The guardian angel

Carl Larsson
Before the Mirror
Reproduction of an oil self-portrait of 1909

Carl Olof Larsson was born to a poor family in Stockholm in 1855. At the age of 13 he entered the first rung of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. On graduating, like many other young Scandinavian artists, Carl Larsson travelled to France, then the centre of modern art. He soon gravitated to the Scandinavian art colony at Grez-sur-Loing. There he met his future wife, the artist Karin Bergöo. Carl Larsson is now best remembered for the watercolours he painted of their home and family life in Sundborn; these, by recording and popularising Karin Larsson's radical stripped-down decorative schemes and loose aesthetic-style dresses, created what we now think of as Scandinavian style. This style has proved so powerful and enduring that it still prevails in the furniture of Ikea and the clothes of Gudrun Sjödén.


Carl Larsson
Empire: Dansös vid göteborgs Teater, 1891
Etching
Published in 1892 by der Gesselschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in the survey of international etching Vervielfältigende Kunst der Gegenwart

The 1997 exhibition at the V&A, Carl and Karin Larsson: Creators of the Swedish Style (with an excellent catalogue edited by Michael Snodin and Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark), rightly gave Karin equal billing and equal attention, a shifting of gender perspectives that has proved equally fruitful in assessing other Scandinavian artistic partnerships of the time, such as Anna and Michael Ancher, Marie and P. S. Krøyer, Oda and Christian Krohg, and Sigrid Hjertén and Isaac Grünewald, whose work was explored in the exhibition Nordic Artist Couples Around 1900 at the Skagens Museum in 2006, with a short but informative catalogue by Margareta Gynning.


Carl Larsson
Dagmar Grill
Lithographic facsimile after a colour drawing, 1904
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste

Carl Larsson’s oil paintings and murals now seem rather heavy-handed and overworked, but his watercolours have retained their freshness and charm, and the same is true of his etchings. Larsson made 112 etchings, aquatints, and drypoints; colour lithographs were also made from a number of his watercolours. Many of the etchings were published by the Swedish Association for Graphic Art, Föreningen för Grafisk Konst. His original graphics have been catalogued by Bertil, Gunnel and Svenolof Hjert in Carl Larsson: Grafiska Werk (1983), which unfortunately I have not yet seen.


Carl Larsson
Skyddsängeln, 1898
Etching
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste

Carl Larsson died in 1919. Because of the widespread distribution of his work in cheap reproductions – books, postcards, posters, calendars – and the sentimental context in which those reproductions have been published, he is perhaps not as widely admired today as he should be for the sheer draughtsmanship of his watercolours and etchings. Nor is it sufficiently recognized how important a development it was that a major male artist should make the home and the family the supreme focus of his life’s work.


Carl Larsson
Karin och Kersti
Etching, 1904
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste

The tenderness and delicacy of Carl Larsson’s depictions of Karin and their children, and his celebration of the home as a shared work of art, are very striking in their acceptance of the feminine as a vital component of the artistic life. Although Karin Larsson’s essential contribution to the Larsson’s experiment in living was subsumed in the more public and commercial of her husband, there is no doubt in the work itself that this was a partnership of supportive equals.


Carl Larsson
Modellen ved kaminen
Etching with aquatint, 1908
Published in 1909 by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paris

The finer points of Pointillism

Pointillism, invented by Georges Seurat, applies colour theory to painting in a radical way, substituting dots of colour for brush-strokes, and allowing the colours to mix naturally in the eye. It’s basically the same as modern colour printing, where all the colours in a reproduced image are made up of dots of black, cyan, yellow, and magenta. A remarkably wide range of artists adopted the Pointillist (or Divisionist) approach, if only temporarily, and at least three – Seurat, Signac, and Cross – produced masterpieces in it. But I never expected to find a monochrome Pointillist. His name was John Jack Vrieslander, a German artist, born in 1879, After studying at the Düsseldorfer Akademie from 1897 to1898, Vrieslander went to Munich, where he lived from 1901 to 1905. Then he moved to Paris, where he lived for the years 1905 to 1908. It must have been here that he encountered Pointillism (still an active force in neo-Impressionism, although Seurat had died in 1891), and experimented with it in his etchings. Both of my etchings by John Jack Vrieslander depict Parisian scenes, and were almost certainly executed there. The influence of Seurat is strongly felt.


John Jack Vrieslander, Place de la Concorde

They were published in 1910 by Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst to accompany a short article on Vrieslander’s etchings by Ernst Schulz-Besser. Schulz-Besser writes admiringly of Vrieslander’s elegance of line and mastery of the distribution of forms. He remarks, “His technique, as applied to these two etchings, appears somewhat laborious, but the elaborate method produces a refined shimmering effect.” Unfortunately one of my etchings, Place de la Concorde, is rather discoloured with yellow staining from the tissue guard, and foxing in the margins. It’s still an attractive piece, though. Luckily the second, Jardin du Luxembourg, is in much better condition.


John Jack Vrieslander, Jardin du Luxembourg

John Jack Vrieslander’s career does not seem to have taken off, and he is now a virtually forgotten artist. Besides his etchings, he published a number of portfolios of black-and-white drawings, often of theatrical or lightly erotic scenes, such as Varieté, Schlafende Frauen, Rose Mirliton, and Paris. Beyond that, I can’t find out much about him. He died in 1957, having long outlived his brief fame.

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