Quiz question

What's the use of a quiz question without a prize? What's the world coming to? Answers on a postcard, please.

Anyway - the question is: which icon of Englishness created this modernist copper engraving?

Last rays of the sun

The boldly graphic woodcut style developed independently and concurrently by William Nicholson in England and Félix Vallotton in France inevitably inspired others to follow their lead. One of the first and most influential was the Czech artist Emil Orlik (1870-1932). Orlik studied at the Munich Academy from 1891-1893. In 1899 he joined the Vienna Secession. From 1905 Emil Orlik taught graphics at the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, joining the Berlin Secession in 1908.

Emil Orlik, Die Näherin (The Seamstress)

Woodcut, 1896

Emil Orlik, On the Victoria Embankment, London

(also known as In the Park)

Lithograph, 1898

Of course, not all of those who worked in this style achieved the lasting fame of Nicholson, Vallotton, and Orlik. The German artist Fritz Lang (1877-1961) is hardly known today, though I like the boldness and the humour in my two examples of his work. Lang was born in Stuttgart, where he studied at the art school before completing his studies at the Karlsruhe Academy.

Fritz Lang, Rabbits

Woodcut, 1907

Fritz Lang, Man with a cigarette

Woodcut, 1907

Daniel Staschus (1872-1953) is even more obscure. Born in Girreniken, he studied at the Königsburg Academy.

Daniel Staschus, Vor Anker (At anchor)

Woodcut, 1907

The lack of ready information about some of these intriguing artists is of course intensified as soon as you come to the women. Martha Wenzel (1859-1943) is a case in point. She was born in Lippiany (Lippehne) and died in Merxhausen. Her powerful woodcuts of the early 1900s show a remarkable talent, but as with so many female artists of her day, very little is known about her. When she created my woodcut, Spaziergang, she was living and working in Munich.

Martha Wenzel, Spaziergang (Going for a walk)

Woodcut, 1907

For Gertrud Leschner, who was active in Leipzig in the early decades of the twentieth century, I don’t even have dates of birth and death.

Gertrud Leschner, Untitled (View across buildings)

Woodcut, 1910

Hans Neumann (1873-1957) and his brother Ernest, the sons of the painter and art critic Emil Neumann, were both woodcut artists associated with the journal Die Jugend, which gave its name to the German Art Nouveau movement, Jugendstil. Hans Neumann is now much the better known of the two brothers, celebrated for his colour woodcuts of landscape subjects.

Hans Neumann, Letzte Sonnenstrahlen (Last rays of the sun)

Woodcut, 1910

Hans Neumann, Meeresruhe (Calm sea)

Woodcut 1905

Although some artists such as Hans Neumann continued working in this vein (see Clive's typically eloquent and informative post on Neumann at Art and the Aesthete), this particular style of western woodcut, emerging in the early 1890s, was effectively finished off by the outbreak of WWI.

The Beggarstaff Brothers

Over 20 years ago we viewed a house in Blewbury, Oxfordshire, seduced by the estate agent’s promise that it contained a separate structure in the garden that had been the painting studio of Sir William Nicholson (1872-1949). The house itself was Nicholson’s last home, shared with his companion, the writer Marguerite Steen. Needless to say, the dream painting studio turned out to be a small, dank hut, and we didn’t buy the house. But it sparked my interest in William Nicholson, who at that time had rather sunk from view, eclipsed by his artistic children: the painter Ben Nicholson, the fabric designer Nancy Nicholson (first wife of the poet Robert Graves), and the architect Kit Nicholson.

William Nicholson, Bookplate for the caricaturist Phil May

Woodcut, 1895

Born in Newark, Nottinghamshire, William Nicholson studied at the private art school run by Hubert von Herkomer, and then at the Académie Julian in Paris. He married a fellow-student from Herkomer’s, Mabel Pryde. From 1900 William Nicholson’s primary occupation was painting, but he is better remembered today for his boldly graphic woodcuts, mostly created in the 1890s. Many of these were published in portfolios such as An Almanac of Twelve Sports, London Types, An Alphabet, and Twelve Portraits. Under the joint pseudonym The Beggarstaff Brothers, William Nicholson and his brother-in-law James Pryde also attempted to make a living as poster designers.

 William Nicholson, Bookplate for the publisher William Heinemann

Woodcut, 1897

There was a major retrospective of William Nicholson’s work at the National Gallery in 1942, by which time he had ceased painting following a stroke. More recently, his art was celebrated in the exhibition Sir William Nicholson: Painter and Printmaker at the Royal Academy, 2004-2005.

William Nicholson, Cabriolet

Woodcut, 1898

That William Nicholson himself was something of a dandy can be seen in James Pryde’s evocative portrait of him, with a stiff high collar and yellow kid gloves.

James Pryde, Portrait Study of W. P. Nicholson

Lithograph 1898

William Nicholson’s woodcuts, with their striking use of thick black outlining and their off-centre composition, draw on Japanese models, filtered through artists such as Lautrec and Bonnard. But unlike an artist such as Henri Rivière (see last post), William Nicholson did not painstakingly imitate Japanese methods. Instead he looked back to the work of the Newcastle artist Joseph Crawhall (1821-1896), whose own work was a conscious homage to the naive woodcuts that adorned early C19th century chapbooks, simple publications sold by wandering pedlars. Oddly, Joseph Crawhall was to suffer the same overshadowing by a more famous son, also called Joseph Crawhall (1861-1913), one of the “Glasgow Boys”.

Joseph Crawhall, Babes in the Wood

Joseph Crawhall, George Barnwel

The Crawhall images above are woodcuts (Crawhall calls them "sculptures") taken from the 1976 Scolar Press reprint of Crawhall’s Chap-book Chaplets (1883), in which the hand-coloured woodcuts were reproduced by lithography.

Light and shadow

The post-Impressionist Benjamin Jean Pierre Henri Rivière (1864-1951) is the French artist who above all others absorbed the aesthetics of Japanese art into his own. He is known especially for his woodcuts and lithographs of scenes in Brittany and Paris. Rivière first visited Brittany in 1884, and returned each summer until 1916. It was at this point that Rivière ceased exhibiting or publishing his work (his last print was published in 1917). My sole lithograph by Henri Rivière shows a scene in Perros-Guirec on the rose granite coast of Brittany. On the beach are massive boulders sculpted into extraordinary shapes by the tides, but Rivière ignores the monumental and the picturesque for the tranquillity of daily life. Rivière began as an etcher, moved on to woodcuts in the Japanese style (which he printed himself), and then turned to colour lithographs (which he entrusted to the master printer Eugène Verneau). This image is unusual in that he created it first as a woodcut, in 1891 as part of his unfinished series Les paysages Bretons, and then as a 9-colour lithograph, printed by Verneau for the art revue The Studio in 1896.

Henri Rivière, Le bourg de Perros-Guirec

Lithograph after a woodcut, 1896

Henri Rivière was born in Montmartre, and is in many ways the quintessential Parisian artist. Besides his graphic work, he also invented a form of shadow play, ombres chinoises, which was a speciality of the Chat Noir nightclub, and of which Henri Rivière and Caran d'Ache (Russian-born satirist Emmanuel Poiré, 1858-1909) were the chief exponents. I don’t have any example of Rivière’s silhouette images to show, but I do have two (also from The Studio) from Caran d’Ache’s celebrated shadow play on the Napoleonic Wars, L’Épopée (The Epic). These were printed on celluloid which has yellowed over time, but they still give an idea of the technique. For the actual play, the silhouettes were cut out of zinc and then projected onto a backlit screen—as much an early form of cinema as a kind of theatre. There’s apparently an excellent book on these plays, The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor and the Avant-Garde, 1875-1905 by Phillip Dennis Cate and Mary Shaw, but I haven’t yet seen it. The Musée d’Orsay has some 40 of the original zinc cut-outs.

Caran d'Ache, Two transparencies for L'Épopée

from The Studio, 1898

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.

A sculptor's lithographs

Writing about Alexandre Falguière's etchings got me thinking about sculptors as graphic artists, and I think that they frequently, like Falguière, use printmaking as a way of exploring and refining their ideas for sculptures. This was certainly the case for Henry Spencer Moore (1898-1986). Moore and his close friend from the Leeds College of Art and Design, Barbara Hepworth, were to become the two leading British sculptors of their generation, but Moore was also a substantial figure in the graphic arts. His prints are catalogued in two large volumes edited by Gerald Cramer, Alistair Grant and David Mitchinson, Henry Moore: Catalogue of Graphic Work. The work of an international star such as Henry Moore is mostly out of my range, but I do have three very interesting lithographs, all dating from around 1950 when he first became seriously interested in autolithography. This interest coincided with, and was I believe prompted by, the invention by the printer W. S. Cowell of "Plasticowell" or "Plastocowell" film. These transparent plastic sheets were born out of necessity, to make up for metal shortages after WWII, but they were seized on by a generation of British artists, including Moore and John Piper, because of their flexibility and practicality. Because they were transparent, the artist, who drew each colour on a separate sheet, could easily get the colour registration exactly as he or she wanted. And as the drawings were transferred from the Plasticowell to specially-prepared zinc plates for printing, the artist could also work the right way round, rather than back to front as when drawing a lithograph directly onto zinc or stone.

Henry Moore, Upper half of Standing Figures diptych

Lithograph, 1950

Two of my Moore lithographs, both printed by W. S. Cowell on machine-made wove paper, were published in the Penrose Annual in 1950 to illustrate an essay by Noel Carrington on this new process, "Autolithography of plastic plates". The two Moore lithographs are described in the contents as "Plastic plate experimental lithographs". The first, untitled in Penrose, is described rather obliquely below the image as "Drawing by Henry Moore. First proof from a plate prepared experimentally." It is now known as Upper half of Standing Figures diptych (CGM 14), as Moore subsequently added a second panel below this image, with a group of five standing figures, and the resulting diptych was published in an edition of 50 copies by School Prints. Cramer et. al. seem to have been unaware of the separate publication of the upper half in the Penrose Annual. A printed note on the back tells us that this and the second lithograph, Seated Figure, were each drawn on four Plasticowell plates. For some reason, despite the fact this print is several times explicitly described as an autolithograph, that it was printed by W. S. Cowell specifically to show off the Plasticowell technique, and that it was issued as an illustration to Carrington's essay on this subject, I have seen this print described as a collograph (for instance by Stephen Laird in the catalogue to the exhibition Twentieth Century British Lithographs at Keynes College, University of Kent, in 2009), but I don't understand why.

Henry Moore, Seated Figure

Lithograph, 1950

Seated Figure (CGM 13) was also issued in an edition of 50 by School Prints, on a slightly larger sheet. Once again, the catalogue raisonné does not mention the separate publication in the Penrose Annual. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this monumental study is that when you turn over the sheet, you find, on the reverse, a second original lithograph - a charming study by Kathleen Hale from her autolithographed book Orlando Keeps a Dog.

Kathleen Hale, Orlando and Grace with a beetle

Lithograph, 1950

For sheer incongruity, this must be one of the most surreal aesthetic linkages of all time. Luckily the paper is opaque with no show-through, so you are free to admire either the Moore or the Hale, as the fancy takes you.

Henry Moore, Red and Blue Standing Figures

Lithograph, 1951

My third and last lithograph by Henry Moore comes from the rare first issue of the re-launched Nouvelle Serie of the art revue XXe Siècle, edited by G. di San Lazzaro, which appeared in 1951. Later issues of XXe Siècle had a substantial print-run estimated at 2,000 copies, but the run for the early issues must have been much more modest, as they are extremely scarce. Entitled Red and Blue Standing Figures (CGM 36), it was also published in a signed and numbered edition of 30 copies. It is printed by Edmond and Jacques Desjobert on cream wove paper. Three of the figures also appear in Henry Moore's first tapestry, Three Standing Figures, which was woven in 1950.

The etchings of Alexandre Falguière

Janine Bailly-Herzberg’s Dictionnaire de l’estampe en France 1830-1950, which is one of my most trusted reference books, credits the sculptor Alexandre Falguière (1831-1900) with just two etchings: Les nains mendiants and Caïn et Abel. I’ve already reproduced Les nains mendiants in my post Two intriguing portfolios, and re-post it here for the sake of completeness. It was executed in 1876 and published that year by Cadart (under the title Deux idiots mendiants), and republished in 1888 by L’Artiste, the year that Falguière exhibited his painting Les nains mendiants in the Paris Salon.

Alexandre Falguière, Deux idiots mendiants (Les nains mendiants - Grenade)

as published by Cadart in 1876

the signature and date are reversed in the plate

Caïn et Abel was also executed in 1876, the year in which Falguière exhibited a sculpture in plaster of the same subject at the Salon. Whether these figures were ever cast in bronze I don’t know; according to Bénézit, Falguière also made a painting of this subject. Bailly-Herzberg dates the first publication of this etching to 1902, when it was issued by the Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne, and also included in Léonce Bénédite’s Alexandre Falguière suivi d’un catalogue de ses oeuvres. I have a copy of Caïn et Abel as published by the Revue de l’Art ancien et moderne, and also a second, published in 1876 by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Until recently required to look closely at these two prints, I had assumed they were both editions of the same etched plate, one more contrasty than the other, and that the prior publication of the etching in the Gazette had simply been overlooked. But I now realise that they are in fact two different etchings, bringing Falguière’s meagre total of original prints up to three.

Alexandre Falguière, Caïn et Abel

as published by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1876

unsigned but with printed credits below

The version published in 1876 has the figures of Cain and Abel emerging in a dazzle of light from a fiercely cross-hatched gloom, and bears no signature. The version published in 1902 is signed and dated in the plate, and in it the murderer Cain merges with the dark background, while the light falls on the body of his victim. Both versions are very powerful – the 1876 more intense, the 1902 freer and wilder.

Alexandre Falguière, Caïn et Abel

as published by the Revue de l'Art ancien et moderne in 1902

signed and dated in the plate

Falguière’s interest in etching seems to have been short-lived, which is a shame as all three of these prints show an impressive natural command of the medium. My feeling is that he used these three etching plates to explore his ideas about subjects he was intending to treat in other media (Les nains mendiants as a painting, and Caïn et Abel as a sculpture and as a painting), so that they are essentially preliminary studies rather than etchings after finished works.