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Summer Exhibition 2009 "... Unfortunately for me, I was set a subject by Konody which was not really suitable to me. He wanted me to illustrate or reconstruct an aerial battle of the great Canadian airman W. A. Bishop, who won two V.C's, the M.C, the D.S.O. with bar, and the D.F.C. I was given all manner of descriptions of the fight and two or three photographs of the machine used, and was granted every facility for flying about in the clouds, where the fight took place. But I had not actually witnessed the fight; and although I had seen a good deal of aerial warfare and had myself been attacked by hostile 'planes, I found the task a terribly difficlut one..."
C. R. |
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Painter of landscapes, urban and industrial subjects, war scenes, figure studies and flower paintings; an accomplished etcher and lithographer who worked in a variety of styles. He attended St John's Wood School of Art 1907-8, the Slade School 1908-12 and the Academie Julian, Paris, 1912-13, where he shared a studio with Modigliani, worked at the Cercle Russe and made friends with Severini. Interested in Cubism and Futurism, he was one of the first English artists to be deeply influenced by new developments in Europe at that time; his work was included in the Post-Impressionists and Futurists exhibition at the Dore Gallery in 1913, and he organized a banquet for the Futurist leader Marinetti in London in that year. A founder member of the London Group, and active in the Rebel Art Centre, he wrote, with Marinetti, 'Vital English Art: A Futurist Manifesto', published in the Observer in 1914; he also contributed to the second issue of the magazine 'Blast'.
In 1915 he joined the RAMC, and was made an Official War
Artist in 1917; he was the first artist to draw from the air. He tried
to sum up the anonymity of the individual in Column on the March, 1915,
the destructiveness of war in The Road From Arras to Bapaume, 1918, and
its horror in Paths of Glory, which was censored and earned him a
reprimand from the War Office. His
prints, with their bold contrasts and jagged forms marked a complete
break with the Whistler tradition. In 1919 and 1920 he visited New York, and his emotional response inspired work such as The Soul of A
Soulless City, 1920. He
was elected to the NEAC in 1929, the RBA in 1932 and as ARA in 1939. Please email
info@hgsummershow.org or call 020 7275 0383 for further information. |
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