iconic Southern Harvest, or Evelyn Dunbar's
celebrated works for the War Artist's Advisory Committee. Selecting
hand-made, mould-made or machine-made papers in various weights,
tex tures and tints - depending on their intentions - artists
worked with a variety of media from pencil, ink and pastel, to
watercolour, tempera and oil, sometimes incorporating extraneous
elements such as gold leaf and metallic forms. Working on
monumental sheets, such as Winifred Knights' cartoon for St
Martin's Altarpiece or tiny pages such as Edith Granger-Taylor's
Small Grey Abstract, women's choices were nevertheless some times
dictated by circumstance: the propensity of Frances Richards and
Tirzah Gar wood - by no means isolated cases - to work on paper on
a small scale was in part a result of not having access to a
studio. From portraits, landscapes, botanical studies and genre
scenes, many of the works in WOW highlight the artist's skill and
dexterity in drawing on paper, which was at the core of artistic
training and practice. Some artists have used the traditional
techniques of etching, screen printing and woodblock to create a
diverse range of images. Others highlight the ethereal properties
of paper through precise cuts, resulting in elaborate collages
combining shapes, patterns and designs, or compact and manipulate
paper to create inventive and surprising sculptures. Featuring both
famous and lesser-known talents, WOW celebrates the many ways in
which women artists expressed themselves through works on, and with
paper and highlights their unique contribution to the graphic arts
in 20th century Britain.
Which artists in British 20th century art painted religious images?
Broadly speaking there seem to have been two categories: The first
concerns artists who created religious images when the religious
content was in response to a set subject, for example The Deluge in
the 1920 Rome Scholarship in Decorative Painting, or who responded
to a specific commission, for example Thomas Monnington's works for
The Ormond Chapel, Bradford, Kippen Church and Stations of the
Cross for Brede Church in Hastings. The second category concerns a
small minority off artists who were committed believers such as
Frank Brangwyn, Eric Gill and Stanley Spencer. No account of 20th
Century British art can overlook the numerous works of the period
that were essentially "religious" in their content. Art, Faith&
Modernity examines this question in Paul Liss' and Alan Powers'
essays and demonstrates the wide range of expression in more than
200 colour reproductions.
Originating from Berlin Hagedorn moved to Manchester in 1905 to
train in textile production. Having studied art under Adolphe
Valette at the local Manchester School ofArt and then The Slade
School of Art, his training was completed by a period in1912-13
where, working under Maurice Denis, he absorbed a range of
avant-garde styles. On his return to England, he made a consciously
pioneering attempt to introduce Modernism into Manchester through
his work as both painter and designer, exhibiting at the Manchester
Society of Modern Painters, RA, RBA, RSMA and with the NEAC.. He
became a British subject in 1914 and served as a Lance-Corporal in
the Middlesex Regiment during World War I. In 1925 he received the
Grand Prix at the International Exhibition of Decorative Art, Paris
and in 1935 he was elected RBA. He exhibited at a number of leading
galleries in London and the provinces, and was elected to the Royal
Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute of Painters in
Water Colours, the Royal Society of Marine Artists, the New English
Art Club and the NS. Hagedorn has only been the subject of one
exhibition and publication: 'Manchester's First Modernist', a
catalogue produced by the Chris Beetles Gallery on the occasion of
the retrospective organised in conjunction with the Whitworth Art
Gallery, Manchester.
This publication examines how artist's portray themselves in
self-portraits and how they portray their fellow artists. The
artist's studio, models and milieu (friends, family etc) are also
considered. Most of Liss Llewellyn's projects in the last twenty
five years have involved working directly with artists' studios.
Amongst the thousands and thousands of images that until now had
lain undisturbed, often hardly seen since the day they were
created, some occasionally stand out. Often modest in size and not
obviously works of importance; a scrap of paper recording the
intense introspective gaze of an artist, or a moment of intimacy
suggesting the artist was in love with his subject - be it his or
her spouse, model or children. This portrait of an artist is the
result of twenty years of collecting and brings together a
remarkable group of works which, large or small, minor or major all
have in common one quality - the ability to transport the viewer
momentarily into the artist's milieu.
The first book to appear on the 20th century British artist Charles
Cundall, this publication examines aspects of Cundall work done at
home in England, abroad - Cundall made numerous painting trips to
the continent, but also to the United States - and during the war.
Well illustrated, the book also includes a chronology and a
reproduction of a text by William Gaunt dating from the 1960s and
commissioned for a book on Cundall that never came to be.
Longlisted for the Berger Art History prize 2016 Kenneth Rowntree
has always been highly regarded by those familiar with his work.
The essays in this catalogue, which embrace new research and
scholarship, reveal him to be an artist of great scope and variety.
His earlywork reflects the inspiration and creative dialogue that
came out of his friendship with Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) on
account of whom Rowntree moved to Great Bardfield during the 1940s.
During this period he was particularly preoccupied with Kenneth
Clark's Recording Britain project. At the end of the war he joined
the teaching staff at the Royal College of Art. In 1951 he was
commissioned to undertake murals for the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion
for the Festival of Britain. As Professor of Fine Art in Newcastle
(1959-1980) he was at the epicentre of an important northern school
of modernism that revolved around his friends Victor Pasmore
(1908-1988) and Richard Hamilton (1922-2011). Even in retirement,
his work, in its return to figuration from abstraction, displays
his consistent qualities of humour and inventiveness. Rowntree's
oeuvre is both influenced by and anticipates a wide variety of
artistic styles, from Ravilious to David Hockney, from the Euston
Road School to the Dadaism of Kurt Schwitters. His work, however,
remains unmistakably his own. This catalogue is published on the
occasion of the centenary of Rowntree's birth, and accompanies
exhibitions at The Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden and Pallant
House, Chichester. This is the first substantial reassessment of
Rowntree's work since John Milner's monograph (2002). It is hoped
that this current initiative will contribute futher to ensuring
Rowntree the significant place he deserves within the history of
20th century British art.
GashWhile Gash's oeuvre is full of the period charm that might be
expected from the decades that bridge either side of the Edwardian
era, his pictures consistently offer something more substantial.
His genre paintings bring to mind those of Charles Spencelayh but
they display a less predictable and less laboured narrative. As a
landscape painter he painted en plein air with relish; he excelled
in themedium of pastel. According to his daughter, portraiture was
the genre he enjoyed most. His portraits are consistently striking,
moving impressively from conversation pieces, such as his elegant
and engaging family group of c.1919, to the tradition of Swagger
portraits which recall those of Gainsborough, Lawrence and Sargent.
For an artist who died before he was 60 it is striking that his
most memorable images are amongst his last. The Inseparables, for
instance, demonstrates the kind of facility and originality that
puts him comfortably on a stage with many of the better known
international artists of his period. Indeed, his best work can be
viewed as a potent last flowering of the landscape, portrait and
genre tradition exemplified by artists such as Sir George Clausen,
Stanhope Forbes and Mark Fisher. It is hoped that Walter Bonner
Gash: Unsung Edwardian Hero will firmly re-establish Gash's
reputation and demonstrate that his talent stands comparison with
those of the better known Kettering artists Thomas Cooper Gotch and
Sir Alfred East.
David Evans' death in a road accident in 1988, at the age of 59,
bought to an abrupt end the career of one of the most distinguished
watercolourists of his generation. The recent discovery of pictures
remaining in his studio, nearly thirty years after the memorial
tribute staged by the Redfern Gallery in 1988, provides the
opportunity for a new generation to discover his work, though the
publication of this first ever book on David Evans and the accom-
panying touring exhibition. Evans' strikingly large watercolours,
(typically they measure over one metre in height or breadth), span
two decades from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, evoking a vision
that is still surprisingly potent today. They have all the period
charm of the glam-rock era they so powerfully evoke but at the same
time they are highly charged with the political energy of the pe-
riod and mirror Thatcher's Britain, with its Industrial unrest, its
towns and country undergoing transformation, the Faulklands war and
threat of the Evil Empire, the building of nuclear power stations
and the dawn of awareness about Climate Change as a political
issue. Evans was an ardent campaigner and environmentalist. The
landscapes, (a homage to his native Suffolk) are peppered with
industrial plants, landfill, scrap heaps, and encroaching roads and
army maneuvers. Urban subjects, similar in some ways to the compo-
sitions of Lowry, show factory plants, spectators' sports,
cafeterias, the interiors of museums, city centers and beach
scenes.
Hugh Finney was a painter, draughtsman and teacher who trained
initially at Bromley School of Art, where he attended evening
classes from 1915, and then at Beckenham School of Art to where he
won a trade scholarship in 1918. He studied painting with Amy
Katherine Browning and etching with Eric Gill. Around 1927 he won a
scholarship to the Royal College of Art, where he studied under
William Rothenstein. Horton, Houthuesen, Ososki and Freedman were
amongst his friends at the college. In 1929 after graduation he
took up a travelling scholarship to Rome returning to teach
part-time at Chelsea School of Art under Percy Jowett and later
Harold Sandys Williamson. From 1927-1934 he exhibited at the NEAC.
In 1935 his painting Mother and Child was acquired by Carlisle Art
Gallery. During WW2 Finney worked for the light rescue service of
the Civil Defense. After the war he taught part time under Anthony
Betts at Reading University and was in charge of life drawing there
when he retired in 1970. Although he was reclusive and reluctant to
show his work he did exhibit at the RA Summer exhibition (in 1950
and 1954) and the Portrait Society and at The Paris Salon. A large
solo exhibition took place at the University of Oxford's Institute
of Education in 1964.
The murals that were produced in this country in the twentieth
century remain as one of the great inventive achievements in modern
British art. Highly original in their approach to design, balancing
varying degrees of modernity or tradition, they demonstrate the
creative drive of their makers and contain singular expressions of
the aesthetic, personal and social concerns that typify the ages
from which they come. Some are celebrations of simple human
pleasures, perhaps to decorate a refreshment room, an ocean liner
or a dining room. Others are intended to be the highest expressions
of their art, ambitious allegorical or decorative compositions that
like the frescoes of the Renaissance would speak through the ages
to later generations. The individuals and committees who
commissioned them similarly believed they would both represent the
best that Britain had to offer and mark the high accomplishment of
contemporary society, elevating the public and private spaces they
occupied and inspiring moral purpose.This catalogue was published
on the occasion of the exhibition 'British Murals & Decorative
Painting 1910-1970' which took place at the Fine Art Society -
London (13 February - 9 March 2013) in association with Liss
Llewellyn Fine Art. It coincided with the Sansom & Co
publication British Murals & Decorative Painting 1920-1960.
Raymond Sheppard showed an early interest in both art and nature
and aged 15 enrolled in the Elementary Course of John Hassall's
Correspondence Art School where he was complimented on "his
remarkable understanding of the correctness of drawing". Sheppard's
talent for drawing wildlife gained recognition with the success of
the first of his three books for The Studio Publications How to
Draw Series. How to Draw Birds, published in 1940, not only ran to
four reprints during WW2 but a further two reprints afterwards in
1948 and 1955 - a remarkable feat for a 27 year old artist. This
not only provided Sheppard with a secure, if modest, financial
income but put him on a stage alongside the highly regarded
draughtsman of this genre John Skeaping (How to Draw Horses) and
C.F. Tunnicliffe (How to Draw Farm Animals) both of whom were 12
years his senior. In parallel to his work as an illustrator of
wildlife, Sheppard, along with Jack Merriott as President, became a
founding member of the Wapping Group. Limited to 25 members, The
Wappers, as they were known, comprised artists from the Langham
Sketching Club, (which did not meet in the summer months,) who
convened along the river between Westminster and Gravesend, in the
East End of London, to paint scenes along the Thames. If Raymond
Sheppard's drawings are to been seen as something more than
illustrations the key is here: "An outlook at once poetic and
intimate, whose technique was developed from a habit of
contemplation".
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John Mckenzie (Paperback)
Sacha Llewellyn, Paul Liss
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R304
R237
Discovery Miles 2 370
Save R67 (22%)
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It is rare for a creative artist to work in the privacy of his
garden shed, in a challenging medium, and almost entirely for his
own pleasure, but such a one was the slate-carver, John McKenzie.
His day job was working as a steward in the Petty Officers' Mess
aboard H.M.S. Condor, the Fleet Air Arm Training School at
Arbroath, Angus, on the east coast of Scotland. McKenzie's work is
totally unpretentious, but it reveals a cultivated familiarity with
the carvings of ancient Babylon and Mesopotamia, as well as
classical mythology, suggesting that as a boy he had haunted
Kelvingrove Art Gallery - and may have continued to do so - as well
the public libraries of Glasgow and Arbroath. A list of the hundred
and twelve carvings that were still in his possession at the time
of his death exists, but forty years on we will never know what
books he had on his shelves, what postcards, photographs and
cuttings from the local paper, what references he used. John
McKenzie may have worked in solitude but it is clear that he did
not work in isolation.
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Victor Moody (Paperback)
Sacha Llewellyn, Paul Liss
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R330
R267
Discovery Miles 2 670
Save R63 (19%)
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Victor Hume Moody created timeless images of an Arcadian idyll at a
time when most artists had turned their backs on the classical
tradition. The centuries old heritage of Western art was too
inspiring and too valuable for him to simply abandon. Over a
working life of nearly 70 years he tirelessly researched and worked
to revive traditional painting techniques. At the same time he
created a unique fusion of classical figure composition and the
pastoral English landscape. Since Victor Moody died his work has
been widely seen and his reputation has steadily risen. The Harris
Museum in Preston held a retrospective exhibition, 'The Last
Classicist', in 1992 and more recently his work featured in the
2010 exhibition 'Counterpoint - Modern Realism 1910-1950' held at
the Fine Art Society. The dispersal of works from the Estate of the
artist's daughter, which has made this present catalogue possible,
represents a further important moment in the rehabiliation of
Victor Moody's reputation. It is hoped that his work will, as a
result, continue to become more widely seen and better understood.
Ziegler was born in London in 1903 and studied at the Central
School of Arts and Crafts. He subsequently (from 1927 to 1930)
studied at the Royal College of Art under William Rothenstein, whom
he recalled as 'a lively and inspiring Principal'. The late 1920s
was a rich period to attend the RCA : the likes of Bawden,
Ravilious, Mahoney, Sorrell, Bliss and Freedman had already
completed their formative studies and, in what was to prove the
golden age of the Royal College of Art, their influence can be seen
in Ziegler's early work. Later on the influence of his fellow
Jewish artists - Joseph Herman, Bernard Meninksy, David Bomberg,
Mark Gertler, Emmanuel Levy and Fred Ulhman, all of whom he
empathised with and wrote about with enthusiasm, came increasingly
to the fore. After leaving the RCA Ziegler taught drawing and
painting at St. Martin's School of Art (where he was a visiting
instructor for Figure Drawing and Painting) and Art History at
Morley College in London and for the Worker's Educational
Association. His work was widely reproduced in publications
including Illustrated London News, Country Life, Architectural
Review, Mater Builder, Architecture Illustrated, Studio Artist,
Courier, London Mercury, Leader, Bookman and The Artist. His Royal
Academy exhibits (which between 1931 and 1970 numbered 12) were
mostly of his locality: Chelsea in the 1930s, Hendon and
Hertfordshire in the 1940s and Hampstead from the 1950s onwards.
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