Horror and humour Laura Gascoigne
The first major exhibition for forty years of the work of Edward Ardizzone is on in London until January.
‘T he English are a nation of illustrators,’ wrote Osbert Lancaster; ‘all our best artists, are raconteurs. And as war seldom fails to be a first-class story, we can always look forward with some degree of confidence to a recurrent Renaissance as soon as the guns go off.’
Lancaster made this observation in a review of the 1941 exhibition of Official War Artists at the National Gallery which happened to include an exhibitor destined to become one of English art’s greatest raconteurs. Among the first artists to be appointed by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, Edward Ardizzone was selected for what its chairman, Kenneth Clark, foresaw as his ability ‘to show the earthy part … what military life was really like’.
‘In one way, it was the best thing that could possibly have happened,’ Ardizzone later reflected. The one way was the tax-free income of £650 p.a. it provided for an artist who had previously scuffled to survive on the odd freelance illustration and exhibition of paintings which, with their familiar cast of well-upholstered tarts, well-oiled gents and local lowlifes sketched in the streets and pubs around his Elgin Avenue studio, were appreciated by critics but not designed to find a ready market among middle-class collectors.
In sending Ardizzone to war, Clark catapulted him from the fug of the snug into an arena that gave full scope to his talents. His rarely seen war pictures are the revelation of a major new retrospective at the House of Illustration – the first for forty years – accompanying a new book by Alan Powers. Feeling himself under no obligation to be fashionably Modernist, Ardizzone simply turned the beam of his acute observation on the war-torn world around him and recorded it with a humanity and truth that disarmed even the high priest of English Modernism Herbert Read. ‘Some critics will say that he reduces the tragedy of war to a comedy,’ Read wrote in the Listener in 1940, ‘but I am learning more about this war from Ardizzone than from any other single source.’
Some of his war drawings are laugh-outloud funny – like the wonderful ‘War Artists Receive a “State Visit” from General Staff Officers’ (1942), showing the officers struggling to maintain their ramrod postures while negotiating a spiral staircase – but the line between comedy and tragedy is sometimes so thin as to be indiscernible. The macabre image of a soldier sizing up a pair of looted pyjama trousers beside the corpse of their previous owner in ‘On the Road to Fuka, November 6th, 1942: Loot’ is
only rescued from morbidity by the cheerfulness of the looter, while the graveyard humour of ‘On the Road to Tripoli: A Cup of Tea for the Burial Party’ (1943) is somehow redeemed by the sheer ordinariness of the scene. The most atmospheric images are the landscapes. In ‘A Drunken Dutchman in the Street in Bremen, 1945’ we view the bombed-out city from a pie-eyed perspective, as the only walls left standing are squiffy.
When asked how he created a character, the actor Walter Matthau said the first thing was to ‘get the walk’. From the posture of Ardizzone’s figures you can tell exactly what they’re about – something calculated to appeal to children, who rely on body language to negotiate a world of adults whose verbal communications are mostly impenetrable. The resourceful child heroes of Ardizzone’s stories are typically misunderestimated, to borrow a Bushism, by their parents and neglected to a point where social services would now be called in. In response, like Little Tim, they run away to sea or, like the orphaned Lucy Brown, get themselves adopted by a lonely old man who hangs around playgrounds.
But as the author found when inventing these stories for his own offspring, children like a story ‘with lots of danger in it’. ‘After all, books for children are in a sense an introduction to the life that lies ahead of them,’ he reasoned. ‘If no hint of the hard world comes into these books, then I am not sure that we are playing fair.’
Given that treating children as equals is the way to their hearts, the success of Ardizzone’s books is hardly surprising; what is more surprising is that they should have been translated into Afrikaans, Zulu, Aboriginal and Icelandic. Their appeal has crossed borders, deserts, outbacks and icecaps and their influence on children’s illustration has been immeasurable. It’s hard to conceive of Maurice Sendak’s
Where the Wild Things Are without the example of Ardizzone’s monstrous Catipoce, while his insouciant Huck Finn is a veritable Abraham, the clear progenitor of the tribes of harum-scarum nippers populating the pages of Quentin Blake. It’s a debt Blake acknowledged when he credited his predecessor with saving ‘the always precarious aesthetic of our nurseries’.
Ardizzone also worked for advertising agencies. The ubiquity of his 1954 Guinness poster of a stout-fuelled piano mover lifting the instrument complete with pianist made him uncomfortable: ‘I creep around feeling rather ashamed of myself.’ But his most widely circulated illustration adorned the GPO’S birthday greetings telegram. When Kenneth Clark turned seventy, he received about fifty. ‘How sick I would have got of them,’ he wrote to the artist, ‘if they had been designed by anyone else. Instead of answering them immediately I am writing to thank you for the pleasure that your drawings have given me … I enjoyed every one I opened.’
My favourite drawings in the exhibition are the pen-and-ink vignettes illustrating the artist’s memoir The Young Ardizzone, especially one showing a troop of scouts passing a park railing against which an abusive husband is throttling his wife. The boys were told by the scoutmaster to look away as one should never come between a man and his wife, but the future illustrator looked and committed the scene to memory. His brain seems to have functioned as a picture library in which all of life’s serio-comic incongruities were filed for future use. Near the end of his book, Powers quotes a letter to his accountant in which he marshals this ingenious argument for setting off his living expenses against tax: ‘Please explain to the Chatham Inspector that the artist’s life is very different to that of the tradesman or business man. What the artist does and how he lives and where he goes is the basis of his work. His life is a genuine expense.’ ‘Ardizzone: A Retrospective’ is at the House of Illustration until 15th January 2017. ‘Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator’ by Alan Powers, Lund Humphries £40