Inter-war landscapes: amazing international comparisons

"The South Downs stand like a line of gigantic beached whales guarding the southern foreshore of England. Rounded and rolling, they merge into each other to create a series of graceful forms. Modest in height yet possessing an undeniable grandeur, the Downs can be bleak. But even when the prevailing wind blows sudden storms across the summits, they are never forbidding. The Downs were never a frontier, but a pastoral range and crossing place, their easy gradients, dry tracks and firm grasslands making them a natural highway for Man and his herds".

Nash, Wood on the Downs, 1929, Aberdeen Art Gallery, 72 x 92 cm

How did artists depict the South Downs during the inter-war era? Examine Paul Nash’s painting Wood on the Downs, 1929, Aberdeen Art Gallery. Paul Nash (1889-1946) was trained at the Slade School before serving in the First World War with the Artists' Rifles at Ypres on the Western Front. He was invalided home in 1917 and appointed as a war artist for the last two years of the war. This painting, from the inter-war years, had cool yet strong colours that were replicated just a few years later by Ravilius. The trees added a geometric boldness and exaggerated perspective that made the work somewhat mysterious.

Ravilius, Chalk Paths 1935, Pallant House Gallery Bookshop

And think about Chalk Paths, done by Eric Ravilius (1903-42) a London artist, designer and illustrator.  Ravilius' artist friend Peggy Angus (1904–93) lived in a house near Firle on the Sussex Downs, just outside Brighton - it was here that Ravilious painted Chalk Paths and John Piper painted as well. Ravilius' South Downs landscapes were almost always of the land having been well used: the paths had been regularly stamped down by people, the fences zigzaged their way across the canvas. The springy hills left almost no space in the painting for sky!

Ravilious was an official war artist in World War II and received a commission as a Captain in the Royal Marines. Tragically he was killed in 1942 while accompanying a Royal Air Force air sea rescue mission off Iceland. Ravilius was still in his 30s.

As I examined rounded and rolling forms with firm grass lands, other landscapes started to emerge in the inter-war era, landscapes that had nothing to do with South Downs.

Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958) was born in Sheffield in the UK and did his art studies at the Sheffield Technical School of Art. In 1915 Allen enlisted in the British Army and soon after was posted to France where he sketched troops and equipment in the battlefields. After WW1, he painted with a number of art societies, including the Sheffield Society of Artists. His name may not be very well known to most art historians but he exhibited at the Royal Academy over 23 years from 1933, and he had dozens of paintings accepted by those scholarly academicians. Fortunately Allen created many fine landscapes which survive till now, in public and private collections.

Allen, Crowlink Sussex, 37 x 55 cm, date?

Allen, Haddon Hall Derbyshire, date?

Reuven Rubin (1893-1974) was born in Romania into dire poverty. In 1912, still in his teens, he travelled to Palestine to study art at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Since Paris was the centre of the art world, Rubin took himself to France in 1913 to pursue his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts.

In 1921, this well travelled young man went to the USA and met the well known and well connected artist Alfred Stieglitz, who played an important role in organising Rubin’s first art exhibition in the USA. In 1923, Rubin finally emigrated to Palestine, permanently. There his paintings often depicted the biblical and modern landscape, dotted with agricultural workers on kibbutzim and Arab fishermen. Many of his paintings were sun-bathed, parched depictions of Jerusalem and the Galilee.

Rubin, Jerusalem, 1925

Rubin, Safed in Galillee, 1927

Another painter of the interwar era was Dorrit Black. Dorothea Foster Black (1891-1951) was born and raised in Adelaide, daughter of an engineer/architect and an artist. From 1909 she studied at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts and painted landscapes in watercolours. After spending two years (1911-12) in Britain and the Continent, Dorrit returned to Australia and continued studying at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School. By the middle of the war, she adopted oils as her main medium.

In mid-1927 Dorrit Black went to London and spent three months at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, where she liked colour linocut printing as an original art form. Next year she studied at André Lhote's academy in Paris and at his summer school, and worked briefly with Albert Gleizes in 1929. Now a disciple of Cubism, she returned to Sydney late that year, held the first of her six one-woman shows in 1930. Dorrit exhibited with some of Australians finest inter-war painters, Roy de Maistre, Roland Wakelin and Grace Crowley. In the 1930s she ran the Modern Art Centre, Margaret Street and produced most of her linocuts in the 1930s. In 1934-35 she settled in Adelaide and painted landscapes of the Adelaide hills and the south coast.

Black, Coast Road 1942, Art Gallery of South Australia

Black, In the Foothills 1942, Queensland Art Gallery

In all these landscapes, the boldly presented hills and roads emphasised their treatment as mass and form. And like cubist painting decades earlier, the mountains became interconnecting planes of varying depth. In fact I would say that the simple, strong and bold lines were quite cubist in feeling. Bright sunlight and cast shadows in all the landscapes helped define the natural forms. And importantly, for all the artists, the springy hills left almost no space in the painting for sky.

How did it happen that the landscapes of these artists started to feel like the South Downs and like each other? Sheffield, Jerusalem and Adelaide were certainly not the most important art centres in the world. So there seem to be several possibilities.

Firstly they might have seen each other’s work, in galleries or in reproductions.

Secondly they might have both been influenced by a third party from the past. If this is true, I would suggest Paul Cezanne as the most likely candidate.

Thirdly the artists were expressing a shared passion for clean living and fitness.  Peyton Skipworth (Apollo Magazine May 2006) suggested that Modernism was strongly associated with the interwar cult of getting city dwellers out into the countryside, sunshine, fresh air, hiking, fitness and riding bikes.

Finally there is the possibility that the artists had nothing whatsoever in common; 80 years later, I am selecting out commonalities that didn’t really exist back then.

Art Inconnu has the finest collection of Harry Epworth Allen paintings. Art from Israel has an interesting selection of Reuven Rubin paintings. Landscape Painting References has a couple of Dorrit Black paintings. For Eric Ravilious paintings, go to That's How The Light Gets In or read Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs by James Russell (The Mainstone Press, 2009).
A Crisis of Brilliance by David Boyd Haycock traces the lives of five British artists of this era – Stanley Spencer, Dora Carrington, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler and Richard Nevinson.

This topic continues to surprise. Let me add Rita Angus (1908–70), a New Zealand painter born in Hastings but lived mostly in Christchurch.  Her landscapes of Canterbury and Otago were somewhat cubist, clear, flat, simple and sharply-defined. It is said that Angus carefully considered every colour, line and shape, linking each detail in a design of graceful curves and interlocking forms

Angus didn't travel to England until 1958 but she could have easily seen paintings by John or Paul Nash, for example, during the 1930s and 40s.

Angus, Central Otago, 1940, Auckland Art Gallery.