Читать книгу Art of the New Naturalists: A Complete History - Peter Marren - Страница 7

Clifford and Rosemary married in 1931. Rosemary brought to the artistic partnership an instinctive eye for colour, tone and composition; she had a quick mind and the ability to master a new medium at speed. They shared the same open, enquiring spirit, branching out at various times into sculpture, mosaic (including an important commission for the design and laying of the mosaic floor for the British pavilion at the Paris Exhibition in 1937), ceramics and modelling, needlework and mural painting. But their distinctive sense of colour and design is nowhere better seen than in the posters they designed in the 1930s. Posters in the 1920s and ‘30s were often designed with great care and dash, even those that were advertising a product. They became an art form pursued by progressive artists on both sides of the Atlantic in which an image was used to convey a powerful message. Successful poster art needed to say something clearly, simply and, above all, memorably. Distilling a sometimes complex idea into a single image exercised the brain quite as much as a large canvas or sculpture. In their day many leading artists designed posters in the prevailing spirit of ‘art for all’, as a means of bringing art centre-stage into the lives of ordinary people. Among the rising generation of British artists designing posters and book jackets at this time were Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Barnett Freedman, Paul Nash and the American graphic designer, Edward McKnight Kauffer – more or less a Who’s Who of contemporary British art. The 1930s were, arguably, the high noon of poster art in Britain. Every image, said the artist John Berger, ‘embodies a way of seeing’ (Bernstein, 1992). The artist’s job was to see something as if for the first time, and to communicate that insight.

Clifford and Rosemary designed many posters during the 1930s, for the Empire Marketing Board, for Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, for the great Frank Pick, inspirational Chief Executive of the London Passenger Transport Board, and for the Post Office, as well as lithographs for Lyon’s Corner House (‘the Teashop Lithographs’), all of them institutions that found reasons for persuading top artists to produce work for what one called ‘the art gallery of the street’. Paul Rennie described the Ellis’s poster style as ‘painterly’, effectively building up their designs as a succession of separate colour printings. ‘These combined the expressive style of the early design reformers with a Fauvist-inspired colour palette’ (Rennie, 2008).

BP Poster by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, 1932, printed lithographically by Vincent Brooks, Day & Sons Ltd (75.6 x 114 cm).

Some of their posters were intended for specific events, such as test matches, while others were part of a public service for educational and cultural establishments such as museums, galleries and gardens. One of their first major commissions, from 1932, advertised Whipsnade Zoo above a banner suggesting that BP Petrol was the ideal medium for your car journey to the zoo. Designed to catch the eye of a passer-by (the original poster measured 45 by 30 inches), it is an unforgettable image of four wolves staring wide-eyed from the trees with not a cage or bar in sight. Like so much of their work, this image was based on close on-the-spot observation. Rosemary’s memory was of the young Clifford and herself walking to Whipsnade over the downs by night, and choosing a dry ditch to take a nap, waking to find the wolves staring at them.

Another important sponsor of commercial art was Shell, which later showcased some of the best poster design from the 1920s and ‘30s in The Shell Poster Book (1992). The man responsible, a counterpart to Frank Pick at London Transport, was Jack Beddington, who persuaded the company to allow artists to produce designs in their own way with a minimum of commercial interference. Together, the Shell collection advertises not so much the corporate brand as the British landscape and way of life, while, seemingly incidentally, presenting Shell in the guise of a patron of artistic good taste. One of c&re’s Shell designs, dated 1934, shows Lower Slaughter Mill in Gloucestershire as an image of a lost rural England of millstreams, sleepy willows and a village lane empty of cars, painted in pure greens, ochres and reds. It is signed ‘Rosemary and Clifford Ellis’, and hence was a Rosemary-initiated design. Another poster, a joint work done the same year, has an array of antique artefacts, including a grinning stone gargoyle, within a ruined abbey and assures us with a wink that ‘Antiquaries Prefer Shell’.

London Transport bill, Winter Visitors, by c&re, 1937, printed by Dangerfield Printing Company Ltd, London (25.5 x 73 cm).

London Transport window bill by c&re advertising Test Match at The Oval, 1939, printed by Sir Joseph Causton & Sons Ltd, London (25.5 x 31.5 cm).

London Transport window bill, Come out to live! by c&re, 1936 (25.5 x 31.5 cm).

It is quite easy to spot a poster by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis even without the cipher. The colours are fresh, bright and without outlines, the designs simple and bold, and the foregrounds and backgrounds juxtaposed in a characteristic way. They often express an idea rather than a product. With hindsight one might discern elements of the New Naturalist jackets in their poster of a trout fisher’s tackle over the legend ‘Anglers prefer Shell’. Their taste for open-air scenes of nature is still more evident in a quartet of metre-tall images commissioned by London Transport, entitled simply, ‘Wood’, ‘Heath’, ‘Down’ and ‘River’, each symbolised by a lively graphic representation of a wild bird, respectively a green woodpecker, an owl, a kestrel and a heron. In the background of each one, people are having fun: ramblers ask a shepherd for directions; a man and his girl choose a spot for their picnic; a dad gives his child a piggy-back ride. Nature is accessible and enhances life.

From 1934 to 1937, the couple also designed dust jackets for novels published by Jonathan Cape, having caught the eye of a young editor, Ruth Atkinson. These were printed in a similar way to a poster, by lithography and in three colours, and they were executed in a modernist style that brings together intriguing elements from the story. Clifford and Rosemary always liked to read the book before they started work on the jacket. I have never heard of North-West by North by Dora Birtles, or The White Farm by Geraint Goodwin, let alone read them, but their striking jackets would certainly make me want to take up the book and open it.

By 1936, the couple, with their year-old first child, Penelope, had moved to Bath where they had both been offered teaching posts. Rosemary became the art teacher at the Royal School for Daughters of officers of the Army on Lansdown, while Clifford took up an appointment as assistant master at the Bath School of Art, then part of the city’s Technical College. Initially he taught art to 12- to 14-year-olds preparing for local trades skills, such as bookbinding, painting and decorating. He must have made a great impression because, two years later, he was appointed headmaster.

London Transport window bill, Summer Is Flying, by c&re, 1938, printed by Johnson, Riddle & Co, London (25.5 x 73 cm).

Meanwhile, shortly after their arrival in Bath, Clifford and Rosemary joined the Bath Society of Artists, where they were soon elected onto the committee for the Society’s annual exhibitions. Among the many artists they came to know was the painter, and sometime pupil of Sickert, Paul Ayshford, Lord Methuen (1886–1974), as well as the famous ‘grand old man of British painting’ himself, Walter Sickert. The now aged and venerable Sickert, with his third wife, the painter Therese Lessore, had moved to Bathampton in 1938, where they lived in what was to prove their last home at St George’s Hill. Ailing but still active and ever quizzical, Sickert proposed to Clifford in March 1939 that he teach at the Art School once a week, free of charge. His offer was eagerly accepted, and Sickert would talk and reminisce for two hours every Friday to Clifford’s students, continuing to do so until his health failed him in the early years of the war. Clifford and Rosemary were to be of great help to Therese Lessore in the hard task of caring for Sickert during his final illness up to his death in January 1942.

In 1939 Modelling for Amateurs by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis was published in the Studio ‘How to do It’ series (a revised edition was published, again in two formats in 1945). By then, the Ellises were at the heart of the local art world, teaching, and producing innovative freelance work. Then World War II intervened.