Edward Wadsworth: The modern and the maritime
By Jan Cox
The early part of Edward Wadsworth’s career was inextricably linked with Wyndham Lewis. From the pages of Blast in 1914 to the Group X exhibition of 1920, Wadsworth joined with Lewis in the vanguard of an attack on the British art establishment. However, as this period progressed, the ties between the two artists gradually loosened, corresponding to Wadsworth’s increasing confidence in his own abilities, and to the prejudicial impact of the First World War on the modernist agenda. Wadsworth had backed Lewis in his row with Roger Fry over a commission for the Omega Workshops in October 1913, and it was in that same month that Wadsworth exhibited stylised landscapes at the Doré Galleries in London. These showed a marked change in his personal style, containing angular trees and shapes that one can attribute to Lewis’s influence. The following year Wadsworth was alongside Lewis at the opening of the short-lived Rebel Arts Centre, and again when objecting to Nevinson’s appropriation of their names for Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto. However their greatest collaboration in 1914 was over the magazine Blast, to which Wadsworth contributed five works, exemplified by Cape of Good Hope (below, now lost).
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© Estate of Edward Wadsworth. All rights reserved, DACS 2008 |
David Peters Corbett said of Wadsworth’s and Lewis’s work at this time that they ‘enact in their angular and mechanised forms [an] investment of the national landscapes by modernity’ (Peters Corbett 124a). One of the pictures Peters Corbett refers to is Blackpool (1914-15, now lost), which Lewis singled out for praise. Lewis said of Wadsworth’s picture that it is ‘one of the finest paintings he has done. Its striped ascending blocks are the elements of a seaside scene, condensed into the simplest form possible for the retaining of its vivacity’ (Lewis 85f). He praised later its ‘realism’, saying that Wadsworth had captured ‘the essential truth, of a noisy, garish seaside’, whereas a Camden Town artist would merely depict ‘a symbol or trophy of the scene’ (Lewis 88f). In the latter half of World War One, Wadsworth worked for Norman Wilkinson on the camouflage of naval vessels. When, after the war, he was asked to produce a work for the Canadian War Memorial Scheme, the result was Dazzle-Ships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919). This huge picture enabled Wadsworth to bring his Vorticist training to a contemporary scene, in which angular blocks of colour were applied not just to the hull of the ship, but to a background of girders, pipes, buildings and chimneys.
In order to perform our own critical analysis of Wadsworth, we need to concentrate on two significant phases of his work, the Black Country pictures of 1919-20 and the maritime-themed works of the later 1920s. The former group has attracted considerable critical acclaim, whilst the latter represents the public’s primary perception of Wadsworth’s work.
The Black Country
Wadsworth’s oil painting activities had been curtailed by the war and he turned to the production of small woodcuts whilst stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean. After the war he took as inspiration the scenes he had witnessed on his many train journeys between London and Liverpool, which passed through the Black Country of the industrial Midlands. This interest culminated in a show of 37 drawings at the Leicester Galleries in 1920. The Daily Express appreciated Wadsworth’s portrayal of the ‘terrible beauty of the slag heap and furnace’ (Daily Express 15 January 1920).The critic of The Times spoke of ‘the terrific energy of the whole industrial process represented[...]in rhythmical and orderly forms’ (The Times 10 January 1920), whilst The Morning Post saw parallels of ‘desolation almost as grimly forbidding as the shell-riven battlefields of Northern France’. Their critic went on to say that the ‘absence of life greatly lessens the permanent value of these clever drawings of the Black Country’ (Morning Post 13 January 1920). Paul Nash had exhibited images of war landscapes at the same galleries fourteen months previously — like Wadsworth he had been interested in man’s impact on the environment rather than by depictions of the human figure in that environment.
These pictures were a critical success; P. G. Konody in The Observer wrote that Wadsworth had ‘distilled art of the highest order’ from material that was ‘positively forbidding’ (Black 42). This encouraged Wadsworth to publish, later in 1920, The Black Country, a collection of twenty of these images in a luxury edition. This too received much praise, tempered with a social concern for the conditions it portrayed. The New Statesman said of Wadsworth that ‘his mind from the point of view of a Labour member or a welfare worker is simply a blank. But it is anything but blank from the point of view of an artist: it is full of plastic ideas engendered by aesthetic emotion’ (R.S.S., New Statesman 9 October 1920). The Times Literary Supplement praised Wadsworth for ‘increasing the sum of human beauty’ but affirmed that these drawings provided no justification for the Black Country itself (TLS 30 October 1920). R.S.S. asserted that in Wadsworth’s work ‘everything is clear, definite and ordered’ and concluded that he had succeeded in ‘hewing beauty out of a slag-heap’.
Such pictures as The East Wind (1919 — left) represents, for Lewis, the peak of Wadsworth’s output, ‘at his best, to my thinking’ (Lewis 1107g), and also for John Rothenstein, who included Wadsworth in his Modern English Painters; ‘he made nothing finer than The Black Country’ (Rothenstein 63).
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© Estate of Edward Wadsworth. All rights reserved, DACS 2008 |
The works are intensely calligraphic, possessing a sense of controlled devastation, an ordered disorder redolent, in technique only, of Hogarth’s carefully constructed scenes of turbulent crowds. There is a barren, otherworldly feel to them, heightened by the lack of humankind and the apocalyptic landscape. Wadsworth is fascinated by the industrial detritus rather than the industry itself. The works contain strong diagonals that recall Wadsworth’s Vorticist heritage. They lead the eye through the picture and provide a structure for the surrounding mounds of waste. Wadsworth later spoke of ‘the order of “untidiness”’ (The Listener 20 March 1935) and his industrial ‘hell’ encapsulates this idea.
Martime and Mourning
From 1922 to 1925 Wadsworth’s work was largely based upon depictions of sailing ships and, later in the period, depictions of the port of Marseilles. He then evolved his maritime theme into compositions involving nautical items, both natural and man-made, such as conch shells and sextants, invariably accompanied by a serene sea background. A significant factor at this time was Wadsworth’s visit to Italy in April 1923. Henceforward, Wadsworth gave up oil paints and woodcuts and worked in tempera, the medium of the Italian ‘primitives’ he had seen. Jonathan Black relates how upon his return Wadsworth painted La Rochelle (1), but was unhappy with the insipid result in comparison to Italian works. This gave him the impetus to begin making his own tempera from powdered colour and egg, and the second version, La Rochelle (2), now in Portsmouth City Art Gallery, provided the ‘bright luminosity’ he sought (Black 55-56).
A significant clue to Wadsworth’s appreciation of the vivid colour he was seeking has not been recognised by other commentators. In his diary entry for 14th May 1923 Edward records visiting the church of the Collegiata in San Gimignano:
Amazing interior — by far the best thing we have yet seen in Italy...Astonishing works — very fresh...very animated compositions ...delightful colour (Wadsworth 117-118).
These were the New Testament frescoes painted by intimates of Simone Martini (Vasari’s legendary ‘Barna da Siena’) in c.1344-48. Their qualities of clarity, directness and lustrous colour became key points of reference that stayed with Wadsworth for the rest of his career.
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Jesus Carrying his Cross to Calvary c. 1344-48 |
According to his daughter Barbara, Wadsworth’s affection for the sea can be traced back to childhood (Wadsworth 189). However, it is not his use of the maritime, so much as his specific subject matter — old-fashioned sailing ships — that has caused concern to later art historians. In the early 1920s, Wadsworth rejected the modernism of the brightly bedaubed dazzle-ships for a genre that initially combined hints of modernity with a nostalgia for the days of sail (see The Cattewater, 1923, below). By 1924 all trace of modernity had disappeared in unashamedly retardataire depictions of sails and intricate rigging in works such as Dunkerque (1) and Harbour at Marseilles — Quai du Port. The following year Wadsworth introduced a baroque theatricality into his works by framing pictures of St. Tropez with heavily draped curtains, through which the sailboats could be observed.
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© Estate of Edward Wadsworth. All rights reserved, DACS 2008 |
It was John Rothenstein’s belief that Wadsworth’s inheritance led him to gratify his passion for the sea, particularly around the Mediterranean, ‘not I think to the pictures’ advantage’ (Rothenstein 64), and I believe that Lewis implies this also. Other commentators have probed more deeply into these nautical renditions. David Peters Corbett notes the ‘machined edges’ and ‘burnished forms’ of modernity in The Cattewater (Peters Corbett 130a) and remarks that ‘Plymouth Sound appears marked by the shadows and clean, sweeping forms of the machine’ (132a). But he concludes that Wadsworth’s objective is a ‘sense of peacefulness and order’ (131a), that confronts modernity whilst at the same time seeking ‘traditional values’ (134a).
Andrew Causey’s excellent analysis Wadsworth in the Early Twenties contrasts the energy and excitement of Blast to these port scenes. They ‘convey a curious feeling of solitude, existence outside and beyond time’, and possess ‘a documentary precision and dreamlike recreation of a lost past’ (Causey 45). He compares them with the deserted, non-functioning, Sunday afternoon atmosphere of Seurat’s port scenes of the 1880s, not in technique but in a shared artificiality (45). In these pictures, Causey sees an allusion to Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman at the Window (1822; see below) in which a woman gazes from her constrained situation at a boat escaping from the world she inhabits.
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© Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
In November 1926 Wadsworth shared an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London with Alvaro Guevara. He showed pictures of Mediterranean ports such as Rue de la Reynarde, Marseilles and St. Tropez IV, Anchors on Quayside. The critical reception was decidedly mixed. Frank Rutter in the Sunday Times said that the pictures were ‘eminently decorative, but that they are not lively they are static pictures, and if they reveal a somewhat cold, hard vision, is this not typical of our time?’ (Sunday Times 7 November 1926). Vogue drew disparaging comparisons with a French surrealist painter: ‘Mr. Wadsworth has assembled all the properties — shells, ribands, lighthouses — only whereas Pierre Roy uses them to create new and puzzling relations of scale and space, in Mr. Wadsworth’s pictures they are merely decorative’ (Vogue Early Dec. 1926). The critic of Apollo described Wadsworth as ‘the most consciously aesthetic, the most severely intellectual, and also the most characteristically English of the advanced moderns. His pictures function like a “Daimler Double Six” — which to me[...]is a pity, for au fond art is not a matter of intellect’ (Apollo Dec 1926). The latter critic strikes at the heart of the debate regarding Wadsworth: his superb organisational skills contrast with a lack of humanity, both perceived and actual.
From 1926 onwards, the ships recede into the background, whilst large nautical items come to the forefront of the picture plane, as exemplified by Wings of the Morning (below).
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© Estate of Edward Wadsworth. All rights reserved, DACS 2008 |
Wadsworth went through many further styles. There were Léger-inspired mechanical compositions (1930-32), a more abstract duality of shapes (1932-33) exemplified by Dux et Comes 1 (now in the Tate Gallery), and a return to the nautical in the mid-30s, including a commission for the liner Queen Mary. From 1938-41 he experimented with Seurat-style pointillism, then with still further nautical images during the war, and the ‘lurid geometrical flowers’, as Lewis called them, after his post-war return to Sussex. His final years (1947-49) saw a return to a purer mechanical abstraction based on interacting forms and colours. As Serge Fauchereau remarked, ‘had he lived [...] his style would have undergone two or three more changes [...] so stubborn was his refusal to allow himself to fall into a rut’ (Fauchereau 116).
Photography and New Objectivity
However, it is the arrangements of nautical still lifes that provide a focal point for a discussion of the merits of Wadsworth’s art. John Rothenstein saw them as ‘his most characteristic works’ echoing The Times obituary description of ‘his most characteristic kind of picture, a sort of concentrated extract of the sea’ (The Times 22 June 1949). There is a consensus regarding their photographic and nostalgic qualities. David Peters Corbett’s concern is with the latter. He sees Wadsworth’s marine pictures as representing a state of mourning, an iconography that ‘speaks overwhelmingly of loss and denial’ (Peters Corbett 182b). For example, the central item of Wings of the Morning (above) is a ship’s log, which for Peters Corbett is ‘an embodiment of the registration of change and the vanishing of the past’ (182b). Wadsworth, he says, both restricts and distrusts modernity: ‘Wadsworth’s marine paintings formalise the repression of modernism and the oblique and silent experiences of a privatised modernity’ (187b). He believes that in pictures such as North Sea (1928), Wadsworth is declaring his modernism but is also simultaneously denying it (179b). An earlier commentator, S. D. Cleveland, had suggested a similar interpretation in 1943 when he referred to Wadsworth’s objects possessing ‘aloof, symbolic and often nostalgic qualities’ (Lewison 86).
The exceptionally still quality of the works has also been commented upon. Richard Cork said of The English Channel (1934) that ‘after a while the stillness begins to ache with expectancy’ (Cork 151). This stillness leads to a consideration of the photographic qualities of the paintings: clarity, precision and smoothness of surface. Andrew Stephenson notes Wadsworth’s interest in the photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in Germany and the fact that Wadsworth himself was a keen photographer. Pictured below we can see Wadsworth’s trusty German-made Leica camera.
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The photographic qualities of Wadsworth’s work were made manifest in an article in The Graphic magazine of August 1930 (see below) in which three of Wadsworth’s works, including Shells with Auger (1927; also known as Gasteropoda) and Song of the Sea (1928; also known as Bright Intervals), were compared with photographs taken by Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor. John Rothenstein believed that this comparison was to Wadsworth’s advantage: ‘how superior is the power of the painter, by a hundred delicate touches’ (Rothenstein 67). Barbara Wadsworth explained that Beck was an old friend of Edward’s, hence a tongue-in-cheek claim from a ‘solicitor’ asserting that: ‘All shells were copyrighted by our client some two years ago’ and we therefore request ‘a cheque for 1000 guineas and a case of champagne as compensation’ (The Graphic 30 August 1930).
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The Age of the Machines
Other critics discovered positive, more universal qualities in Wadsworth’s work. Michael Sevier in The Architectural Review said that machine-age painters like Wadsworth were ‘pioneers of a new ideal of beauty [...] exponents of a living art, the art which mirrors the essential spiritual aspect of our age’ (Architectural Review September 1932) and Rothenstein concluded that Wadsworth was ‘a true poet of the age of the machines’ (Rothenstein 71). John Piper also saw machine analogies in Wadsworth’s work: ‘they have this likeness to clocks and revolvers: that they are composed of carefully selected and unerringly arranged parts that make a working whole’ (Piper 387). A photograph by the German ‘New Objectivity’ photographer Germaine Krull exemplifies Wadsworth’s interest in the artistic possibilities of the mechanical. Andrew Stephenson recognises Wadsworth’s stylistic appropriation of ‘German sources’ (75), whilst David Mellor says that ‘German [...] industrial décor and machine culture was the magnet for Wadsworth (120).
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An introduction to a 1931 catalogue of eleven contemporary English artists (including Wadsworth) at the Abdy Gallery in London uses a quotation from Baudelaire to assert that ‘all that is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation’ (The Times 23 December 1931). A Dutch newspaper — evidence of Lewis’s intimation of a continental appreciation of Wadsworth — concurred: ‘if genius is the “capacity for taking pains” then this Englishman has a good claim to the title’ (Algemeen Hendelsblad 2 June 1927). This calculated element is both the strength and weakness of Wadsworth’s work. His infinite pains produce a motionless beauty that can both captivate and desensitise the viewer. For the pictures to succeed you have to accept, as Waldemar George believed, that ‘These objects exchange words. They act like actors in a drama’ (Dawson 1997). In other words, Wadsworth’s compositional skills create a whole that is much greater than the sum of the individual parts.
This emphasis on composition is the antithesis of the method used by another British marine painter of the 1920s, Christopher Wood. He would produce a painting in a matter of hours, following what he described as an ‘inner voice’ inside his head. In 1930 the critic of the Daily Chronicle said that Wood ‘gets the spirit of a galleon into a sardine boat [...] his pictures make you smell the wind’ (Ingleby 238). Wadsworth’s boats, by comparison, are becalmed in the torpor of the Mediterranean sea untroubled by breeze or waves. Wood’s method was much more akin to that of Francis Bacon, who declared that ‘real painting is a [...] continuous struggle with chance’ and that ‘the brush stroke creates the form and does not merely fill it in’ (Rothenstein 172b).
There has been much discussion as to the means through which Wadsworth turned his back on a purely modernist agenda (Peter’s Corbett’s ‘repression’ and ‘denial’, Causey’s ‘recreation of a lost past’), but little discussion as to his motives. Rothenstein, and indirectly Lewis, suggest that it was his inheritance that led him from the dark satanic mills of the Black Country to the sleepy ships and ports of the South. But was there another reason behind the notions of mourning, of nostalgia, of a rejection of modernity? I propose that the pivotal date in Wadsworth’s career was not the death of his father on 1 January 1921, but the little-discussed death of his nine-year-old daughter Anne on 15 March 1922. Wadsworth produced modernist landscapes in early 1922, but after this tragedy his art begins to express the wish to go back in time, to recapture the past. One is reminded of Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920):
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Oil transfer drawing and watercolour on paper on cardboard, 31,8 x 24,2 cm The Israel Museum, Jerusalem © DACS, London 2009 |
A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. Walter Benjamin Theses on the Philosophy of History, (1940)
I contend that Wadsworth, like the angel, is being propelled towards the future whilst looking towards the past. Barbara Wadsworth relates how ‘his sorrows were kept secret’ and that over two decades later he wrote to Richard Eurich, saying of his daughter’s death that ‘it is still poignant’ (Wadsworth 108-9). Wadsworth’s constrained emotion emerges in his art, a symptom of his wish to turn the clock back to a time before the catastrophe.
Summary
This analysis adds two key points to our knowledge of the art of Edward Wadsworth. Wadsworth pursued a modernist agenda in both industrial and rural landscapes, but in March 1922, after the personal tragedy that enveloped him, his drive towards the future was redirected into a softer, more lyrical style. Mechanised ships receded into the background. His passion for the mechanical became introverted; directed towards the intricacies of the machine, as distinct from its attributes of power and force. His style became reflective rather than innovative. Secondly, other commentators, exemplified by Reginald Wilenski (The Graphic 6 November 1926) have remarked upon the art that Wadsworth saw in Italy. Perhaps because of the lack of attribution to a specific painter and its unfashionable location, the importance of the towering frescoes of San Gimignano — clear, direct, vivid and colourful after nearly six centuries — have hitherto been unconsidered.
In 1935, Wadsworth spoke to the art critic Eric Newton and discussed his artistic philosophy: ‘the artist is...the same as the scientist “trying to extract a new bit of truth out of the universe”’ (The Listener 20 March 1935). The truth Wadsworth extracted from the short-lived industrial boom in the post-war Black Country is now little known to the public. Better appreciated is the haunting tranquillity of the paraphernalia of the sea, arranged with precision like atoms within a molecule. If there is room for a British artist of scientific truth, then Edward Wadsworth is that artist.
Bibliography
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TATE GALLERY ARCHIVE
Edward Wadsworth’s Press Cuttings Album. Ref: TGA 8112/3
- Sunday Times 30 November 1919
- Sunday Times 11 January 1920
- The Morning Post 13 January 1920
- Daily Express 15 January 1920
- The Observer 18 January 1920
- Times Literary Supplement 30 September 1920
- Rutter, Frank. The Sunday Times 7 November 1926
- Apollo December 1926
- Vogue Early December 1926
- Algemeen Hendelsblad 2 June 1927
[Version 1.00: July 2009]