Eric Ravilious: High Street variants

When I wrote my post A walk along High Street, I was aware that three of Eric Ravilious's evocative lithographs of shop fronts for High Street had first been published in the journal Signature: A Quadrimestrial of Typography and Graphic Arts, with an appreciation by John Piper. This short article, entitled "Lithographs by Eric Ravilious of Shop Fronts", was published in March 1937, while the book did not appear until the following year. What I had not realised was that the three plates in Signature varied significantly from those in the book. When I first noticed this, I thought it was merely a matter of variant colourways, but the more I look at these beautiful prints the more variations I see. I won't spoil the fun of this spot-the-difference game by pointing out every detail, but will simply put the two versions next to each other. All were printed by the Curwen Press, where the lithographs were executed directly onto the lithographic stones.

Eric Ravilious, Restaurant and Grill Room

Lithograph, 1937

Signature version

Eric Ravilious, Restaurant and Grill Room

Lithograph, 1938

High Street version

Eric Ravilious, Letter Makers

Lithograph, 1937

Signature version

Eric Ravilious, Letter Makers

Lithograph, 1938

High Street version

Eric Ravilious, Naturalist: Furrier: Plumassier

Lithograph, 1937

Signature version

Eric Ravilious, Naturalist: Furrier: Plumassier

Lithograph, 1938

High Street version

Here is the text of John Piper's short essay, as published in Signature:

"There is an accent on line in all the work of Eric Ravilious. His control over a pencil, a pen or an engraving tool - the sense that it is never leading him, but that he is always taking it exactly where he wants it - made it necessary that sooner or later he should try lithography as a medium. Ravilious is a particularly English artist. That may seem a stale thing to say, but he is English in this most important way; in this matter of control over line - line that can express fluently movement or stillness, and grace as well as volume. The delight of his new lithographs of shop fronts is of a kind that is rare enough. It is the delight one gets from work which one feels has been specially suited to an artist's taste and feeling; and there is probably no one else who could have made these records at once so faithfully and so imaginatively. There is about them the suggestion that you are looking in at a series of gay, old-fashioned parties from a matter-of-fact street in the present. They are records of a passing beauty, but they are full of present-day experience. And they are faithful enough to look like tuck-shops full of sherbet, liquorice and lollipops - which after all is one of the chief appeals of the attractive shop. The three examples reproduced here are from a series of twenty-four."

Woodcut Patterns

One of the most interesting things about British art in the 1920s was the blurred distinction that arose between art and design. This can be seen in all kinds of areas, from textiles to advertising to architecture. In the field of pattern papers, the Curwen Press was at the forefront, commissioning designs from artists such as Edward Bawden, Margaret Calkin James, Claude Lovat Fraser, Albert Rutherston, Enid Marx, and Eric Ravilious. Curwen were so proud of these papers that in 1928 they published the delicious A Specimen Book of Pattern Papers Designed for and in Use at the Curwen Press, with an Introduction by Paul Nash. I don't, sadly, have a copy of this extremely rare and costly publication. But I do have a copy of The Woodcut: An Annual for 1927. Like the Specimen Book, this was printed at Curwen and published by the Fleuron. And it contains an essay by Paul Nash (identical with the introduction? I'm not sure, but probably) entitled Woodcut Patterns. It is illustrated with two tipped-in colour samples, one by Enid Marx, the other by Eric Ravilious, while the boards of the journal itself are covered with a design by Nash.

Paul Nash, Wood engraved design for the cover of The Woodcut, 1927

Paul Nash writes that, "I have become lately more interested in woodcut patterns than in woodcut pictures. It is always a relief to be rid of the responsibility of representation. To concern oneself solely with the problem of formal relationships is to escape into a new world. Here one is in touch with pure reality..."

Eric Ravilious, Wood engraved pattern paper for the Curwen Press

from The Woodcut, 1927

Nash considers block printing on textiles, including not just wood blocks but also the fabrics decorated with linocut designs being produced under the name Footprints at the Hammersmith workshop established by Celandine Kennington to supply Elspeth Little's shop Modern Textiles. He also discusses block-printed wallpapers (noting that in France fine artists such as Marie Laurencin and Raoul Dufy have "produced some charming designs"), and paper covers for books.

Enid Marx, Wood engraved pattern paper for the Curwen Press

from The Woodcut, 1927

In the field of textiles printed from wood blocks, Paul Nash singles out Phyllis Barron ("a true artist as well as a craftswoman) and her two colleagues Dorothy Larcher and Enid Marx. Marx was only just launched on her distinguished career as a designer, having failed her diploma at the Royal College of Art because of her allegiance to abstraction. Of her work Paul Nash writes, "Miss Marx's designs have the character of a fugue in music. Another quality which distinguishes them from the majority of textile designs is the peculiarly rigid movement of the units, which are not conceived in fluid waves or undulations, or as an efflorescence, but are more like the delicate architecture of birds, building with rather awkward shaped sticks."

Enid Marx, Wood engraved pattern paper for Chatto and Windus

from Signature, 1936

Enid Marx, Wood engraved pattern paper for the Curwen Press

from Signature, 1936

His conclusion is that, "we should begin to consider patterns as important as pictures."

Change

Lying on my desk as I write is a modest little hardback volume entitled Change: The Beginning of a Chapter in 12 Volumes, edited by John Hilton & Joseph Thorp. It was printed and published in January 1919 at The Decoy Press, Plaistow, London.

Herbert Rooke, The Torch

The appearance of the word Plaistow in the address is enough to suggest that this booklet has something to do with the Curwen Press, whose printing works was in Plaistow. And indeed on page 122 of Joanna Selborne’s British Wood-Engraved Book Illustration 1904-1940 a footnote tells us that, “The Decoy Press, Plaistow, was Thorp’s publishing imprint only, not a printing press, used sometimes by the Curwen Press when it was impolitic to use their own imprint.” This was one of those times, for Change was a radical publication, calling for a new post-war order based on socialist and spiritual values.

Eric Gill, The Decoy

This idealistic publication did not find a ready market—of the announced 12 volumes, only two appeared. But apart from offering its readers a thoughtful alternative to the glib talk of “reconstruction” in the popular press of the day, Change is notable for its nurturing of the green shoots of the between-the-wars wood engraving revival.

Robert Gibbings, The Little Copse

It would appear to be Joseph Thorp who was responsible for commissioning, publishing, and championing the engravers. Thorp was one of the founder members of the Design and Industries Association in 1915, alongside Frank Pick and Harold Curwen, and soon became closely involved with Curwen as a consultant and ambassador. Herbert Simon’s Song and Words: A History of the Curwen Press has a whole chapter devoted to Joseph Thorp. He writes, “Thorp was an eccentric and an entertainer. He had the gift of giving substance to the spirit of joy and to outline to war-weary audiences how a new Jerusalem could be built in England’s pleasant land.”

Herbert Rooke, He Stirreth up the People

Most of the wood engravings in Change are tiny vignettes. The contributors are Herbert Kerr Rooke (1872-1944), Robert Gibbings (1889-1958), Philip Hagreen (1890-1988), and Eric Gill (1882-1940). All of these men shared the political vision of the editors. This is most obvious in Herbert Rooke’s full-page engraving, He Stirreth Up the People, but also evident in a vignette such as Gibbings’ The Burst Bonds, and in Philip Hagreen’s sardonic portrait of a bloated war profiteer in One of Our Conquerors. In Change 1 there are also drawings by Claude Lovat Fraser, Raymond Binns, and George Morrow. 

Philip Hagreen, One of Our Conquerors

Philip Hagreen, A Head

Philip Hagreen, A Head

Unfortunately I haven’t seen Change 2. According to Joanna Selborne, the two volumes of Change include work by a total of nine wood engravers. Change 2 apparently includes work by Millicent Jackson, Vivien Gribble, Rachel Marshall (Ray Garnett), and Gabriel Pippet. The ninth engraver is Paul Woodroffe; his contribution may be confined to the title page device, though this is not explicitly stated to be an original wood engraving, and I’m not sure that Woodroffe ever made his own engravings.

Robert Gibbings, The Burst Bonds

At the end of Change 1 is an interesting announcement that shows how interwoven the magazine’s support for wood engraving was with its calls for social renewal:

“The Editors would also like to draw the attention of those interested in modern English art, who are not merely patrons of the dead, to the woodcuts which embellish this little volume. There are a score or so of really competent wood engravers and woodcutters in England, who have great difficulty in finding a market for their excellent work. Their names are unknown often even to the connoisseur, and a fine craft, now just raising its head, may be starved back into oblivion through lack of the patronage of discerning folk.

“Change in its very modest way will continue its attempt to advertise this workmanlike and attractive process. Replicas of any woodcut appearing in Change may be had from the artist, pulled on India paper, mounted and framed in passe partout, on application to the Editors, who will put correspondents in direct touch with the artist himself. He will charge his own price, which will be a very modest one—too modest, in our opinion.”

Making marks

Since I last posted about Barnett and Claudia Freedman, I have found out a bit more about Barnett Freedman, and acquired some more of his work. Barnett Freedman is I think underestimated as an artist, precisely because of the thing that makes him most interesting, which is his devotion to lithography as a means of mass distribution of original fine art. He was not really interested in producing signed limited editions of 20 prints for connoisseurs. As he argues in his article “Autolithography or Substitute Works of Art” in The Penrose Annual in 1950: “While limited editions of hand-pulled proofs account for most of their work to date, autolithography specifically planned for machine production is—in the opinion of the present writer—the real sphere for the future activities of artists who are prepared to overcome the difficulties of working in close co-operation with publishers and printing houses.”

Barnett Freedman, Self-portrait at the lithographic stone

Drawing, 1938

Barnett Freedman himself worked very closely with several printers who specialised in printing autolithographs—in particular with Harold Curwen at the Curwen Press, with Thomas Griffits at Vincent Brooks Day and subsequently at Fred Phillips’s Baynard Press, and with the Shenval Press and Chromoworks. He even produced advertising posters for them to demonstrate their skills. While Freedman had very much the mindset of a fine artist, he had the desire to communicate with a mass audience that is more common in the commercial artist. Much of his output was book jackets (mainly for Faber & Faber), posters, or book illustrations (chiefly for George Macy’s Limited Editions Club). Yet his artist peers regarded him not as a jobbing illustrator, but as the finest lithographer of his day, almost certainly the finest Britain had ever seen. Freedman himself refused to make any distinction between commercial and fine art. Pat Gilmour writes in Artists at Curwen (Tate Gallery, 1977): “’What’s commercial art?’ he would ask when the topic was raised. ‘There’s only good art and bad art.’”

Barnett Freedman, Advert for The Curwen Press

Lithograph, 1936

Barnett Freedman, Advert for The Baynard Press

Lithograph, 1938

Barnett Freedman, Advert for Henderson & Spalding at the Sylvan Press

Lithograph, 1939

Barnett Freedman, Advert for Chromoworks

Lithograph. 1950

Freedman took to lithography like a duck to water. What he most valued in the process was the “freedom of expression emanating from the artist’s hand to the printing surface, without any hindrance” (“Autolithography or Substitute Works of Art”).

Barnett Freedman, A fine old city

Lithograph for Lavengro, 1936

There is a wonderful book on Barnett Freedman as a lithographer by Ian Rogerson: Barnett Freedman: The Graphic Work, with an essay on Freedman as master lithographer by Michael Twyman (The Fleece Press, 2006). Rogerson quotes Freedman from his essay “Lithography: A Painter’s Excursion” in Signature 2, 1936: it is “the immense range and strength of tonality that can be obtained, the clarity and precision of delicate and fine work and the delightful ease of manipulation by the artist directly on to the stone, plate, transfer paper or celluloid which gives autolithography as supreme advantage over other autographic methods.”

Barnett Freedman, Fair

Lithograph for Lavengro, 1936

Although he lists above various methods of creating lithographs, Barnett Freedman himself always preferred to work directly on to lithographic stone. As Michael Twyman writes, “The lithographic crayon became his main means of making marks, and he relished the sensuous way in which it allowed him to caress the finely-grained surface of lithographic stone.”

The colophon of War and Peace

with Barnett Freedman's signature and thumbprint

The phrase above, “making marks”, is key to understanding Barnett Freedman’s art. He was above all a mark-maker, as he demonstrated when signing the colophon of the Limited Edition Club’s 6-volume edition of War and Peace, which he had illustrated. He did sign his name, as requested, but he also dipped his thumb in red ink and literally “made his mark”.

Barnett Freedman, War and Peace

Lithograph for War and Peace, 1938

Barnett Freedman, Oak Tree

Lithograph for War and Peace, 1938

The lithographs for War and Peace (1938) are generally reckoned to be Barnett Freedman’s masterwork. They were made at the Baynard Press and printed by Thomas Griffits (though neither Baynard nor Griffits get a credit), and show an immense confidence in the confidence of the lithographic stones to convey the subtlest of messages, whether in the deep perspective of a wild troika ride, or in an extreme close-up portrait.

Barnett Freedman, Troika ride

Lithograph for War and Peace, 1938

Barnett Freedman, Pierre

Lithograph for War and Peace, 1938

One interesting change in Freedman’s practice as an illustrator in War and Peace is that he abandons the traditional relationship of the dimensions of the illustrations to the dimensions of the text block. In his lithographs for Lavengro two years earlier, the illustrations exactly match the text, albeit with a couple of rounded corners. But those for War and Peace, and those for Henry the Fourth Part I in 1939 and Anna Karenina in 1951, are long and thin, with a wide margins to the right, a narrower margin to the left and the image bleeding off the page top and bottom. This produces a very striking assymetrical effect across the spread as a whole. He explains this unusual approach in his note on the lithographs for Henry the Fourth in the insert A Shakespeare Commentary that accompanied the book. He writes: “I have attempted to enrich the book, and enhance the beauty of the typography, not by the accepted method of producing an illustration that ‘goes’ with the type, but by an entirely contrasting one. The shape of the picture is in direct contra-distinction to the type-area, as is the colour and general weight, and the method of carrying the whole design through the page, from top to bottom, serves to retain continuity, and has been, I believe, rarely used.” Freedman also tells us that: “The illustrations are auto-lithographs in six printings, drawn on the stones and printed directly from them under my supervision. No photo-mechanical reproduction has been allowed to interfere with my original work, such as it is.” I particularly love that faux-modest “such as it is”!

Barnett Freedman, The Sack of Moscow

Lithograph for War and Peace, 1938

Barnett Freedman, Farm

Lithograph for War and Peace, 1938

Looking through some old copies of the long-running art revue The Studio, I found in the issue for November 1958 an article on Barnett Freedman by Charles S. Spencer. Freedman had died earlier that year, at the age of just 56. Spencer’s article is largely concerned with Freedman as a painter, as it was tied in with the 1958 retrospective of Freedman’s work organized by the Arts Council (the catalogue of which has an introduction by Stephen Tallents), but he also discusses Freedman’s graphic work. He writes, “The unrivalled potentialities of lithography in book publishing were not recognized until Barnett Freedman’s work. He proved the great superiority of auto-lithography over machine processes.”

Barnett Freedman, Falstaff

Lithograph for Henry the Fourth Part I, 1939

Barnett Freedman, The Battlefield

Lithograph for Henry the Fourth Part I, 1939

Spencer draws attention in particular to Barnett Freedman’s lithographs for two projects: Henry the Fourth and Anna Karenina (both projects printed at the Curwen Press). In the lithographs for Henry the Fourth, Spencer notes that “a richness of characterization is allied to warm, subtle colour.” The lithograph of the scene before the battle is singled out as “a remarkable evocation”.

Barnett Freedman, Anna dreaming

Lithograph for Anna Karenina, 1951

Barnett Freedman, Banquet

Lithograph for Anna Karenina, 1951

The lithographs for Anna Karenina are admired for their “Renoir-like delicacy”, and Spencer remarks on a “romantic, rather impressionistic quality” to Freedman’s lithographs as a whole.

Barnett Freedman, Family

Lithograph for Anna Karenina, 1951

I don’t dispute any of the remarks above, but I do believe Freedman’s art is rather more robust than they suggest. His mastery of the long perspective and the sharp close-up and his sure sense of the formal organization of an image are instruments which he uses to convey a wide range of emotion—tenderness, passion, excitement, sorrow, aggression, fear, anticipation, regret. If we forget their function as commissioned book illustrations and simply look at each image as an image (and Freedman himself encouraged this by binding up sets of proofs of these lithographs as gifts for friends), then Freedman’s remarkable range of artistic expression leaps into focus.

Barnett Freedman, Freemason's Lodge

Lithograph for War and Peace, 1938

There is an archive of Barnett Freedman’s work at Manchester Metropolitan University. The initial guide to this collection by Ian Rogerson and Sue Hoskins is entitled Barnett Freedman: Painter, Draughtsman, Lithographer (Manchester Polytechnic Library, 1990). The title is accurate, but it is surely the last word that defines his importance: lithographer.

Marion Dorn

The contribution to graphic art made by the Curwen Press in the 1920s and 30s was immense. That story, and the continuing tale of the Curwen Studio, has been well told by Alan Powers in Art and Print: The Curwen Story (Tate Publishing, 2008), and Pat Gilmour in Artists at Curwen (Tate Gallery, 1977). But neither of these excellent books tells us much about Marion V. Dorn, who illustrated the first autolithographed book produced at Curwen, an edition of William Beckford's gothic orientalist novel Vathek, published by the Nonesuch Press in 1929. All of the illustrations to this post are original lithographs by Marion Dorn for Vathek.

Marion Dorn was born in the USA in 1896, and studied graphics at Stanford University. Having become interested in textile design in the early 1920s, she travelled to Paris with fellow designer Ruth Reeves in 1923, to explore the textile revolution being spearheaded by artists such as Raoul Dufy and Sonia Delaunay. There, she met the love of her life, fellow-American Edward McKnight Kauffer. They fell for each other hard. Kauffer left his wife and daughter for her, and they remained together until his death in 1954.

Ted McKnight Kauffer had already experienced professional success in England as a graphic artist, and Marion followed in his footsteps. Not that she wasn't a powerful talent in her own right, but it no doubt helped to have an "in" to a publisher such as Nonesuch, and a printer such as Curwen. Vathek proved to be Marion Dorn's only book project, and the 8 full-page illustrations and two vignettes are the only lithographs of hers that I have encountered. It's a shame, as they are quite beautiful. They are printed on a beige-coloured laid paper, and have the look of a pastel drawing. 1050 copies were published in the UK by Nonesuch, and 500 in the USA by Random House.

Why Marion Dorn did not continue with graphics after this is a bit of a mystery. Although she and McKnight Kauffer did collaborate on various projects, she may have been wary of treading too heavily on his toes.

Or it may be that the success she found as a textile designer - particularly of rugs and carpets - meant that her time was more fruitfully spent pursuing that line. In 1934 she founded her own company, Marion Dorn Ltd, which was wildly successful.

In 1940 Kauffer and Dorn moved back to the USA, neither to have quite the success back in their homeland that they had experienced in Britain.

Marion Dorn is an artist I would love to know more about. She strikes me as one of those women artists of the period - such as Enid Marx or Margaret Calkin James - who were edged out of fine art into the decorative arts, in a way that in the end enriched our culture and enabled them to fulfill themselves, but that was essentially unfair to their talent.

You can see, though, in the Vathek lithographs, a wonderful sense of design, especially in the repetition and variation of motifs, that would transfer readily to a rug, a furnishing fabric, a dress, or a wallpaper design.

Marion Dorn died in Tangiers in 1964.

Barnett and Claudia Freedman

Reading Alan Powers’ excellent book Art and Print: the Curwen Story (Tate Publishing, 2008) got me thinking about the exciting flurry of artists’ autolithographed books in Britain in the 1930 and 40s. The Curwen Press was at the heart of this, though there were other fine printers specialising in this area, such as the Baynard Press. But presses wanting to encourage lithography (and in the case of Curwen, pochoir as well) still needed publishing patrons to make it all happen. They needed connoisseur’s book clubs such as the Limited Edition Club, and most especially they needed Noel Carrington. Carrington, the brother of the Bloomsbury artist Dora Carrington, was enthused by the cheap lithographed children’s books published in Russia and France, and wanted to introduce the same kind of work to the British market. He did this with a three-pronged attack: as publisher of Country Life Books, as editor of the Puffin Picture Books series for Penguin, and as proprietor of Transatlantic Arts. I was lucky enough to know Noel Carrington in his later years, and now of course am full of questions I wish I had asked him…

Anyway, this subject is so huge it needs to be cut up into small chunks, so I shall today just write about two of the artists associated with Curwen and with Carrington, Barnett and Claudia Freedman.


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

Barnett Freedman was born in Stepney, East London, to East European Jewish parents. Freedman studied under Paul Nash at the Royal College of Art, and it was Nash who introduced him to Harold Curwen of the Curwen Press, with whom Freedman had a long and fruitful association. Working with the artisans at Curwen (and also at their friendly rival, the Baynard Press), Freedman became one of the pioneers of colour autolithography in England. Barnett Freedman was also a successful commercial artist (producing posters for London Transport, for instance), and his love of lettering and typography is evident. Powers calls him “the undisputed master of the lithographic book jacket, poster or illustrated book between the wars”. Freedman was an official War Artist in WWII.


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

I don’t have much of Barnett Freedman’s work, but I do possess what I think to be his finest book, the two volume Lavengro printed by Curwen for George Macy’s Limited Editions Club in 1936, for which Freedman created 16 gorgeously evocative colour lithographs. Alan Powers reproduces one of these (“One day it happened that, being on my rambles”), and notes that “Freedman’s plates for this book were his first to develop a full colour range”. Learning how to create the painterly quality for which his lithographs are celebrated caused Freedman considerable effort. In her book Artists at Curwen (Tate Gallery, 1977), Pat Gilmour quotes a letter from Barnett Freedman to “My dear Ruth”, the wife of Oliver Simon, Curwen’s chief typographer:


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

“The misery occasioned by the enormous amount of work I have had to do for Lavengro – the getting up at six o’clock every morning for three months – the journey to Plaistow in crowded and overheated trains – the faces of wage slaves and breadwinners, their coughs and sneezes, their smells, their conversations and newspapers. The close approximations of their bodies to my own (this sometimes was not so bad)- the rush and roar of the works at North Street – the bickerings of the printers – the inexperience of the lithographic department making me often leave the works at eleven at night – all these things and many more are completely mitigated and relieved by your most kind and delightful letter.”


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

Of Barnett Freedman’s Lavengro lithographs, Pat Gilmour writes, “The colour pages are very subtle, employing to great effect rose-pink, tan, gold, blue and green in charmingly lit landscapes and character sketches.”


Barnett Freedman
Lithograph for Lavengro

Barnett Freedman is quite rightly held in the highest regard by those who are interested in such things. But his wife Claudia is almost forgotten. She was born Claudia Guercio in Formby, Liverpool, of Anglo-Sicilian parentage. She studied at Liverpool School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Working initially under her maiden name, she took the name Claudia Freedman on her marriage to Barnett Freedman in 1930. Compared to her husband, Claudia Freedman's output was relatively small, but works such as the autolithographed book My Toy Cupboard (undated but published in the 1940s by Noel Carrington's Transatlantic Arts) show that she had a talent equal to his.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

Their son Vincent was born in 1934, and My Toy Cupboard, one of the gems of the brief flowering of British autolithograpy in the mid-twentieth century, is an eloquent testament of a mother's love (even including one of Vincent’s own pictures signed with his initials, VF). It was printed not at Curwen, but at C. J. Cousland and Sons in Edinburgh.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

Lavengro was published in a signed limited edition of 1,500 copies, and I imagine most of those copies are still sitting on a shelf somewhere. My Toy Cupboard was printed in an unnumbered, unsigned, cheap popular edition of goodness knows how many copies. I would be surprised if more than about 20 are still in existence.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

There’s one in the Opie Collection in the Bodleian Library, but that’s the only one I’ve so far traced in a public collection. It is a tiny book, 130 x 95 mm (roughly 5 x 33/4”), 16pp long, printed on flimsy (probably wartime) paper, and only about a millimeter thick.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard

It’s a stunning little thing, probably literally worth its weight in gold.


Claudia Freedman
Lithograph for My Toy Cupboard