An optimistic, feel-good collection
Exhibition
Edward Bawden
Dulwich Picture Gallery
★★★★★
For a gentleman illustrator who spent most of his life in a quiet Essex village, Edward Bawden is an oddly divisive figure. Celebrating quintessential Englishness with a distinctively modern – but not too modern – twist, his watercolours and lino-cuts are invariably written off as “fogeyish” by anyone even remotely near the cutting edge, while more conservative viewers tend to overesteem him for his “charm” (a very Bawdenesque word), and the fact that he patently can draw.
This exhibition, however, is out to rescue Bawden from this rather stuffy image, rediscovering him as one of the most “influential and versatile artists of his generation”, and promising a wealth of revelatory little-seen material alongside his most popular images.
The decision to look at Bawden, who was born in 1903, thematically – as is fashionable in exhibitions these days – rather than chronologically doesn’t make it easy to pinpoint his earlier and, we suppose, more radical work. Two interesting cubistic copper engravings from the Twenties are hidden away in the penultimate room. Generally, however, we get a reasonably clear sense of his trajectory.
It’s been Bawden’s fate to be overshadowed by more brilliant talents such as Paul Nash, his teacher at the Royal College of Art, and his close friend Eric Ravilious, whose stylish pre-war landscape views are even more highly regarded than Bawden’s. His Thirties watercolours, indeed, often look like exact amalgams of these two artists, such as Christ! I Have Been Many Times To Church (1933), with its starkly drawn and very Nash-like trees. The prosaic The Greenhouse (1932) and Brick
House Garden (1936), meanwhile, bring to mind Ravilious at his most boring.
Technically, though, these works can hardly be faulted. September: 11am and
September: Noon, both 1937, introduce a distinctive red-tinted colour palette quite different from the other two artists, with dexterous layering of texture – scratching, blotching and hatching – that is always Bawden’s great strength whatever medium he’s using. You form the impression of a precociously gifted but rather cosseted and lazy-minded artist, who was given a house in his home village, Great Bardfield in Essex, by his ironmonger father, and who, while hard-working on a day-to-day basis, didn’t push himself.
The Second World War, however, jerked Bawden out of his comfort zone, and produced the most surprising and interesting work in this exhibition. As an official war artist, Bawden was forced to depict people, something he’d previously avoided, apparently because he simply didn’t enjoy it. Portraits of servicemen and workers for the military in North Africa and the Middle East give a poignant, almost existential sense of men plucked out of their customary roles into extraordinary, dangerous circumstances, whether it’s the powerful line drawing Private G F Dunning or the haunting watercolour An Iraqi Jew (both 1943).
With the war over, however, Bawden is back to illustrating places, in the medium for which he has become best known: lino-cut. In these works, he celebrates Britain’s architectural heritage in bold, incisive lines that reinvent British vernacular traditions, from 18th-century handbills to 19th-century wood engraving, with a touch of upbeat Festival of Britain modernism.
There’s no denying the formidable technical achievement of huge lino-cuts such as the 5ft-wide Lindsell Church (1963), or the almost equally large Liverpool Street Station (1961), with its excitement about steam travel captured in a lateral perspective along gothic arches. As with the exuberant Brighton Pier (1958), it’s easy to write these images off as merely decorative. Yet despite their retro-flavour and handicraft origins, they belong very much to their post-war moment, perfectly designed to be scaled down for use on postage stamps or blown up into posters.
If Bawden can be merely ordinary (as in his views of London markets) or so feather-light that his work feels in danger of blowing away (his packaging for Fortnum & Mason), at his best he gives us an optimistic, feel-good message about living in Britain that still feels fresh and oddly relevant, and which makes this an ideal summer exhibition.