British Council − UK at the Venice Biennale

He didn’t receive an official commission in either War, but Edward Wadsworth was a real War Artist, overseeing the painting of dazzle camouflage onto battleships when he was invalided home in 1915.

Wyndham Lewis recalled that 'service in the Marine Reserve in World War I left him with a rolling gait, a becoming tan, and an unrivalled collection of salty limericks'. The camouflage job, which Wadsworth recorded in Dazzle-Ships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919), brought together his main themes: industrial machinery, graphic technique, and the sea. The posthumous exhibition in the British Pavilion in 1952 showed them develop from Wood Engravings (1914-18), Drawings of the Black Country (1919), a 1949 tapestry, to a series of paintings in the medium he came to favour: egg tempera.

In the catalogue for a 1982 retrospective, Mark Glazebrook argued 'Wadsworth is worth considering during the 1920s as both as a leading ‘traditional’ and as a leading ‘advanced’ or ‘progressive’ artist.' The Biennale works in woodcutting and tempera are both good examples of Wadsworth’s contradictory mix of startlingly new effects and ancient techniques.

The Wood Engravings link him to Vorticism, the pre-WWI artistic and literary movement started by Lewis; a writer, painter, and on-off friend of Wadsworth and his wife, Fanny. The first issue of the movement’s magazine, Blast (1914), which set out 'to be an avenue for all those vivid and violent ideas that could not reach the public in any other way', featured five angular, abstract Wadsworth illustrations of industry – Newcastle –, and nature – March –, and a review of Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

Wadsworth had translated the book whilst improving his German in Munich; the trip which had made his mind up to become an artist. This was a disappointment to his family, who had sent him to Godby’s School in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, and Fettes in Scotland, with a view to bringing him into E. Wadsworth & Sons. As well as making him rich enough to develop at his own pace when his father died in 1921, the family worsted-spinning business in Cleckheaton gave him slightly more of an understanding of industry than most Vorticists, and led John Rothenstein to call him 'a true poet of the age of machines.'

Bradford: A View of A Town (1914) shows industrial urbanisation from above, abstracting it to look like a 'Rubik’s Cube', according to Andrew Graham-Dixon, with pieces which 'can be rearranged at will because it is not, in fact, a place, but an idea.' 'Delight, in fact, is the principle emotion running through Wadsworth’s Vorticist work', according to Richard Cork, but his was an unusual perspective on the heyday of British industry; mill-owning families like the Wadsworths lived at the tops of hills to avoid the factory smog, and the view is probably from a drive in one of the sports cars that were his only regular experience of machinery.

Blast set Vorticism firmly in the here-and-now, and in Industrial, northern Europe, specifically England:

The future is distant, like the past, and therefore sentimental.

[…]

The Modern World is due almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius, - it’s [sic.] appearance and its spirit.

Wadsworth’s woodcuts – quickly and endlessly reproducible with machines, and in an Anglo-Saxon tradition of printmaking – were an ideal choice of illustration, and followed through into Drawings of the Black Country (1919). The Drawings were described in the Biennale catalogue as 'stark scenes, carved and moulded by machinery', and their success led directly to Wadsworth’s first one-man show at London’s Leicester Galleries in 1920.

The poet Ezra Pound, another contributor to Blast, was convinced that if Lewis 'had not been a Vorticist painter he would have been a Vorticist something else' whereas 'on the other hand', if 'Mr. Wadsworth had not been a Vorticist painter he would have been some other kind of painter.' He took what he wanted from the movement, and left what he didn’t, though his work on ship camouflage – William Feaver points out the RMS Aquitania was 'the largest painting ever' – took machine art to its logical conclusion, whilst the other Vorticists were renouncing it in disgust at WWI’s mechanised killing.

Wadsworth studied at Bradford School of Art and the Slade School, London, and in 1913, he worked with Slade lecturer Roger Fry on restoring fifteenth-century paintings by Andrea Mantegna at Hampton Court. Here, Fry, who also employed Wadsworth in his Omega design workshop, introduced him to egg-tempera, a method which basically involves binding paint pigments together with egg yolk rather than the more usual oil. As this makes manipulating the paint once it's on the canvas fairly dangerous, it forces the painter to 'think six times and draw once', according to S. Kennedy North. This suited Wadsworth's technical sense perfectly, and is responsible for the crisp, dreamlike finish of the paintings displayed at the Biennale.

Continental, old-fashioned, and proof Wadsworth's main commitment was to painting rather than the Blast manifesto, he developed his interest in tempera travelling in Europe in the 1920s. During this time he was regularly exchanging letters on technique with Giorgio de Chirico, an Italian painter who would exhibit at the Biennale in the 30s, and, so his wife told Rothenstein, 'was always reading' Cennino Cennini's Trattato della Pittura, a Renaissance manual on technique republished in 1920.

In the early thirties, Wadsworth joined collectives of abstractive painters at home and abroad; the continental Abstraction-Création, and Paul Nash's British Unit One. But, in much the way his Venice co-exhibitor Graham Sutherland thought that human faces were abstract enough without a painter's tampering, he'd decided by 1934 to return to representing what Blast called 'the vast planetary abstraction of the OCEAN'.

Jeremy Lewison suggests the use of tempera, 'historically associated with the figure and the object', pushed Wadsworth in this direction, and he now returned to paintings like the Biennale Starfish and Shells (1949); extremely, almost worryingly-still still lifes of seaside objects. Like the series of harbour scenes he was painting 1923-9 and 1934-44, the paintings hark back to Vorticism, both in geometric precision, and in revisiting Blast's belief 'The English Character is based on the Sea':

BLESS ALL PORTS.

PORTS, RESTLESS MACHINES of                scooped out basins
 
[…]
lighthouses, blazing
through the frosty
starlight, cutting the
storm like a cake […]

Wadsworth named works after phrases from the Shipping Broadcast, and port seascapes like Dunkerque (1924), also in the British pavilion in 1952, were inspired by Turner's Harbours of England. According to Rothenstein, they showed him 'as a composer of exceptional resource and an impeccable craftsman in an academic style of commanding elegance.' Partially in recognition of this side of his work, he was nominated as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1944.

To the surprise of his old radical comrades, he accepted; he had never exhibited at the Academy Summer Show, although his woodcuts of dazzle-camouflaged ships had featured in 1919 exhibition, and been described by the Evening Standard had as 'by far the best things' there. As the article continued, they were an 'amusing' example of 'how to destroy form instead of emphasising it', and also of the confident ability to contradict himself shown at the Biennale.

Tom Overton, 2009.

Sources

Jill Dunkerton, 'Tempera', Grove Art Online: Oxford Art Online, accessed 11th December, 2008.

William Feaver, 'Angry old man of the sea', The Observer, 25th March 1990.

Mark Glazebrook, 'Wadsworth, Edward Alexander (1889–1949)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford, OUP: 2004), online edn, May 2006, accessed 11th December 2008.

Mark Glazebrook, 'Introduction', in Edward Wadsworth: 1889-1949: Paintings from the 1920s, exh. cat., (London: Mayor Gallery, 1982).

Andrew Graham-Dixon, 'Out of the Vortex', The Independent, 20th March 1990.

Philip Hendy, 'Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949)', in The British Pavilion: Exhibition of works by Sutherland, Wadsworth et. al. [exh. cat.] (London: British Council, 1952).

Wyndham Lewis, ed., BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex, No.1, 20th June 1914 (repr. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1981).

Jeremy Lewison, ed., A Genius of Industrial England: Edward Wadsworth 1889-1949 (Hatfield, Herts.: Arkwright Arts Trust and Bradford Art Galleries and Museums, 1990).

S. Kennedy North, Edward Wadsworth, exh. cat., (London: Leicester Galleries, 1923).

Barbara Wadsworth, Edward Wadsworth: A Painter's Life (Salisbury: Michael Russell, 1989).