Rocks and Flesh
An argument for British Drawing, selected by Peter Fuller
First published by Norwich School of Art Gallery, 1985. The exhibition toured from the Norwich School of Art Gallery to The Winchester Gallery, The Newcastle Polytechnic Gallery and the Royal Albert memorial Museum in Exeter.
The Road to ‘Rocks and Flesh’
It is now almost a year since Lynda Morris came over to our cottage in Stowlangtoft, Suffolk, and invited me to make an exhibition for the Norwich School of Art Gallery, to coincide with this year’s Norwich Triennial Festival. Lynda gave me virtually carte blanche to select any show I wished within the physical and financial limitations of the Gallery. For some time, I had been thinking about the possibility of putting together an exhibition of British drawing, and so I had no hesitation about accepting her offer.
The original idea I had for the exhibition was rather different from the way it has in fact worked out. At first, I felt I wanted to choose five good drawings by each of the twelve different artists, and to write a short essay on each work indicating its qualities. But as I looked – literally with an eye to my exhibition – I found I was following certain themes, but without being entirely sure about why I was doing so. I also came to feel I wanted the individual drawings just to stand, without elaborate verbal justifications.
As it has ended up, ‘Rocks and Flesh’ is not an historical exhibition: by this, I mean I have self-evidently not attempted to trace the history of British drawing from Ruskin to the present day, but nor is it, strictly speaking, a ‘thematic’ exhibition- at least, not of the ‘Hands’ or ‘Horses’ variety which has suddenly become so popular in London’s Cork Street. I have left out innumerable drawings which my suggestive title might bring to mind, and I have also included others which, at first sight, might seem to have only a loose or tenuous connection with the chosen theme. What sort of exhibition, then, is ‘Rocks and Flesh’?
It remains, first and foremost, an exercise of discriminatory taste. I have held true to my original intention to select only drawings I believe to be of exceptional quality. I hope they will be enjoyed: good drawing is hardly plentiful. But my intentions in putting together this exhibition were also pedagogic and instructional. For I do not regard taste as a faculty whose responses are necessarily arbitrary: this is, matters of whim, or merely personal preference. The exertion of taste always involves the affirmation of certain values and the implied or explicit exclusion of others. Ruskin once observed that no statement of his had been more earnestly or more often controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. But, he insisted, ‘The first, and last, and closest trial question to ask any living creature is ‘What do you like?’ tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are.’ These are all drawings which I like.
Of course, I have deliberately excluded various categories of tendentious and functional drawing – e.g. cartoons, caricatures, architectural drawings, and all manner of illustrational and diagrammatic material. Such things can also be either well or badly done: but this is an exhibition about drawing as an imaginative, and disinterested, aesthetic activity.
A drawing is not so much the reproduction of the image of something seen, as a record of something made. Nonetheless, all the drawings I have chosen have a strong relationship to the pursuit of truthful perception – or, at least, to the memory system which functions as the storehouse of past perceptions. I wanted the whole show to have a coherence, to amount to something more than the sum of its marvellous parts. As I write, of course, I have not seen all the works on the walls together, but I am confident nonetheless. I found that I was beginning to organise the exhibition around images of heads, mothers and children, couples, babies, stones, mountains, the nude female figure, quarries, churches, cathedrals, townscapes, and somewhat less than heroic men. But not one of these drawings aspires to being a simple record of appearances. All the images I have chosen celebrate the power of the human imagination, that is, our capacity to see and to represent objects, people, and the world other than the way they are, or appear to be.
I believe that all good drawing is – to use a word of the psychoanalyst, D. W. Winnicott’s, ‘transitional’. I will explain this more fully. Suffice to say that, at its best, imaginative drawing involves a mingling of subjective and objective experience in a way which transcends mere fantasy and the factual evidences of immediate perception, alike. The good draughtsman creates upon the flat support an illusion of a third area of experiencing – unattainable through say dreaming or photography – to which the word ‘revelation’ can legitimately be applied.
Inevitably, the formation of this exhibition has been subject to predictable vicissitudes and disappointments. The most significant of these was undoubtedly the fact that, after a prolonged exchange of letters, the Henry Moore Foundation finally felt unable to lend us a group of late drawings by Henry Moore. Moore’s drawings of the last few years had been one of my major sources of inspiration when I conceived of this exhibition. I particularly wanted to see what his great studies, Man drawing rock formation, 1982, and his Two figures looking at rocks No. 1, 1982, would have looked like beside Ruskin’s dazzlingly imaginative drawings of rocks and stones. I hope that, one day, this juxtaposition will be made. The absence of any work by Samuel Palmer is another significant omission, but we simply did not have the resources to gather together everything I wanted. Some sacrifices had to be made – and sadly, Palmer became one of them. Fortunately, certain Palmers were recently hung close to some of the English, 20th century, Neo-Romantic landscapes which, in part at least, were inspired by them in Fischer Fine art’s pioneering exhibition, The British Neo-Romantics.
Drawing the line somewhere
The appreciation of drawing can be obstructed by an ‘objective’ fallacy on the one hand, and a ‘subjective’ fallacy on the other. According to the ‘objective’ fallacy, learning to draw is nothing more than acquiring a technique to record what you see. The ‘objectivist’ tends to believe that there is a technique capable of capturing appearances, and that the more thoroughly one aspires to and masters that technique the ‘better’ the drawing will be. There are both popular and professional versions of the fallacy; the latter is often associated with a particular strand of recent teaching at the Slade, which emphasises measurement, plumblines and rules of thumb.
One objection to this view is that drawing is not seeing: it is not even a way of seeing. A drawing consists of the traces left by a tool drawn across a surface with the intention of making a representation or an abstract pattern. Alternatively, drawing can be thought of as that element of a two-dimensional work of art which functions independently of colour. But when we look at nature, it does not present itself to our eyes as static lines: rather the world renders itself visible as areas of colour.
‘Everything that you can see in the world around you,’ Ruskin once wrote, ‘presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded.’ We may like to think that lines and outlines are naturally given, and that all the draughtsman has to do is to read and record them; in fact, however, they are concepts or constructs, which no amount of looking can reveal. A drawing is always created.
The ‘subjective’ fallacy, however, has its roots and history in an older, religious conception of drawing. Drawing began to be discussed and appreciated for its own sake (rather than as a sketch or preparation for some other artistic activity) in the 14th century. There was considerable consensus around the view, expressed by Giorgio Vasari himself that drawing originated in the intellect of the artist. In the 17th century, Federico Zuccari characteristically argued that that which is to be revealed through art must first be present in the mind of the artist. For Zuccari, disegno – that is drawing or design – was synonymous with the term ‘idea’. But Zuccari differentiated between disegno interno and disegno externo – the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ design.
The disegno interno, ‘inner design’ or idea, preceded the act of creation and could, or so Zuccari thought, only be engendered in a man’s mind by God. This imaginative ‘inner design’ was, if you will, a spark of divine, creative activity, manifesting itself though a human being. The s was, for Zuccari, the physical rendering of this divinely inspired intuition, in the world: he conceived of the ‘outer’ design as the visible shape of the structured idea, or its actual artistic representation, through pencil, chalk, or whatever, on a support. And so, Zuccari saw drawing as a human corollary of divine creative activity:
‘Since the human intellect, by virtue of its participation in God’s ideational ability and its similarity to the divine mind as such, can produce in itself the forme spirituali of all created things and transform the forme to matter, there exists, as if by divine predestination, a necessary coincidence between man’s procedures in producing a work of art and nature’s procedures in producing reality – a predestination which permits the artist to be certain of an objective correspondence between his products and those of nature.’
It is true that, like the modern ‘objectivist’, Zuccari ended up with the claim that the artist should be certain of ‘an objective correspondence between his products and those of nature’, but the apparent relationship between drawn forms, and those of nature, is unrelated, in his view, to the act of visual perception. Rather, he accounts for it in terms of the artist’s ability to, as it were; reproduce something of divine creativity in his work. And if we remove God, or the divine, from this account, we tend to end up with a completely ‘subjective’ description of drawing which owes nothing to its relationship to the world of things seen. Roger Fry once quoted approvingly the words of a small child who, when asked how she produced her drawings, said, ‘I think, and then I draw a line round my think.’ Paul Klee called drawing, ‘Taking a walk with a line’. Philip Rawson has attempted a more sophisticated description of the modern ‘subjectivist’ position at the beginning of his intriguing book, Drawing:
‘In a sense one can say that drawing is the most fundamentally spiritual – i.e. completely subjective – of all visual artistic activities. Nature presents our eyes with coloured surfaces to which painted areas of pigment may correspond, and with inflected surfaces to which sculptural surfaces may correspond. But nowhere does it present our eyes with the lines and the relationships between lines which are the raw material of drawing. For a drawing’s basic ingredients are stokes or marks which have a symbolic relationship with experience, not a direct, overall similarity with anything real. And the relationships between marks, which embody the main meaning of a drawing, can only be read into the marks by the spectator, so as to create their own mode of truth.’
Although the ‘subjectivist’ view stresses important aspects of drawing which the ‘objectivist’ cannot account for, I believe that it, too, involves us only in partial truths. In fact, Philip Rawson himself seems to recognise this when he, quite rightly, attacks that ‘modern academic’ type of drawing which never has the slightest suggestion of three dimensions. He goes on to spell out the ‘horrid implication’ (in which he clearly delights) that this illusion of a third dimension, so necessary to good drawing, can only be produced by the appearance in the drawing of ‘notional bodies of some sort.’ ‘Notional bodies’? IT seems we have moved away from the idea of the marks creating ‘their own mode of truth’, towards some concept, however remote, of their resemblance to natural forms, or at least physical forms in three dimensional space. And indeed, drawings which contained no illusions of space, nor of bodies, could hardly be expected to retain our interest for long.
Clearly both the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ accounts of drawing are inadequate. But in Britain there has long existed a tradition first of landscape, and later of figure, drawing which makes manifest the nature of a ‘third position’, upon which, I believe, the theory and practice of good drawing depends.
The Naked Shingles of the world
Everyone knows Ruskin’s famous advice to those who want to learn to draw: ‘go to Nature in all singleness of heart,’ he advised, ‘and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.’ Now, at first sight, this may sound like an extreme version of the ‘objective’ fallacy: and yet if we look at the context of Ruskin’s advice, and indeed at his drawings themselves we quickly realise that this is not the case.
In his advocacy of ‘simple bona fide imitation of nature’, Ruskin was concerned explicitly with the training of young artists for ‘the scarlet and the gold’ of the imaginative feats of their later years. The contrast between pedagogic exercises and fully realised imaginative work is illustrated in this exhibition by the difference between Ruskin’s instructional drawing (Cat. No. 30) and his great and justly well-known studies, Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas, (Cat. No 36) of 1853, and In the Pass of Killiecrankie, of 1857 (Cat. No. 38). Moreover, Ruskin’s ‘naturalism’ was in no sense topographic, or quasi-photographic: rather it was profoundly spiritual. He believed that the study of natural forms led men and women towards the highest of all revealed truths: in his view, nature was the visible handiwork of God.
In his early writing, Ruskin took these views absolutely literally: he believed that through the study of nature one came to see how God had made things. And God revealed himself in small things, as much as in big: ‘the Divine mind,’ Ruskin insisted, in the first volume of Modern Painters, ‘is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone, as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven, and settling the foundation of the earth.’
In holding such beliefs, of course, Ruskin was not alone. The new landscape aesthetic which emerged in England in the late 18th century depended upon a natural theology of this kind, As Kenneth Clark once pointed out, even such an apparently empirical painter as John Constable was motivated by the belief that since nature was the clearest revelation of God’s will, the painting of landscape, conceived in a spirit of humble truth, could be a means of conveying moral and religious ideas. Ruskin tried to interpret all of Turner’s work in this sort of way. He even went so far as to describe Turner as, ‘sent as a prophet of God to reveal to men the mysteries of His universe.’ Ruskin argued that Nature had a body and a soul like man; ‘but her soul is the Deity’. Turner’s great achievement was that through his exacting attention to the details of natural form – the ‘body’ of nature – he had rendered visible its soul.
In 1850 William Dyce, an Academician and friend encouraged a reluctant Ruskin to look at John Everett Millais’s work. Ruskin soon began to argue that, like turner, the pre-Raphaelite painters were taking truth to nature to such lengths that they revealed God.
In deriving his aesthetics from natural theology (that is teaching about God based on knowledge of nature), Ruskin was very much at one with the general intellectual climate of the first half of the 19th century. He had been deeply involved in the Geological Society, and was personally acquainted with eminent geologists like William Buckland of Oxford and Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge, whose theories though widely divergent) assumed that nature was the principal source of divine revelation. They thought that the stones provided direct evidence of God’s activity, just as we believe that in studying the material marks left on a piece of paper, or a canvas, we are dealing with evidence which leads us back directly to the aesthetic and spiritual activity, the imagination, of an artist.
But what if a stone was just a stone? The 1850s, the decade which saw the rise and fall of Pre-Raphaelitism, was also Ruskin’s greatest period as both a teacher of drawing, at the Working Men’s College, and, I believe, as a draughtsman himself. But this was a time of spreading doubts about God’s relationship to his world, doubts which occasionally extended to questioning his very existence. The explanations of the older generation of geologists, though still, in a sense, the accepted orthodoxy, were coming to sound increasingly in adequate. With the advantage of hindsight, it is possible for us to see that every advance of knowledge emphasised that the earth bore evidence of slow developmental processes rather than of a sudden, single, creative art. The attempts made to accommodate the new evidence to the old biblical, creationist account were often ingenious, but many retreated fearfully into the ever more emphatic affirmation of old dogmas.
In 1856, Ruskin restated his view that the earth had been literally ‘sculptured’ by the hand of God. ‘We should try to follow the finger of God,’ he wrote, ‘as it engraved upon the stone tables of the earth the letters and the law of its everlasting form; as, gulf by gulf, the channels of the deep were ploughed; and cape by cape, the lines were traced, with Divine foreknowledge, of the shores that were to limit the nations; and, chain by chain, the mountain walls were lengthened forth, and their foundations fastened for ever.’ This is heavy stuff, indeed: not even Buckland and Sedgwick had clung as closely to the scriptures as that. And yet we know from Ruskin’s journals and correspondence that his doubting ran as deep as his mountain of dogma rose high. For struggle as he might to follow the earth-sculpturing finger of God in nature, it became harder and harder for him to do so. ‘Hammers!’ he complained in a letter to a friend in 1857, ‘I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the bible verses.’
Ruskin’s great rock drawings of the 1850s are, I believe, animated by just this mixture of rock-hard conviction and dissolving doubt. Ruskin wants to see the spirit in the mass, to perceive the stones as an avenue to revelation of the divine, but the ever increasing scrutiny which he bestows on them, with this intention, in fact ends up leading him towards their blank tacticity.
In 1857, Ruskin published his little book, The Elements of Drawing, in which he wrote:
‘Go out into your garden, or into the road, and pick up the first round or oval stone you can find, not very white, not very dark; and the smoother it is the better, only it must not shine. Draw your table near the window, and put the stone…on a piece of not very white paper, on the table in front of you. Sit so that the light may come from your left, else the shadow of the pencil point interferes with your sight of your work. You must not let the sun fall on the stone, but only ordinary light: therefore choose a window which the sun does not come in at. If you can shut the shutters of the other windows in the room it will be all the better; but this is not of much consequence.
Now if you can draw that stone, you can draw anything; I mean, anything that is drawable. Many things (sea foam for instance) cannot be drawn at all, only the idea of them more or less suggested; but if you can draw the stone rightly, everything within reach of art is also within yours.’
Now Ruskin has been often praised for the ‘practical’ tone of The Elements, for his refusal to engage in his customary preaching, and it must be said that here, more than anywhere, he comes close to naturalism, to the ‘objective’ fallacy. For when Ruskin wrote The Elements, his faith was ebbing away: the following year he was to undergo his famous ‘unconversion’, or loss of belief, in Turin – and, temporarily at least, to change from a ‘spiritual’ to a sensualist aesthetics.
Predictably, at this time Ruskin found that he could no longer draw as he once had done: he even began to sympathise with his father’s indifference to mountains. Nor, of course, was Ruskin’s case an isolated one. About the same time, Palmer’s once visionary art became inert, topographic and lifeless. Similarly, in 1854, Holman Hunt, Ruskin’s most comprehending disciple among painters, went against all advice to the Holy Land – in the belief that there, if anywhere, he would find God in nature. Instead, he ended up beside the Dead Sea, ‘black, full of asphalt scum’. No one, he commented, ‘can stand and say it is not accursed of God.’ In place of evidences of his Redeemer, he encountered only a mangy goat, which dropped dead on him.
The greatest of all works produced in this twilight of an aesthetic based on natural theology was William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay: A Recollection of October 5th, 1858. Dyce’s great landscape shows a group of women and children hunting for fossils in an ominous landscape. A comet, symbol of impending disaster, passes across the grey, lowering sky, unnoticed. Whatever Dyce may have intended to convey through his isolated figures, we know, for certain, that they are not tracing the finger-marks of God.
Before Dyce had completed his painting, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species had been published. The aesthetic Ruskin had proposed to explain the greatness of Turner, and upon which Pre-Raphaelitism, and his own drawing, had been based was now effectively in ruins. It became harder and harder to believe that meticulous attention to natural form would reveal the activity of the Great Artificer. If nature was the product of chance, and not God’s handiwork, it seemed to be deprived of its exemplary beauty. Once the sea of faith had withdrawn, all men and women, including artists, came to feel they were standing on the naked shingles of the world where a stone is a stone is a stone. Hence-forth, there seemed to be something quite arbitrary about the attempt to make truthful depictions of the appearances of given chunks of matter.
Beyond the darkling plain
All this is not, in my view, some strange and remote affair of relevance only to the middle of the last century. The ‘discovery’ that the natural world was unrelated to divine creative activity had the most profound effects on man’s ethical and aesthetic life. The outside world, no longer seen as a garden made by God for man, came to be regarded as fit only for ‘exploitation’. The artist tended to look upon it as something increasingly intractable, alien and other. ‘Naturalism’ became reduced to the attempt to reproduce appearances, to a process like photography.
Drawing declined in the later 19th century into a lifeless academic practice drained of even the aspiration to spiritual content, and largely dependent on delineation through outline. Modernism pursued the strange gods of mechanism, abstraction, and subjectivism. But for the last ninety years or so drawing in this country has been fostered by a diverse, and, for the most part, unacknowledged tradition of drawing masters and practitioners who have tried to find ways, in this secular and technologically blinkered society, of re-uniting vision and visionary imagination. This exhibition celebrates some of them.
One man responsible for the revival of drawing was the improbable figure of Henry Tonks, who taught at the Slade School from 1892 until 1930 (a major exhibition ‘Henry Tonks and the “Art of Pure Drawing”’ was held here at Norwich School of Art Gallery earlier this year). Tonks believed that drawing should be both ‘poetic’ and objective – but that only the latter could be taught. Tonks professed a great admiration for Ruskin, but he had been a surgeon. His system of teaching drawing was rooted in the human figure, which Ruskin effectively ignored. Certainly the ‘Elementary Propositions in Drawing and Painting’, which Tonks signed together with George Clausen, have a pedestrian feel today. Some of Tonks’s propositions – especially the emphasis upon horizontal and vertical lines as a means of establishing an object’s position in space – were to be turned into mere mannerisms by later Slade practitioners, like Patrick George and Euan Uglow. Tonks’s own drawings show little capacity for imaginative transformation. And yet there can be no doubt that he was an inspiring teacher whose passionate belief in draughtsmanship fired several generations of students: among those included in this exhibition are David Bomberg, Bernard Meninsky, and Roger Hilton.
Bomberg was to emerge as a far greater figure in the revival of drawing than his master. Bomberg was involved in the Vorticist movement at the beginning of this century, but he became, in effect, a pioneer post-modernist who saw that the only possible redemption of art would come about through renewed imaginative contact with the world of natural form. Although he believed drawing always began in immediate perception, he also thought that, in itself, the eye was a ‘stupid’ organ. He emphasised the role of intuition in drawing which he once described as ‘the representation of form. Not the representation of appearance of Form, but more the representation of our feelings about form.’ But he was no subjective expressionist: rather, he argued that the way through to the depiction of feeling about form was through a restless and ceaseless search for the ‘spirit in the mass’. For Bomberg. As for Ruskin, his way of drawing was inseparable from far wider values than the merely optical. As Roy Oxlade, one of Bomberg’s pupils has put it:
‘Bomberg believed that…his own approach to drawing, involving an assessment of form leading through synthesis to what he called ‘the spirit in the mass’ was the answer to the problems of drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture and the total environment…it also became increasingly clear to him that the self-destructive impulses latent in materialistic and sophisticated societies could be avoided only by reappraising man’s relationship with nature. Indeed, Bomberg’s teaching concentrated on what he saw as an urgent collective need to reassess that relationship.’
Drawing, for Bomberg, was the practical expression of this new ‘approach to mass’. He felt that through learning to draw in his way, we could attune ourselves to the forces of nature and ‘become initiated in the hidden integrations of its structures’, and thereby be enabled ‘to render our vision of its image in our fervour to make known what is.’ Bomberg was shabbily treated by the art institutions during his life-time; between 1945 and 1953, however, he held classes at the Borough Polytechnic, where he gathered around him a remarkable group of students – those who studied with him represented in this exhibition are Frank Auerback, Dennis Creffield, Leon Kossoff, and Roy Oxlade.
Bomberg’s position was in some ways paralleled by that of Bernard Meninsky, who had also studied under Tonks. Meninsky’s art depended entirely on the pursuit of drawing: he taught evening classes in life-drawing at the Westminster School of Art. Unlike Bomberg, however, he constantly drew attention to the drawings of the Old Masters as he believed in the possibility of enthusing the ‘classical’ language of line with a new life. For him, too, drawing was not a technique: rather he insisted that it was an affirmation of values, which went far beyond resemblance to ‘the evocation and realization of a dynamic impulse.’ Meninsky’s own drawings, which often reflect his concern with the mother-and-child theme, are filled with a sense of deep repose, and silent utopian mystery.
In the 1930s and 1940s, English ‘Neo-Romantic’ artists, began searching for ways of depicting the natural world which were modern equivalents for the visions of Turner, Palmer, and Ruskin. The drawings of Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Paul Nash and John Minton can all be seen in this way. Graham Sutherland began as an etcher and immersed himself in Samuel Palmer. Later, he looked at nature and transformed what he saw in a way which reflected his own sense of the immanence of spirit in the natural world. John Piper’s great Welsh drawings of the 1940s are directly inspired by Ruskin’s attempts to unify the geological and spiritual. But the neo-Romantics were not nostalgic: they were looking for a contemporary vision which could affirm a sense of ‘onement’ between men and nature, and some of their most powerful imagery came about in response to the devastations of the Second World War.
Henry Moore, too, produced some of his most compelling drawings in response to the war. I believe that Moore is the finest British draughtsman of this century, indeed probably of any century. No one has come closer than Moore to creating a new aesthetic in which perception and imagination are re-united through a response to natural form which is at once perceptually accurate, and involved with the most profound of symbols. Interestingly, Moore’s great themes as an artist have always been the exploration of the infant-mother relationship, and the reclining female figure seen as a nurturing and sustaining landscape (Ruskin’s images of mountains metamorphosing into women can usefully be contrasted with Moore’s images of women seen as mountain ranges).
As Moore’s early life drawings show, he has a tremendous sense of the construction of the human figure and a great feel for its variety of balance, size and rhythm. All this, Moore can express with exemplary economy of line: he can evoke the “massivity” of a woman’s back with just a few marks in brush or charcoal. But at times Moore has also made ‘Transformation’ drawings, in which he works with no preconceived object in mind, or in front of the eyes, to produce a series of variations on a theme. Nonetheless, Moore’s greatest drawings – like his famous studies of sleepers in the tube during war-time, or of miners working at the coal face – belong neither to the world of re-constituted impressions, nor yet to that of fantasy. They constitute a vital third area of experiencing.
Like Henry Moore, Cecil Collins was also briefly involved with the Surrealist Movement in the 1930s. Like Moore, too, he has always excelled at drawing from the figure: Collins now teaches drawing at the City Literary Institute. A source of inspiration, throughout his life, has been a vision of “onement” with nature which he experienced as a child. He believes that the art schools will have to be reformed because they have wrongly taught that creativity can be rationalised, whereas he regards it as ‘unveiling or revealing something’. Nonetheless, Collins insists on the value of drawing from the casts:
‘I would certainly bring the cast back for several reasons. First, the discipline in drawing from them that can be a form of meditation. Secondly, because if the casts are rightly chosen they are bringing back the archetypal forms that the student should study. Contemplation of archetypal forms is one of the most important things that should come back to the art schools. Because what you contemplate you become.’
He insists that the technique of drawing should be learned consciously, but one creates unconsciously. Creation, he says, is always a leap into the unknown:
‘I don’t know what’s coming, and what’s more, I’m not really very interested in what’s coming, because then I would not get that very important surprise which is what creativity is about. It’s always something being born in me and revealed.’
Martin Bloch, too, believed that art should reveal. He did not arrive in England until 1934, when he was fifty-one years old. Yet his sensibility was of a kind which responded, immediately to the landscape he encountered here. In one sense, Bloch was a European expressionist, but he differed from, say, Oskar Kokoschka, in the closeness with which he studied the world of nature. Indeed, Bloch resembles Bomberg in the sense that we feel he is always searching for ‘the spirit in the mass’, rather than simply projecting his own subjectivity into the landscape. Bloch, too, established himself as a teacher of drawing at Camberwell, in 1949. His work, for me, exemplifies the way in which the British tradition could be re-invigorated not just by a ‘return’ to the 19th century insights of Turner, Ruskin and Palmer, but also thought contact with what might be described as empirical anchored expressionism.
Certainly, several of Bomberg’s most talented pupils can be thought of as having combined expressionism with an emphasis on relentless, empirical questing to produce a new kind of marriage of objective and subjective, which cannot really be described adequately as being either. I have written extensively elsewhere about the work of Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff in these terms.
The work of Dennis Creffield and Roy Oxlade, also in Bomberg’s illustrious class at the Borough, is perhaps less well-known. Creffield himself has perceived the links between the vision of Ruskin, and that of Bomberg: he professes admiration for both, though his own work is quite independent of either. Certainly, Creffield has drawn mountain scenery, and the great cathedrals, but he also returns to the sacraments of the flesh, to drawings of human embraces, pregnancy, child-bearing, and, most recently, his own baby son. His work exemplifies that sense of secular spirituality – of the discovery of new forms capable of expressing aspects of our haptic and affective life – which I believe to be essential for the creation of good art in our time.
Roy Oxlade has developed, and made his own, a different aspect of Bomberg’s teaching. Although he is a traditionalist, in the sense that he emphasises the need for artists to assimilate the past in order to contribute to the present, Oxlade believes that old attitudes and methods cannot be kept alive artificially. He is, for example, exceptionally critical of Tonks’s legacy, and has stressed the need for a primitive sign language which breaks with conventional modes of depiction, and thereby questions conventional ways of seeing. This sense of intuition and gesture, linked to a rigorous draughtsman’s discipline, is the basis of his teaching in Tunbridge Wells. It has also enabled Oxlade to create some exceptional drawings – like the brilliant male nude figure in this exhibition which suggests Mantegna’s fore-shortened Christ, without being in the slightest bit like it, Cat. No. 68.
Roger Hilton also tried to make use of a ‘primitive’ gestural sign language in his re-interpretations of the figure. Nonetheless, he often seems to lack Oxlade’s Bombergian rigour and vision: he is in my view, at his best in, say, the superb drawing of a reclining woman, Cat. No. 47, which retains more than a residue of Henry Tonks’s ‘objectivist’ approach.
My list could continue, and in the exhibition it does. But it must now be said that during the 1960s and 1970s imaginative drawing of the kind I have been describing passed out of fashion. The legacy of Bomberg was largely ignored. Cecil Collins worked in obscurity. Moore, Sutherland, and Piper were regarded as being outside the critical debate. Auerbach and Kossoff had not yet begun to receive the attention they enjoy today. Some of the reasons for all this are hinted at in Lynda Morris’s ‘Preface’. Suffice to say that most art simply refused the dilemma posed on Pegwell Beach: it became drained of all sense of ‘spirit’. Late modernism with its emphasis on Pop imagery, bland and insensitive minimalism, anti-illusionism, etc, was the order of the day.
It seemed that a shift was coming about around 1975, when Patrick George selected an exhibition, ‘Drawings of People’ for the Arts Council. This contained some beautiful works – but George tragically argued that the artist’s task was nothing more than ‘to account for the bewildering state of appearance’. George maintained that all the artist does is to catch likenesses, like a photographer with antiquated equipment.
R. B. Kitaj’s better known exhibition, ‘The Human Clay’, mounted the following year, certainly included a wider range of work – and left out some of the dead wood from the Slade. But Kitaj, too, often seemed to argue as if mere involvement with appearance, as against ‘empty’ abstraction, was sufficient. Over the last decade, we have seen plenty more vacuous figurative art. By and large, this has not been ‘Georgian’, ‘photographic’, or factualist; rather, it has tended to be new expressionist, or subjectivist. It has had no relationship to imaginative vision or revelation. All this seems to have played its part in leading Kitaj himself to realise that even for us unbelievers, art without a ‘spiritual’ dimension – whether abstract or figurative – is barely worth having.
Potential spaces
Throughout this introduction, I have suggested that good drawing is ‘transitional’ in character, and that this might provide a clue to that quality of secular spirituality which I believe is the necessary ingredient of any genuine post-modernist aesthetic. The term ‘transitional’ I have borrowed from the late D. W. Winnicott, a great psychoanalyst, who talked about those ‘moments of illusion’ which occur when the mother offered her breast at precisely the moment when the child wanted it, thus providing the illusion that there was an external reality which corresponded to the child’s capacity to imagine, or to create.
In such moments, the baby’s sense of what is self, and what is other, is literally not yet defined: the baby has not yet developed a sense of his body as contained by a limiting membrane, or skin. The baby does not so much perceive objects, as apperceive subjective objects. Winnicott drew attention to the moments when the baby reaches out for the mother’s mouth and feels her teeth, and at the same time, looks into her eyes, seeing her creatively. Winnicott felt that such primary ‘transitional’ experiences led on naturally to cultural experience, and indeed formed its foundation.
In his view, the ‘potential space’, originally between baby and mother, ought ideally to be reproduced between child and family, and indeed between the adult individual, and society, or the world. He thought that this potential space was ‘the location of cultural experience’ itself. He once wrote, ‘The interplay between originality and the acceptance of tradition as the basis for inventiveness seems to me to be just one more example, and a very exciting one, of the interplay between separateness and union.’
Good drawing mingles perception and apperception, and involves just such an interplay. This helps us to understand why even, perhaps especially, in an advanced secular and technological society, the teaching and practice of drawing require celebration, and where necessary, defence. Drawing involves an affectionate and creative gaze, a mingling of self and that which is seen, or imagined, of a kind which an automatic process, like photography, immediately and inevitably excludes. Drawing involves heart, head, eye and hand in a relationship with objects which implies not just an aesthetic, but also an ethic, which is reconciling and re-binding – a redemption through form.
I have surely said enough at least to hint at the reason why images of the mother-and-child occupy a special place in my exhibition, but the point of view from which the majority of these have been drawn can be distinguished from that of an independent observer, or the mother, alike. The good draughtsman, or woman, develops his or her inherited talents to the full: he absorbs and extends the living legacy of tradition. And yet, in so doing, he never loses touch – or at least not for long – with his child-like, ‘transitional’ vision. Rather, he presents others with a fully adult version of such vision, a version created through the exercise of traditional skills, informed and transformed by a life-time of personal looking, apperceiving, learning, and above all, creating. We need not be surprised if the birth of a baby, close to home, often stimulates the draughtsman towards a replenishment and revitalisation of the intimacy of vision. There are drawings by Henry Moore, Peter Lanyon, Dennis Creffield, Martin Bloch, and Martin Murray, in this exhibition which underline that point. But the subject matter included here extends out from re-creations of that primary, maternal environment, to include the whole face, as in heads and portraits, and indeed the entire female body, male figures, rocks, stones, landscape, and architectural structures too. For as Roger Scruton once put it, architecture is ‘the history not of engineering, but of stones in their expressive aspect.’ In short, this exhibition is about the way in which, through his search for what Bomberg described as ‘the spirit in the mass’, the artist can create for us an illusion of a transitional environment – even when we no longer believe that the world is the literal handiwork of God.
