'Art and Life' at Dulwich

Art and Life: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray, 1920 – 1931 is now at Dulwich Picture Gallery after spells at Leeds Museums and Galleries and Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Earlier posts here have covered shows at Compton Verney in 2011 which examined the impact on Ben Nicholson of encountering Alfred Wallis in 1928, and at the Courtauld in 2012 which examined Nicholson’s work in the 1930s after his encounter with Mondrian. The Dulwich show (Art and Life from now on) looks at an earlier period starting with Ben Nicholson’s marriage to Winifred in 1920, then the couple’s meeting Kit Wood in 1926, the three artists’ responses to Alfred Wallis in 1928 and ends with the Nicholson’s separation, de facto after 1931. Art and Life features more than 80 works, some 15 of which have been exhibited publicly for the first time and many are on loan from “Private Collection”. It includes items by the potter William Staite Murray who often exhibited with the Nicholsons. The show has been curated by the art historian Jovan Nicholson, Ben and Winifred’s grandson, who gave a very informative lecture, Art and Life: Ben and Winifred Nicholson, at this year’s Oxford Literary Festival.

Art and Life can be regarded primarily as a portrait of an artists’ marriage – for the years it lasted. Ben and Winifred both came from upper class backgrounds, his father being the painter Sir William Nicholson and her family being north of England aristocrats with unusually artistic inclinations. The exhibition starts early in their married life when they were painting together at Lugano, producing work like his Cortivallo Lugano 1921 (below, top) and her Window Sill Lugano (below, lower) and Cyclamen and Primula (poster above), both 1923, the year of their first joint exhibition:

They would often produce works on the same theme, thoughtfully juxtaposed like many of the exhibits, for example the moorland scenery in 1920 at Tippacott (Devon, SW England), her Watercolour below top, his Pencil Drawing below, lower:

The consensus seems to be that at this stage of their artistic lives, his work is more concerned with form, hers with colour. This is, of course, with the benefit of retrospect from the 1930s when he is clearly far more interested in form than colour. In 1923 the Nicholsons began to spend time at Bankshead in Cumbria near Hadrian’s Wall and the exhibition includes further examples of the same landscape being pictured by both. What is apparent is how anodyne their work seems in comparison with that of avant garde artists like Malevich a decade earlier. Soon three works by Ben Nicholson indicate an interest in something more unconventional: 1924 (First Abstract Painting, Chelsea) (below, top left), Jamaique, circa 1925 (below, top right) and Still Life with Jug Mugs Cup and Goblet, 1925 (below, lower):

In 1926 Ben met Christopher Wood who later took a painter’s holiday with the Nicholsons in Cornwall (SW England), before the area’s revival of interest to artists. Wood’s Pill Creek Eock Cornwall, 1928 (below top) and Winifred Nicholson’s Summer, 1928 (below, lower) are among the three’s responses:

Soon they met Alfred Wallis in St Ives. Wallis was a retired mariner and prolific painter of self-taught sea studies like The Schooner the Beata, Penzance, Mount’s Bay, and Newlyn Harbour, undated (below, left) and St Ives Harbour, circa 1932-34 (below, right):

which made a lasting impression on all three artists, particularly Ben, Cornish Port, circa 1930, (below, top) and Wood, Le Phare, 1929 (below middle), perhaps less so Winifred, Seascape with Two Boats, circa 1932 (below, lowest):

although her Autumn Flowers on a Mantelpiece shows a small Wallis. Then came the climactic events of 1930: Ben Nicholson’s meeting Barbara Hepworth and Christopher Wood’s suicide at Salisbury station. Wood’s influence on Ben is apparent later that year in 1930 (Christmas night):

By the end of 1931, the year Winifred gave birth to their third child, Andrew, the Nicholson’s relationship had sundered. The saddest pictures in the exhibition are Wood’s The Fisherman’s Farewell, 1928 (below, top) and her Jake and Kate on the Isle of Wight, 1931 (below, lower):

Art and Life provides a welcome opportunity to see several works by Wood, for example Blue Necklace, 1928 (his mistress, Frosca Munswer) and Zebra and Parachute, 1930. The final exhibits in the show go beyond its nominal dates, but are of considerable interest including Ben’s 1935 (White Relief) and an abstract by Winifred, White and Black Ellipse, Outwards, 1936. The Nicholsons did not divorce until 1938 when Ben married Barbara. The famous Hepworth triplets had been born in 1934.

Art and Life: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray*, 1920 – 1931 ends at Dulwich on 21 September 2014, nearly a year after it began at Leeds.

*Ben Nicholson 1894 - 1982
Winifred Nicholson 1893 - 1981
Christopher Wood 1901 - 1930
Alfred Wallis 1855 - 1942
William Staite Murray 1881 - 1962

British Writers and British Art

On 28 August BBC2 screened the thriller, Page Eight, written and directed by the eminent British playwright and screenwriter, Sir David Hare. The film’s central character, Johnny Warricker (played by Bill Nighy), is a senior MI5 officer (a deputy to the Director General apparently). To gain any insight into the real work of the security services, it would be better to accept that Hare’s work is set in a different Realm from Christopher Andrew’s, and listen to the last three of this year’s BBC Reith Lectures. But in the film, not only does Warricker have a daughter, (Felicity Jones) described by Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent as:

an artist who paints graphic and harrowing images of Guantanamo Bay-like torture victims. (Ironically, some of her work has found its way into the Government's art collection. One of her paintings hangs in the MI5 boardroom.)

but he has an extensive art collection in his flat. This serves to demonstrate the taste and values of the last-century English patriot that Hare has in mind. Two artists get a mention: by the end of the film Warricker has given away a painting by Mark Gertler and sold another, by Christopher Wood, to an art dealer in Saffron Walden for £60,000 in cash. The dealer kept the money in an antique-looking safe at the back of her shop and Warricker takes it away in a Waitrose carrier bag. He also discovers that his daughter is pregnant after a one-week affair with a Conceptual artist (pun intended, presumably) – not exactly Warricker’s taste in art.

The film’s art department and set decorator did a good job with Warricker’s collection. (The Christopher Wood looked a bit like The Card Players from Lord and Lady Attenborough’s collection as sold by Sotheby’s in 2009 for about twice as much as Warricker could raise.) Hare, as the screenwriter, must have had his reasons for lighting on Gertler (1891-1939) and Wood (1901-1930).  

Gertler was a contemporary of Stanley Spencer at the Slade. Wood, who had trained in Paris, was in St Ives when Ben Nicholson encountered Alfred Wallis. Both died young and by suicide, in Wood’s case under a train at Salisbury station in a state of opium-induced paranoia. I did wonder how even a senior public servant, particularly with several divorces behind him, could afford so many pictures,. A Gertler might be more attainable, one of his late works, The Barn, surprisingly fetching only about £5000 last year at Bonhams.

It reminded me of Ian McEwan’s novel, Solar, published in 2010. The main character, Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, is about the same age as Warricker (and Hare, McEwan and Nighy) and has also had costly troubles with a succession of women. His latest is Melissa:

She owned a string - if three was a string - of shops across north London selling dance clothes.
…
Like many slobs, Beard was appreciative of the order that others created without effort, or any that he noticed. In Melissa's flat, which was spread over two floors, he was particularly happy. She lived such an uncluttered life at home. There were open perspectives untroubled by furniture. The foot-wide beeswaxed floorboards recovered from a Gascony chateau shone with dull perfection. There were no loose objects, all the books were on the shelves in the right order, at least until he visited, and the art on the walls was sparse lithographs, mostly of dancers. There was a single statue, a Henry Moore maquette.

Very nice too, but a work of that type by Moore, Maquette for Reclining Figure, went for about £25000 in Bonhams in June this year.

Obviously Melissa and Warricker were being depicted as people of taste, and their creators didn’t intend them to be case studies for amateur financial advisers. But I can’t help thinking that Henry Moore maquettes and Christopher Wood oils are more likely to be found in the handsome houses of successful writers like Hare and McEwan (in London’s Hampstead and Fitzrovia, respectively) than in the humbler dwellings of civil servants and minor retailers.

ADDENDUM 4 OCTOBER

Visiting Bristol Museum and Art Gallery recently I took the opportunity to see Eric Ravilious’ tempera triptych Tennis.

The panels were commissioned to decorate the door of Sir Geoffrey Fry’s music room in London. Notwithstanding my remark above, Fry was a civil servant and a distinguished patron of the arts. He served as Private Secretary to Stanley Baldwin when the latter was Prime Minister. Fry, however, came from a wealthy Bristol family, and he and Lady Fry donated Tennis to the Museum in 1945.