|
| Greetings! |
Welcome to Out of the Frame. In this issue, art critic Catherine Bindman reveals the array of influences that shaped a group of early 20th century British artists who are the focus of a new museum show in New York. We hope you enjoy it!
Michele Senecal
Executive Director
International Fine Print Dealers Association |
Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939
|
An exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art records the frequently ambivalent responses of fourteen British printmakers to modern artistic styles from the Continent (specifically Italian Futurism and French Cubism) as they sought to address a new era in warfare and urban life. And the more than one hundred works in the show, a series of often quirky and experimental images, point to a richly rewarding area for collectors, if one that might require considerable persistence due to its increasing popularity over the past decade or so. Much of the pleasure here lies in the disjunction inherent in the representation of the frenzy of mechanized modernity through a wide range of largely hand-propelled printmaking techniques, many of them dating back to the earliest days of the medium.
Of the many distinctive areas here that might provide a collecting focus, the Vorticist prints that open the show are probably the rarest. But they are certainly worth pursuing: since most Vorticist paintings have not survived, the prints are often the only record of this specifically British artistic movement that flourished very briefly immediately before World War I. Interestingly, and in spite of a fitfully proclaimed rejection of the sentimental conventions of Victorian realism, the Vorticists generally responded with restraint to the wilder extremes of European modernism, and in particular to the dynamism, fluidity, and militaristic rhetoric of Futurism. Rather, radically geometric forms in woodcuts like Edward Wadsworth's Illustration (Typhoon, 1914) and E. McKnight Kauffer's Flight (1917) point to the use of Cubist and Futurist motifs to create a controlled abstraction, one intended to champion a new hard-edged world of mechanization. |
|
Prints describing the first fully mechanized war form another discrete group here, and the works of C. W. R. Nevinson are particularly sought after. While Nevinson also deployed modified versions of modernist motifs in his grim drypoints of 1916 titled Return to the Trenches (left) and Column on the March to suggest the anonymity and dynamic forward motion of phalanxes of marching soliders, the lithographs he produced after his appointment as an official war artist in July 1917 reflect a significant reversal. In the most moving and extraordinary images in the exhibition, he abandons geometric modernism and Futurist notions of heroism in favor of an austere realism, most notably in the stark Road from Arras to Bapaume (1918) in which men and horses straggle along a road over a series of apparently neverending hills. Paul Nash's dark and detailed lithographs of war-blasted landscapes near battlefields of Ypres, Rain, Lake Zillerbeke (1918) and The Crater, Hill 60 (1917) are equally far removed from pure modernism, evoking, if anything, the pastoral nostalgia of British nineteenth-century wood engraving (and are, according to a prominent London dealer in this field, just slightly easier to obtain). Meanwhile, Wadsworth's three black-and-white woodcuts from a series showing "Dazzle Ships," British ships camouflaged with geometric designs intended to confuse German U-boats (here streamlined in an almost Deco manner by the artist), must rank among the great curiosities in the history of documentary printmaking as well as among the market's major rarities.
|
|
The energy and excitement of modern cities, in particular New York and London, became the chief preoccupation of many artists after World War I; they remain highly resonant and obviously attractive to the city-dwelling collector of the twenty-first century. Nevinson moved further in the direction of conventional realism in his representation of the dynamic geometries of interwar New York with its brand new skyscrapers and teeming streets and these prints are inevitably in huge demand. Members of the Grosvenor School under the leadership of Claude Flight, meanwhile, tended to combine figuration with modernist motifs in their images of London. Fluid lines and broad planes carved from the malleable surface of the new block-print medium of linocut capture something of the exhilaration of modern existence, its entertainments and diversions, and suggest, too, the alienation often seen as its essential condition. Sybil Andrew's Rush Hour, (1930, above), for example, shows only the highly stylized, curvilinear legs and feet of three anonymous commuters stepping Seuss-like across the planes of a few fronds; the passengers of Cyril Power's The Tube Train (ca. 1934, pictured at the top of this article) studiously avoid eye-contact in a scene instantly familiar to contemporary urbanites. And since the Grosvenor School produced a relatively large number of prolific artists who worked in big editions, this post-war material remains somewhat more accessible than that of the earlier period. But like the woodcuts and drypoints of the Vorticists and war artists these linocuts distill both a sense of the dynamic whirlwind of modern city life and the craft traditions of a distant age, images of speed, motion, and industry carefully excavated with handtools and then printed by handrubbing on translucent Japan paper.
Catherine Bindman
Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939 is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through December 7th and was organized in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
|
|
Image caption 1: Cryil Power (British 1872 - 1951), The Tube Train, ca. 1934, color linocut, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Partial and Promised Gift of Johanna and Leslie Garfield, 2005, Copyright, Courtesy The Artist's Estate & Osbourne Samuel Ltd., London
Image caption 2: C. W. R. Nevinson (British 1889 - 1946), Returning to the Trenches (Troops Marching on the Front), 1916, etching and drypoint, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1968, Copyright, Courtesy of the Nevinson Estate/Bridgeman Art Library
Image caption 3: Sybil Andrews, Rush Hour, 1930, color linocut, Johanna and Leslie Garfield Collection
|
|
|
OCTOBER 2008 / ISSUE NO. 2
|
| Coming Soon:
|
The annual IFPDA Print Fair is unique among the world's major art fairs for its focus on fine prints from all periods. All dealers exhibiting at the Fair are members of the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA).
FAIR DATES
THURSDAY 10/30/08 12pm-7pm
FRIDAY 10/31/08 12pm-7pm
SATURDAY 11/01/08 12pm-7pm
SUNDAY 11/02/08 12pm-6pm
LOCATION
The Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue at 67th St.
New York, NY 10065
|
|
