This essay was published in Apollo: The Fine Art Magazine in October 2014.
‘I find [oil] painting so appealing
that I’ll have to make a great effort not to paint all the time,’ Vincent van Gogh told a friend in 1882. ‘It’s rather
more manly than watercolours, and has more poetry to it.’[1]
It is perhaps that first phrase of Van Gogh’s that best captures why
watercolours have not received quite the attention they deserve in the story of
Modernism. The watercolour, it might seem, is simply too feminine for the
modern artist – too redolent of aristocratic ladies, of refined Georgian or
Victorian gentlemen, or of enthusiastic amateurs and Sunday artists.
Vincent Van Gogh, The Oise at Auvers (1890), Tate Gallery, London
When in
2011 Tate Britain staged ‘Watercolour’, its first ever exhibition devoted
solely to the medium, it was felt by many critics that this largely
chronological show lost direction once it reached the Modern era. ‘As the show moves into the twentieth century,’
Richard Dorment suggested in The Daily Telegraph
‘it hurtles into chaos. It is an inarguable fact that the great tradition that
began in the eighteenth century died out at the beginning of the twentieth. Few
major artists painted in watercolour and those that did used it only
occasionally.’[2]
This ‘inarguable fact’ reveals a common misconception. There is of
course a long and distinguished history of the watercolour in British art, and
it is widely considered a peculiarly British medium whose golden age began in
the eighteenth century, peaked in the mid nineteenth century and dwindled
towards its end. An article in The
Burlington Magazine in 1905 complained of ‘the failure of our water-colour
tradition’, lamenting, ‘[h]ow many works of the so-called English School of
Water-Colour could be hung by the side of an old Japanese print without looking
either weak or garish?’[3]
Yet watercolour did play a significant role in the Modern movement of the early
twentieth century, both in Britain and abroad. That history is worth closer
examination.
Despite
his criticism of its ‘unmanly’ aspect, Van Gogh was a keen watercolourist. ‘How
marvelous watercolour is for expressing space and airiness,’ he told his
brother rapturously in 1881, ‘allowing the figure to be part of the atmosphere
and life to enter it.’[4]
He continued to use watercolour (often in combination with pen and ink, oil or
gouache) intermittently until his death in 1890, often with remarkable results.
Another godfather of
Modernism who used watercolour both to develop his ideas and as an end in its self
was Paul Cézanne. ‘It is Cézanne who was the precursor and illuminator of
Cubism,’ wrote the French modernist Robert Delaunay, who saw revelatory exhibitions
of the recently deceased artist’s watercolours in Paris in 1909 and 1910.
‘Cézanne’s watercolours: the investigation of coloured planes … or rather
luminous planes which destroy the subject.’[5]
Modernism
was thus not born free of the watercolour, and works on paper that incorporated
watercolour by Van Gogh and Cézanne were included in Roger Fry’s category
defining Post-Impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912. It is perhaps not
surprising that it is to this same date that the critic and curator Frank
Rutter placed the ‘increasingly conspicuous’ appearance in London exhibitions
of ’watercolour drawings, based upon the definite line and decorative
composition of the early topographical draughtsmen of Great Britain’.[6]
Rutter was a leading champion of the Modern movement in Britain. In 1907, with
the support of friends in the Fitzroy Street Group, he formed the Allied
Artists' Association with a view to bringing artists working in France to the
attention of British audiences, and in 1913 he curated an influential Post-Impressionist
and Futurist exhibition at the Doré Gallery in London’s Bond Street. The
Italian Futurists inspired the foundation of the British modernist movement, Vorticism.
Like the Futurists, the Vorticists advocated a break with the past and a modern
art that embraced the industrial, the urban, the mechanical and the abstract.
Yet even they did not eschew watercolour. Percy Wyndham Lewis, the movement’s
founder, and Edward Wadsworth, one of its more talented artists, produced
numerous works in what might have been taken as a rather old-fashioned medium
for such a forward-looking movement. At the same time, many other significant European Modernists –
Raoul Dufy, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele – were keen and adept watercolorists.
Percy Wyndham Lewis, Composition (1913), Tate Gllery, London
When Paul
Nash, who would become one of Britain’s leading figures of the avant-garde, arrived
at the Slade School of Art in 1910 he was happy to advance his career solely as
a watercolourist. His remarkable paintings undertaken as an Official War Artist
on the Ypres Salient in November and December 1917 were all on paper. According
to his wife, ‘Some of these water colours … actually had mud spattered upon
them from nearby exploding shells, which he at times worked in to help with the
colour of the drawing.’[7]
The grandiosity of the subject did not defy the medium: they were drawings made
in a frenzy of passion, images that would endure as among the most sublime, terrifying
and beautiful representations ever made of the First World War. They were also
very modern, for in the trenches Nash had embraced the techniques (if not the
tenets) of Vorticism. ‘I know of no works of art made by any artist working
there who saw the splendours and miseries of the greatest of all theatres of
war so grandly’, wrote John Rothenstein in 1955. ‘Out of infinite horror [Nash]
distilled a new poetry. The best of them will take their place among the finest
imaginative works of our time …’[8]
Of
course, the situation in which Nash worked demanded a portable medium that
could be used rapidly under fire: other Official War Artists, including William
Orpen and John Singer Sargent, worked in watercolour at the Front; they could
hardly have carried easels on to the battlefield. And in due course Nash realized
that the immensity of his subject – as well as the need for permanent,
large-scale records – almost demanded that he advance into oil painting; yet it
was only in early 1918, as he approached his twenty-ninth birthday, that he
completed his first work in the medium. As he told his friend Gordon Bottomley,
these first attempts had been ‘a complete experiment you know – a piece of
towering audacity I suppose as I had never painted before ...’[9]
Almost inevitably, one of his first and most famous oil paintings, We Are Making a New World (1918) was a
direct interpretation of an original drawing, whilst his epic canvas, The Menin Road, now in the Imperial War
Museum, was rendered first in watercolour.
By 1926 Frank
Rutter was suggesting in his book Evolution
in Modern Art that any frequenter of art exhibitions in London and Paris
over the past thirty years,
must have
observed that the greatest difference between the pictures of the past and of
the present is that there is less and less of the ‘foggy’ Impressionist type of
pictured, in which ‘atmosphere’ was the goal, and more and more of a clear,
clean-hewn type of picture in which the accent is laid on design. This
tendency, visible in pictures of all descriptions in Paris as in London, has
become most pronounced in the modern water-colour. From it has arisen a new
school of water-colour, which is perhaps the most rich in promise of any
contemporary British movement.[10]
Rutter considered one of the most
exciting manifestations of this new contemporary movement was the recent
establishment of the Modern English Watercolour Society. The founders, who
included Paul Nash and his brother John, Edward Wadsworth, Robert Bevan,
Charles Ginner, Lucien Pissarro, Ethelbert White and Randolph Schwabe, all felt
that their watercolours were not receiving a fair chance of being properly seen
at mixed shows. As both the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Institute
of Painters in Water Colours already offered exhibition opportunities
exclusively devoted to the medium, these artists clearly wished to distinguish
themselves from their fellow practitioners, perhaps most obviously in their use
of the word ‘Modern’. ‘The quality of the work shown justifies the formation of
the new society,’ The Burlington Magazine
observed in a brief notice of Nash and his colleagues’ first exhibition in May
1923, ‘and it is a great comfort to be able to study a moderate number of good
drawings by themselves.’[11]
Paul Nash, The Tench Pond in a Gale (1921-22), Tate Gallery, London
For the next five or six years the Modern English Watercolour Society held exhibitions, with catalogues prefaced by Rutter. The modern watercolour was also championed by organisations such as the Contemporary Art Society, which acquired Paul Nash’s watercolour Tench Pond in a Gale (1921-2) and presented it to the Tate Gallery in 1924. There it would be an important influence on young artists such as Nash’s pupil at the Royal College of Art, Eric Ravilious.[12] Ravilious would be one of the chief artists from the younger generation to carry forward the English school of watercolours, but other significant practitioners would include John Piper, Edward Burra, David Jones, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Graham Sutherland, John Tunnard, John Minton and Keith Vaughan.
As well
as exhibiting with the Modern English Watercolour Society, Nash contributed
works to various other group exhibitions devoted exclusively to watercolours,
and he held a number of solo shows in this medium. From 1918 until his death in
1946 he continued to paint both in watercolour and oils. He was actually
working on a watercolour on the day of his death, and his late works in the
medium reveal a more fluid handling and the possibilities of exciting new
avenues. Though his works
in oil are his most well known today, it would be wrong to suggest that they
eclipsed his watercolours in the eyes of contemporaries. In 1929 the prominent
critic R.H. Wilenski called Nash ‘the John Sell Cotman of to-day’ – putting him
on a par with another artist who painted in both media (though Cotman is more
famous today for his watercolours).[13]
A solo exhibition of Nash’s watercolours held in London in 1932 was
particularly successful: ‘Certainly Mr. Paul Nash is one of our most
interesting artists,’ The Times
observed, ‘particularly when … he works in water-colour.’[14]
An exhibition of sixty new watercolours three years later elicited the response
in the same newspaper that ‘water-colour seems more apt for his purposes than
oil, in which he sometimes gives the impression of subjecting the fatter medium
to the restrictions of fresco.’[15]
Nevertheless,
many admirers today of Nash’s most famous works such as Totes Meer or We Are Making a
New World may not be aware that he painted in watercolour at all. Though I
was sixteen when I first discovered his work, it was not until I was in my
thirties that I realized the full extent of his work as a watercolorist. Partly
this was (and remains) the fault of the public museums and galleries that hold
his work: put simply, with the exception of retrospectives and special
exhibitions, his works on paper are so rarely hung. Tate Britain’s 2013
rehanging of its collection in chronological order was well-received, but was
almost entirely devoted to oil paintings, as if works on paper did not play a
significant role in that history. The extensive recent rebuilding of the
Ashmolean Museum in Oxford did not incorporate a space devoted to its
extraordinary collection of works on paper; and despite the supposed
significance of the ‘English School of Watercolour’, there is still no permanent
venue where this school can be studied in its entirety.
This criticism
is not exclusive to the Tate or the Ashmolean, and attention might be drawn to
the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, or even the Victoria and Albert Museum. Of
course, this absence is partly due to the nature of the medium itself:
watercolours simply cannot be exposed to light for long periods of time, a
factor that has always (literally) diminished their public exposure, and which
has also played a significant part in their ongoing under appreciation. These collections
are, however, available to be seen:
all the aforementioned institutions have excellent Prints and Drawings Rooms
open to the public, offering the most intimate opportunity to view almost any
of their works at first hand.
Yet by removing
their works on paper to the private sphere, the average visitor or tourist is
deprived of easily seeing these often-extraordinary collections, and may spend
a lifetime unaware of the place or significance of the watercolour drawing in
the history of art. This limitation could be alleviated by dedicated exhibition
spaces with a rotating display taken from the permanent collection. To the best
of my knowledge, the only British institutions offering such spaces are the
British Museum and Tate Britain (which has rooms devoted to works on paper by
Turner and Blake, as well as the recent welcome addition of a large space
devoted to displaying material from their archive collection). Perversely,
given that there are no issues of conservation or additional cost, the more
general art historical publications tend to reproduce the (more famous) oil
works at the expense of works on paper, thus perpetuating the art historical
imbalance. A look at any general book on Cézanne will confirm this.
When Paul
Nash neared the end of his life and was struggling to complete his
autobiography, it was to his earliest works on paper that he returned. ‘When I
came to look into the early drawings I lived again that wonderful hour,’ he
told Gordon Bottomley. ‘I could feel myself making those drawings – in some
ways the best I ever did to this day. And because of this I suddenly saw the
way to finish my ‘life’ … I feel I could make a complete thing by taking it up
to 1914 – just up to the war. After that it was another life, another world.’[16]
In examining the career of an artist like Paul Nash, or those of his colleagues
in the Modern English Watercolour Society, or their precursors such as Van Gogh
and Cézanne, let us not overlook the extent to which they worked with
water-based media as well as oil.
[1] Vincent Van Gogh, Letter
256, to Anthon van Rappard, The Hague, 13 August 1882, in Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker (The Van Gogh
Museum, 2009), at www.vangoghletters.org.
[2] The Daily Telegraph, 15 February 2011.
[3] P.A., ‘The Failure of our
Water-colour Tradition,’ The Burlington
Magazine, vol. 7, no. 26, May 1905, 112-15.
[4] Vincent Van Gogh, Letter
192, to Theo Van Gogh, The Hague, about 18 December 1881,
www.vangoghletters.org.
[5] Robert Delaunay, The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert
and Sonia Delaunay, edited by Arthur A. Cohen (New York, 1968), 20.
[6] Frank Rutter, Evolution in Modern Art: A Study of Modern Painting,
1870—1925 (London: George G. Harrap, 1926), 146.
[7] Margaret Nash, ‘Memoirs
of Paul Nash, 1913-1946’, unpublished MS, 1951, Tate Gallery Archive, London,
TGA 769.2.6.
(1951), f. 16-17.
[8] John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters, Sickert to Moore
(London: Eyre and Spotiswood, 1957), 347-8.
[9] Paul Nash to Gordon
Bottomley, 16 July 1918, in Claude Colleer Abbott and Anthony Bertram (eds.), Poet & Painter. Being the Correspondence
Between Gordon Bottomley and Paul Nash, 1910–1946 (London: Oxford University
Press, 1955), 98
[10] Frank Rutter, Evolution in Modern Art: A Study of Modern
Painting, 1870—1925 (London: George G. Harrap, 1926), 145.
[11] The Burlington Magazine, vol. 42, no 242, May 1923, 261.
[12] Alan Power, Eric Ravilious: Imagined Realities
(London: Imperial War Museum, 2004), 37.
[13] The Observer, 13 October 1929.
[14] The Times, 4 November 1932
[15] The Times, 15 April 1935.
[16] Paul Nash to Gordon
Bottomley, Abbott and Bertram (1955), 219.
