David Boyd Haycock - Essays and reviews
Eric Ravilious: Imagined Realities.
‘
Eric Ravilious: Imagined Realities: A Centenary Exhibition.’ Imperial
War Museum, London, 23 October 2003—25 January 2004.
The Times Literary Supplement, December 2003.
The year 1903 was a prodigal one for British art: talented painters born in
that year included Edward Bawden, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, and Eric Ravilious.
As, predominantly, a watercolourist, and with an artistic career brought tragically
short in an air crash somewhere over Iceland in 1942, Ravilious’s name
is perhaps the least familiar. Yet in those short forty years Ravilious — who,
despite his foreign-sounding name was English through-and-through — produced
some of the finest paintings of the century. He was, as this exhibition sets
out to show, a talented and worthy successor to the great tradition of British
watercolourists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Ravilious was, like William Blake and Samuel Palmer before him, a visionary.
Appropriately enough, he grew up at Eastbourne on the eastern tip of the South
Downs, not so far from Felpham where Blake had lived and worked for a while.
He too had the visionary’s character of the charismatic outsider: as a
fellow student later recalled, he possessed an ‘extraordinary, almost Pan-like
charm’, yet ‘always seemed to be slightly somewhere else, as if he
lived a private life which did not completely coincide with material existence.’ To
a critic writing in 1939, Ravilious’s diaphanous painting technique appeared ‘as
something magic, almost mystic, distilled out of the ordinary everyday.’
Via Paul Nash, his sometime tutor at the Royal College of Art in the mid 1920s,
Ravilious was also linked directly with the previous generation of English painters
who had made their names as artists in the Great War, and who shared a similar
interest in Blake and Palmer. As a young student Nash had read Blake, ‘persuading’ himself
that he too was capable of ‘seeing visions’. Nash was a contemporary
and fellow-student at the Slade with Stanley Spencer, another twentieth-century
visionary. Spencer was described by Ottoline Morrell in 1914 as being ‘more
like Blake than anyone I knew’, and though the influence of Nash on Ravilious’s
work has often been made, there is surely something of Spencer to be seen here
too: from his suburban works with their Spencerish views downwards from attic
windows, to a fascination with the clutter and abandoned junk of everyday life,
to a similar vision of the English countryside. Ravilious’s Downs in
Winter (1934) and Spencer’s lost Landscape with Cultivator (1920) share more in
common than just the foregrounding of a seemingly abandoned agricultural implement.
Yet Ravilious took his love of the English landscape and projected it outwards,
unlike the inward-looking, overtly spiritual Spencer. As Alan Powers rightly
claims, Ravilious’s inspirational drawings of southern England’s
chalk figures — the Long Man of Wilmington, the Uffington and Westbury
white horses, the Cerne Abbas giant, painted in the late 1930s as the world once
more approached all-out war — are eloquent ‘symbols of Englishness
and defiance, as well as an evocation of the man-made in a natural setting.’ This
is an English pastoral at its most full-blooded.
Yet unlike either Nash or Spencer, who were both self-taught oil painters, Ravilious
could never master this tricky medium. ‘I wish there were something between
oil and watercolour other than tempera’, he lamented in 1942. If any of
his efforts at oil do survive, it is a shame they are not included here. It would
be interesting to see how Ravilious handled and interpreted his world in oils.
His adventures into alternative art forms, in particular his wood cuts and delicate
designs for Wedgwood china exhibited here, are particularly successful — much
more so than similar attempts by Nash. It seems possible he was being too harsh
on himself in his failure to persist.
A separate room in this centenary exhibition contains further paintings by Ravilious
from World War Two, alongside works by his 1903 contemporaries and fellow War
Artists Bawden, Piper, Sutherland, Richard Eurich, Thomas Hennel, Raymond McGrath,
and Ceri Richards. Of these, Eurich and Sutherland’s are the most exciting,
whilst Bawden’s water-colours from Iraq in 1943 and 1944 hold the most
contemporary interest. Bawden, Piper, and Ravilious were friends, but it is Sutherland’s
work which can be most interestingly compared with Ravilious. Sutherland, too,
had started his artistic life as a keen observer of the English pastoral, before
responding to the contemporary influences of abstraction and Surrealism. His
war works appear at first the antithesis of Ravilious’s apparent neatness:
they are dirty, scrubby, dangerous. Yet looked at close-up, Ravilious’s
treatment of water-colour is actually quite rough; it is only standing back ten
feet or so that the elements of his design and treatment merge, and the paintings
spring to life.
It is thus appropriate that in his catalogue introduction Powers offers a corrective
to the view that Ravilious was not, in his own way, also modern. There is definitely
a Surrealist element to his empty interiors of the late 1930s and early 1940s,
a clear sense of absence and anxiety. And Ship’s Screw on a Railway Track(1940) is strongly reminiscent of the seaside Surrealism of Tristram Hillier
who, unlike Ravilious, joined Nash’s avant-garde group, Unit One. Yet it
is interesting to note amongst letters and memorabilia included in the exhibition
an invoice of 1934 from Ravilious’s gallery, Zwemmer: this notes the deduction
from sales of his work the cost of a subscription to the French Surrealist magazine
Minotaure. Even if he was not as responsive to modern issues in politics as some
of his friends wished him to be, it is quite apparent Ravilious was intellectually
open to modern movements in art.
Even in time of war there remains a simple pleasure to Ravilious’s watercolours;
though certainly highly stylised, his works are uncomplicated, unpretentious.
Even in the potentially most violent of them, HMS Ark Royal in Action (1940)
or Firing a 9.2 Gun (1941), there is an innocence and naiveté. There is
an absence of threat, or danger — or death, even. As with Nash’s
oil paintings of the First War, it is Nature, the landscape in which these man-made
events are happening, that is the most scarred, the most traumatised. Like the
chalk figures, it is Man who is implanting his will upon the natural world.
Ravilious feared what might happen to him as an artist as he grew old. His work
was certainly changing and growing in his response to the war: he was thrilled
at the opportunity of travelling to Iceland to paint its bleak landscape, and
the direction it might take him in. This potential future, however, remains a
mystery, an imagined reality as perplexing as the loss of the RAF plane which
on 2 September 1942 vanished in bad weather with Ravilious on board.
©
David Boyd Haycock.