In his introduction to the eagerly anticipated Wadsworth exhibition at Tooth’s Gallery, London, in May 1929, Léonce Rosenberg, a leading champion of European artistic Modernism, wrote: ‘Wadsworth is not merely the name of a painter, but also of an event.’ It is a clear indication of how highly Wadsworth was regarded that Rosenberg, art critic, dealer and publisher of cutting edge Parisian art journal, the Bulletin de L’Effort Moderne, should refer to Edward Wadsworth in such glowing terms. The present exhibition should indeed be regarded as an ‘event’ - the first devoted to Wadsworth in the UK in over fifteen years. It provides an excellent opportunity to reassess an artist who played a leading role in the early Twentieth century revival of tempera painting, alongside Giorgio de Chirico and Gino Severini, was a key member of the major British avant-garde art movement of Vorticism and whose powerful and compelling contribution to pictorial abstraction won the admiration of such giants of European artistic modernism as Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Theo van Doesburg and Wassily Kandinsky - most of whom were introduced to Wadsworth by Rosenberg in Paris during the late 1920’s.
He was by far one of the great draughtsman of Twentieth Century British art i.e. Man Asleep (1907) - a somnolent Munich cab-driver caught with assured economy during the year he spent as student in the city or his chilling image of untrammelled rampant industrialisation - Leeds Steelworks with Slag (1920). His virtually single-handed contribution to the development of a distinct British variation of the unsettling and uncanny realism of the German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement is evident in works such as St. Tropez V - Sacks on the Quayside (1925), Little Western Flower (1928) and On est bien au bord de la Mer (1928-29) Indeed, Léonce Rosenberg was so impressed by the latter two works that he exhibited both in his Galérie de l’Effort Moderne where they caught the appreciative attention of Léger and Gino Severini who were also attempting to bring a ‘new rhythmical mystery’ to the still-lives they were painting at the time. The exhibition also contains examples of Wadsworth’s more experimental and challenging abstract (though he personally preferred the term non-figurative) work, such as Composition, Screwthread Gauges and Bevel Protractor I (1930) and Composition IV (1932) which caught the eye of Auguste Herbin and Theo van Doesburg and led to him being one of the few contemporary British modernists to be invited to exhibit with the Abstraction-Création group they had established in Paris in 1931. Meanwhile, in Britain, Wadsworth’s further experimentation with a sinuously distinctive form of biomorphic abstraction, demonstrated in Composition IV, drew him closer to Paul Nash and led to their becoming founder members, early in 1933, of Unit One which the celebrated modernist critic and art historian Herbert Read described the following year as having ‘more importance than any event than has happened in the history of English art for many, many, years.’ Unit One proved a short-lived phenomenon: Wadsworth had already taken a lead by holding a solo exhibition devoted to abstract work in November 1933 at the Mayor Gallery (probably the first ever by a British artist during the last century) but true to his mordantly laconic dictum: ‘The only permanent thing in life is change’ he moved on to more representative, yet still enigmatic, work, such as The World of Happy Days (1934) and The Rogues Yarn II (1937).
The Second World War brought fresh challenges; in 1940 Wadsworth was forced to leave his home in East Sussex by the prospect of invasion while he was prevented from becoming an official war artist on the farcical grounds that because his son-in-law was German he might be a ‘security risk’. Wadsworth adapted to circumstances and the exhibition includes a number of stimulating works such as The Acid Test (1941) and Measured Tread (1942) he produced as an artist working for ICI to illustrate the firm’s significant contribution to the war effort by developing new techniques that led to the manufacture of radically new materials and products. In the spring of 1945 Wadsworth returned to East Sussex and, despite lengthening periods of illness caused by a malfunctioning gall bladder, embarked on a final fascinating period of abstraction in his work - a scintillating re-evaluation of motifs from earlier phases in is career i.e. the artificial flower in Little Western Flower is transformed into still-lives of spiky roses such as Abstract with Rose for F, while aspects of his Vorticism of 1914-16 and his contacts with Abstraction-Création in the early 1930’s combine with the fantastically shaped objects he encountered in the laboratories of the ICI’s Plastics Division in works such as Starfish and Shells (1947), Octopus (1947) and Triangles (1948). When Léonce Rosenberg saw Starfish and Shells he pronounced it ‘parfait’ captivated by its ‘colour’ and ‘thrilling rhythm.’ Wadsworth was delighted by the verdict; as he had written in 1940 to his friend the painter Richard Eurich in whatever manner he painted he always tried to energise his compositions with a strong intimation of ‘an under-the-surface rhythm of things.’ In his best work the viewer cannot help but acknowledge this ‘rhythm of things’ and be compelled to a realisation that even the most ostensibly prosaic objects, such as the binoculars in Little Western Flower and the serpentine aluminium strips in Starfish and Shells, posses an enthralling and mysterious power all their own.
By Dr. Jonathan Black, July 2006
This exhibition celebrates the publication of the new catalogue raisonne of paintings and drawings of Edward Wadsworth entitled:
Edward Wadsworth: form, feeling and calculation - the complete paintings and drawings
by Dr. Jonathan Black which was released this year. To order a copy or to request an exhibition catalogue, please contact Lucy Tyler at the gallery:
ltyler@osbornesamuel.com
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