THE WILLIAM MORRIS SUSSEX CHAIR

Woolley and Wallis are offering a set of four Morris & Co. Sussex chairs from the house of Emery Walker in their sale on 6 October (above) with an estimated price of £400 to £600. 

The Sussex range, based on traditional country furniture, was intended to be cheap and simple, very much in line with Morris’s principles. The V&A say that Morris used Sussex chairs himself in Red House and Kelmscott House. Burne-Jones had Sussex chairs in his studio and so did the sculptor Alfred Gilbert. Sussex chairs were bought for students’ rooms in Newnham College, which was decorated in Arts and Crafts style, and for galleries in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Other firms, notably Liberty & Co. and Heals, produced their own versions of the Sussex chair. Sussex chairs in various versions were made in very large numbers but they’re collectible and the sale estimate is reasonable.

In 1912 Morris & Co. were selling a Sussex chair for nine shillings and ninepence, which a skilled worker could buy after 13 hours work. Today a skilled worker – say a car auto worker – would have to work 10 hours to buy a chair in the Woolley and Wallis sale if the set sells for £600. 

William Morris’s struggles over pricing are well known, with his famous complaint about being forced to cater for the swinish luxury of the rich. I’ve written before about the difference in price between goods designed with a view to simplicity and cheapness (where form followed function), like the Isokon Donkey, and the price of modern reproductions (where meaning follows form). There’s also a reproduction of the Sussex chair by Nafisi Studio, who make a beautiful modern version in coloured lacquers (below), retailing at £1,375 – about 11 days’ work for a car auto worker. Far from the swinish luxury of the rich but not quite Ikea.

CHILDREN’S ILLUSTRATORS

As a child I looked at the illustrations of books before I read them. I had a guilty feeling that this wasn’t the right thing to do and indicated laziness and a lack of seriousness, but I now realise that my imagination was visual, maybe even hyperphantasic. Talking to my brother recently about the books we read as children, I was surprised to find that these illustrations made little impression on him, but several impressed me greatly and I’ve remembered the artists ever since, even when I’ve stopped liking the books.

Maxwell Armfeld’s art nouveau-ish illustrations to Hans Anderson, in line and colour, published in 1910, perfectly matched the cruel and magical mind of the author. His depictions of the tortured Girl Who Trod on a Loaf and Mermaid were, to me, inseparable from the narratives.

Later I discovered Rex Whistler’s Anderson, far superior artistically, (below) but I still picture Anderson’s tales like Armfeld did. Apart from recognising Anderson’s sadism I now find his moralising intolerable, but some of his best stories, like The Steadfast Tin Soldier and The Snow Queen, still resonate.

R.S.Sherriffs’ strong graphic style jumped out at me from a now almost-forgotten book of short stories. His still-remembered picture calls to mind an episode in which a military officer rides through the street ogling the girls. Only through my memory of the picture do I remember that I’d never come across the word “ogling” till then and wasn’t sure what it was or how he did it.

Sherriffs was a perceptive caricaturist who did a few children’s books and was one of the artists who introduced me to the potential of illustration. My liking for him was reinforced by his vignettes in Punch (above), which I came across in the doctor’s waiting room. His style was perfectly suited to the Rubaiyat (top) and made a lovely edition.

As it happens, the mocked and maligned Ladybird books employed illustrators with a talent for literal representation, which, in the case of their natural history titles, like What to Look For in Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter (below) was wholly appropriate, and brought in Royal Academician Charles Tunicliffe, a wildlife illustrator who specialised in birds. He did pictures for Brooke Bond tea cards and the RSPB magazine as well as the Ladybird books and introduced me to the wonderful potential of both natural history and illustration. The RA had an exhibition of his work in 2017.

I loved Enid Blyton’s Adventure books between the ages of 10 and 12 and was quite indifferent to the weakness of her plots and characterisation, to say nothing of her casual racism. But even more than the stories I loved the illustrations by Stuart Tresilian (below) and studied them closely. Tresilian, the son of a clerk, studied at the RCA (as did Tunicliffe) and taught at the Regent Street Polytechnic. He was a member of the Art Workers Guild and the Society of Graphic Artists and became respectively Master and President. He is well known for his illustrations to Kipling and also did work for educational  natural history publications. He is the least of the illustrators mentioned here, but I wasn’t so discriminating at the age of ten and liked his work a lot.

 

TULLIO CRALI, THE LAST FUTURIST

^{Self Portrait (1935)}

We went to the Estorick Collection’s postponed exhibition of the art of Tullio Crali A Futurist Life, the first devoted to him in the UK. Crali was a key figure in the second wave of Futurism, to which he remained attached with idealistic devotion, and the major proponent of aeropittura, painting inspired by aerial flight.

^{The Force of the Bend (1930)}

Crali was born in 1910 in Montenegro and spent much of his life in Gorizia, near Trieste. He developed an enthusiasm for Futurism as a schoolboy and taught himself to paint in a Futurist style. Marinetti wrote to him in 1929, “Dear Futurist, Delighted to have you with us in the Futurist struggle.” Meeting Marinetti, who favoured him with a smile, was the high point of his life.

^{Cosmic Maternity (1960)}

This remarkable exhibition gathers works from the Crali family collection that span the artist’s long life (he died in 2000), many unseen for decades. His most famous painting Nose-Diving the City (which the Estorick included in its 2005 exhibition Painting the Skies) is not included, but his intoxication with flying is well-represented.

^{The Forces of the Infinite (1931)}

After the war the position of Futurists became difficult in Italy. Crali never had much interest in politics and engaged as a naïve patriot – “acquiescence”, the word the curators choose to describe his relationship with the regime, is accurate. In 1942 Crali and Marinetti produced a manifesto (always a manifesto!) about the potential artistic contribution to the war effort, Plastic Illusionism of War and Perfecting the Earth, whose ideas about camouflage did not appeal much to the military mind:

“Spiritualise materiality and vulgarity by means of gigantic winged colourful transparent free-word compositions in such a way that a smoking factory might metamorphosise into an evanescent mystical chapel fringed with angels and bells.”

^{Vegetable Volumes (1948)}

Unlike Depero, who had to emigrate to the USA to continue as an artist, Crali survived with a teaching job in Italy. His post-war still lifes (above) gained in depth and subtlety.

Futurism was a way of life to Crali, not to be abandoned when circumstances changed. At a meeting of Futurists in 1950 – and I was surprised to learn that there was still an organised Futurist movement after Marinetti’s death – Benedetta Marinetti dissolved the movement, a decision Crali refused to accept, and in his own mind he remained a Futurist.

^{Lights at Sunset in Ostia (1930)}

Teaching posts in Paris and Cairo introduced Crali, ever curious about his world, to new scenes, new people, new shapes and new possibilities. His late embrace of found art from rocks, the Sassintesi (“Stonetheses”) was, in his mind, still a Futurist enterprise.

^{Crali with his wife Ada Savelli in Paris, 1950s}

BERNARD LEACH

Clara Grein

Bernard Leach’s A Potter’s Book, which has never been out of print in Britain since it was published in 1940, has been translated into Italian for the first time by Clara Grein. The long delay is explicable by Italy’s very different ceramic tradition, into which the Leach style of stoneware has made few inroads. I learned of Il Libro del Ceramista from British potter Terry Davies, who has been making stoneware pottery in Italy for many years.

Emmanuel Cooper’s biography of Leach refers to Leach’s admiration for Ruskin but I looked in vain for any reference to Bergson, whose whose anti-rationalism and philosophy of élan vital pervade A Potter’s Book. Leach regarded “vitality” as a virtue in pottery, talked of “the intuitive craftsman” and used “intellectual” as a term of disapprobation. This short quotation gives a flavour of his thinking:

Judgment in art cannot be other than intuitive and founded upon sense experience, on what Kawai calls ‘the body’. No process of reasoning can be a substitute for or widen the range of our intuitive knowledge. This does not mean that we cannot use our common sense in examining the qualities in a pot which give us its character, such as form, texture, decoration and glaze, for analytic reasoning is important enough as a support to intuition.

It’s hard to know whether Leach ever read Creative Evolution, the book in which Bergson expounded his idea of the vital spirit that drives evolution and that can be interpreted as the source of human creativity, but it was popular in the first half of the twentieth century, was widespread in artistic circles and (as Rachel Gotleib showed) was marshaled in service of the new ceramics.

CHARDIN

Ernst Gombrich was typically gracious in response to Charlie Rose’s sometimes silly questions in his 1995 interview (below). He wouldn’t admit to a favourite colour but he did admit to favourite painters, Valasquez and Chardin.

Michael Levey’s beautiful passage about Chardin in Roccoco to Revolution is worth re-reading:

There never was such a perfect world as Chardin’s … . It is a puritan, perhaps almost more truly Quaker, life that is depicted in simple, windowless rooms, dark and sheltered domestic interiors in which nothing more is happening than the preparing or serving of frugal meals, the education or amusement of children. The appeal is in the restriction: an emphasis on plain living and clean linen – linen, not silk. There is humbleness without poverty. Above all, everything indicates industry. The few possessions are polished and harmoniously arranged; the plain-coloured clothes are cared for, neatly worn. Gravity is present not only in the mood, but in the sense of each object finding its own place in the scheme of things. And objects are as important as people: they coexist, so that the copper cistern is no mere prop but is as fully realized, as measured and plotted, as the girl who bends at it.

In all this there is rebuke, if no more than a tacit one, to rococo sensations. A cold bath of purity replaces the heady hot-house languor of Boucher. Those tendencies for everything to shimmer, melt, dissolve – for art to hover on the point of orgasm – are counteracted by chastity: chaste draughtsmanship and chaste activity. Women remain the chief subject, but treated as household managers and mothers; girls are firmly put back into a domestic environment, often shown assuming maternal responsibilities. Chardin’s technique is equally in opposition to rococo fluidity. Like Piazzetta again, he was a slow worker. His Father had been a carpenter and there is something almost of joinery in Chardin’s tiny slabs and slices of saturated paint which are, as it were, assembled and slotted into place in the composition.