There has been a Ravilious room at Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery for quite a long time. Reworking now in a generous and long overdue space liberated by the addition of new galleries downstairs breathes new life into appreciating his short-lived genius. Ravilious is an interesting character. He’s not part of the art establishment as characterised by the dilettantes of the Bloomsbury group who were largely Cambridge graduates who ‘knew people’. Ravilious went through his local art school and into the Royal College where he did a design course not fine art but attracted patrons.
It must be remembered that at the time Ravilious would have been a student, the 1930s and on into the 40s, there was a distinction between ‘fine art’ and ‘applied art’. This was in the days of ‘commercial art’ before the computer, when most artwork for magazines, newspapers and books was developed by hand, photographed and transferred onto litho plates or wood blocks for production. In a sense the Towner has continued the art establishment snobbery of preferring the degree fine art level of interpretation of painting, kowtowing to the same forces that lord the Bloomsbury group of dilettantes rather than their more contemporary painters. ‘Commercial artist’ was used as a considered insult, a derogatory term. However, it is those dilletantes that we are invited to compare Ravilious with rather than those more abstract contemporaries shown in their recent show of Sussex Contemporaries, such as Ivon Hitchens
Shell poster by Nash
Making a comparison to ‘modernist’ painters such as Nash and Piper following the French school may be a little unfair to Ravilious although he stands up very well in comparison, but you need to use somewhat different comparison criteria in making judgement. The true contemporaries of Ravilious in his role as a designer/artist were those who were involved in the Shell poster project or other pre-war advertising projects, many anonymous painters and printmakers. The Shell poster project managed to cross many boundaries, continuing into the 1950’s, and pulling artists from many disciplines in the production of the iconic series of posters which exists in its complete form in the Shell hotel on the banks of the river at Teddington, but which again feature as isolated items in the collection at the Towner.There is a section of the galleries devoted to the commercial work in textiles and product design
Interestingly many of the artists involved as commercial artists went on to become major players in the revisions of the art education system itself. When I went to art college in the 1960s it was in the dying days of the old NDD’s, the commercially oriented National Diplomas in Design. Two of the Shell artists, major players in the graphics world alongside the likes of Ravillious were Clifford and Rosemary Ellis. From producing Shell posters they went on to become principal and head of graphics respectively at Bath Academy of Art hailed by many after the second war as the Cambridge of the art world, and prototyping new graduate programmes based in Bauhaus thinking, which eventually replaced the NDD. Making an interesting comparison with the Bloomsbury set who were all Cambridge University graduates and exclusive in that respect, only Roger Fry having a lasting impact on critical art thinking.
Ravilious and his wife Tirzah were responsible for the interior decoration of the Midland Hotel in Morecambe, Eric wanting to turn his hand to textile design after the war
Ravilious entered their world through his local art college; I have written that local art colleges have largely been destroyed by the same kind of Cambridge snobbery that is characterised by the Bloomsbury group. The local art college provided a route for people who did not meet the exacting requirements all the elite universities such as Cambridge for entry into education, a route now largely gone. Ravilious went through his local Eastbourne Art College system and his talent and ability shone out sufficiently to gain him entry into the Royal College of Art post-graduate system, but it was on the design course. Again, the distinction between disciplines in educational terms in art colleges was quite different to what it is today. Many fine artists were trained within the commercial sector, and many artists struggle to exist outside it. Interestingly Warhol started as a ‘commercial’ artist and if Ravilious had lived would he have become an English equivalent – or maybe his wife Tirzah Garwood would have, with her sharp eye and humour?
Tirzah’s woodcut shows a gaberdine garbed marrow thief in her garden woodcut
The rehung exhibition clearly shows the relationship between Ravilious and the commercial sector. His work in ceramics and textiles and his relationship with designers of the industrial world is clear. He earned most of his living by design, making illustrative woodcuts for magazines and publications, a process largely replaced these days by designers working on computers. Indeed the boundaries between the commercial world and the fine art world have never been as blurred as they are now where much art is produced using computers on a daily regular basis, the craft approach being a diminishing part of what we see in our gallery’s and on our screens, and local example being the works in Sussex Art Prints.
Seaford Head by Piper
This exhibition explores the skills of Ravilious and his immediate associates his wife his girlfriends and their relationship to Sussex which was a very rich and fruitful one. It seems to make relationships with fine artists like Nash and Piper and fails to see any relationship interestingly with local artists such as Eric Slater who’s walks and woodcuts were internationally known and who must surely have been known to Ravilious. This seems to me be almost inevitable too also when Ravilious lived and worked in Glynde in Sussex close to Slater who lived, walked and worked around Seaford to achieve worldly fame
Newhaven dockside by Ravilious – he would almost have passed Slaters house to get here
It’s interesting to speculate whether the commercial work of Ravilious, which required a skill in defining the line, a graphic ability to produce the wood blocks required for the books and publications that he worked on, affected his other work. Similar clarity of design was required for the ceramics and other design commissions that he created, this must have influenced the definition in his painting. Looking at his early watercolours which have the generous fluid impressionistic brushstroke work that characterised much work of his age and contemporaries, compared with the later work where each individual brush mark is visible and is used almost like coloured pencils, drawing with the paint, reinforces this view.
It is possible to draw the conclusion that the requirement for sharp line making for his wood carvings produced equally sharp definition in his paintings. Thus the accuracy for instance in his rendering of a Walrus taking off over Newhaven fort, the sharpness of the drawing, the clarity of the colour is surely indicative of a very graphic approach to picture making. Referencing and the continued placing of Ravilious in the context of painting as radically departing from within the graphic world surely does him a disservice as an artist. This example of an advertising image for Guy trucks shows the skill of the artist in the ‘commercial art’ field that surely deserves the same level of recognition of those advancing the cause of abstractions as ‘fine artists’?
Gouache painting for advertising. Artist unknown, rescued from a rubbish heap by the author
It is a credit to the exhibition that this clarity in the development of his technique becomes evident in the way that it is hung and in the progression of the work. The contrasting images for instance of Seaford beach by Piper only served to emphasise the difference of approach produced by Ravillious to that of the more painterly contemporaries whose roots go back to the likes of the post impressionists or Wyndham Lewis rather than to the graphic artists also in the Towner collection. Interesting to compare with such as Spencer Pryse, originator of much of the 1920’s Labour imagery and also a war artist albeit a different war and for the Belgian Government, whose work as a lithographer is also in the ‘commercial art’ world and in the Towner collection.
Ivon Hitchens – a contemporaneous work
This distinction between the commercial and fine arts seems to be part of the decay of culture by default. It also, I think, does a disservice to the Towner collection which, whilst furnishing this beautifully displayed feast of the Ravillious collection could have brought out so much more in what he showed in relation to the world he moved in. His was a genius cut short by war, a career that could have flourished and developed. This beautiful exhibition is worth a pilgrimage for all lovers of design as well as the painters amongst us, raising many questions as well as answering much about the man.
The Ravilious Collection is a permanent space in the Eastbourne Towner Gallery and is FREE! Their downstairs caff does the best almond croissants in Sussex
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