WILLIAM ROBERTS SOCIETY

Susanna and the Elders c.1926 (detail) – a painting exhibited in WR’s 1965retrospective – discussed on pages 7–12 – but not since then

Newsletter, April 2015

WRS farewell beano … The William Roberts Society, 1998–2015 … AWR for the BM … A new WR website … WR and the art of the FirstWorld War … The 1965 Roberts retrospective … WR on display …

Tom Devonshire Jones

WRS FAREWELL BEANO

The a.g.m. on 11 April ratified the com-mittee’s decision, announced in a letterwith last October’s newsletter, that thesociety should be wound up. We thankmembers and friends for their valuablesupport over the years; now we look for-ward to raising a final glass together.Please come to a closing-down beano –a gathering to celebrate the society’sachievements and the friendships forged– on Saturday 6 June from 2.30 to 5.00p.m. at the Art Workers’ Guild, 6 QueenSquare, London WC1N 3AT. There willbe a short presentation. Canapés anddrinks will be served. RSVP MarionHutton via the contact details above.

THE WILLIAM ROBERTSSOCIETY, 1998–2015

by Pauline Paucker

Our society, founded in 1998, is nowwinding itself up. Some of us who were

not so young when we elected our com-mittee are now rather old (Diana Gurney,one of our trustees and a founder mem-ber, died recently aged 97), and we all,younger and old, feel that we haveachieved most of our original aims – barthe house museum, so much wished forby Sarah and John Roberts.

We initiated the the application for theblue plaque on the Robertses’ house; wehave visited nearly all the holdings ofRoberts’s work within hitting distance ofLondon; we have led Roberts walks inFitzrovia and Primrose Hill; we haveheld a series of excellent yearly publiclectures with distinguished speakers; andwe were active in dissuading the Treas-ury Solicitor from selling the works col-lected in the house at public auction.(These have since been given or prom-ised to the nation.)

Marion Hutton began the series oflively regular newsletters; Bob Daven-port set up an informative website;David Cleall compiled a catalogueraisonné; we have administered the

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WILLIAM ROBERTS SOCIETY

registered charity no. 1090538Committee: Pauline Paucker (chairman), Marion Hutton (secretary: Lexden House,Tenby SA70 7BJ;

01834 843295; info@williamrobertssociety.co.uk),Arnold Paucker (treasurer), David Cleall (archivist),Bob Davenport (newsletter and website: mail@radavenport.co.uk), Michael Mitzman (copyright),

Ruth Artmonsky,Anne Goodchild,Agi Katzwww.williamrobertssociety.co.uk

April 2015

Our inaugural a.g.m. and public lec-ture was held in the Conway Hall, whenthe late Andrew Causey was the first ofthose who spoke to us on differentaspects of Roberts’s work – the full list isbelow. We have had different venues: theNational Portrait Gallery for some years,the Art Workers’ Guild, Toynbee Hall,even the Swedenborg Society’s hall andMishcon de Reya’s handsome premises.

Andrew Gibbon Williams came to usfor help with his excellent biography,William Roberts: An English Cubist,which we launched with a party at Mish-con de Reya’s.

We were closely involved with thesetting up of the Roberts/Kramer exhib-ition ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ atLeeds University and the Ben UriGallery in 2003, and it was exciting tovisit Pallant House in Chichester for the

Roberts exhibition ‘England at Play’,curated by Simon Martin, in March2007. A visit to Cambridge to see thework held by the Fitzwilliam and theRoberts pictures bequeathed to King’sCollege by Maynard Keynes was unfor-gettable, and Woking’s Lightbox gallerytoo held surprises: it houses a fine collec-tion of Roberts’s work.

We have had visits to the print roomsof the V&A, the British Museum andTate Britain, visited the Imperial WarMuseum when Roberts’s work was onshow, made contact with owners ofpaintings as far away as Sri Lanka, andwalked the Regent’s Canal in pouringrain to fix the sites of Roberts’s canalpaintings. One of our final acts has beenthe purchase of one of Roberts’s rareetchings, presented to the British Mus-eum in the name of the society

copyright of both Roberts and hisbrother-in-law, Jacob Kramer; prices forRoberts’s work have risen – and so havecharges for affordable venues – it seemstime to close down.

Roberts’s son, John, having diedintestate, Diana and I were told byMichael Mitzman, lawyer for theRobertses at solicitors Mishcon de Reya,to act as ‘friends of the family’, sortingout personal property in the house. Themany paintings displayed or stackedthere were our first concern. Dianaimmediately rang Nicholas Serota, whoagreed to store them in the Tate depot,where they remained for many yearsunseen by the public, though we havebeen allowed to have access on morethan one occasion.

It was at a meeting with MichaelMitzman, who was to become our faith-ful support and adviser, that Marionbrightly suggested that we should set upan appreciation society. We thenapproached friends of Sarah and John,found relatives of Roberts, approachedowners of Roberts paintings and ad-mirers of his work, and a group of us metin the basement of Agi Katz’s BoundaryRoad Gallery to found the WilliamRoberts Society one evening in Septem-ber 1998.

We agreed then to contact EnglishHeritage, who showed interest in theidea of a house museum, as did theNational Trust; but nothing came of it,and 14 St Mark’s Crescent was eventual-ly sold. We then concentrated on pro-moting our artist.

Before the sale I had taken manyphotographs of the interior; the paintings

had gone but the highly individual fur-nishings were still in place, and a profes-sional photographer also made a set ofphotographs for English Heritage so thatsome record remains of how the familylived and worked. David‘s video of thehouse with my voice-over has beenavailable on YouTube since March 2011.

We provided the information requiredfor the blue plaque, the unveiling ofwhich by Alan Bennett in October 2003attracted a large crowd. It now sitstogether with two more plaques: com-memorating the poet Arthur HughClough and the historian A. J. P. Taylor,a one-time neighbour of the Robertses,who wrote in praise of Roberts’s memoir4.5 Howitzer Gunner.

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(Above) Self-portrait in a Blue Shirtc.1955–6 and (right) Sarah in a Gold LaméHat c.1932 and John c.1932 – three of the

works currently being held in the Tate depot

A WR FOR THE BM

At a committee meeting last Novemberit was decided to use some of the soci-ety’s remaining funds to purchase awork by Roberts for presentation to apublic collection in the society’s name.The work eventually chosen wasBathers, one of the nine etchings thatWR created and printed in very smallnumbers c.1925. It has been donated tothe British Museum, which has two ofthe other etchings and a study for a third,and where anyone can visit the printroom to see it without appointment (butwith identification).

A NEW WR WEBSITE

With the society coming to an end and itscopyright licence from the TreasurySolicitor about to expire, the WilliamRoberts Society website has been takendown. But David Cleall and Bob Daven-port have obtained permission for aRoberts website of their own, and this isnow online at

http://englishcubist.co.ukThey also intend to send out occasion-

al emails with news about Roberts; ifyou would like to receive these, pleaseemail ‘Subscribe’ to

mail@englishcubist.co.uk

Our members have been enthusiasticand supportive throughout, and we owethem much. We hope to see as many aspossible at our goodbye party in June,also celebrating the birthday of our artist,William Roberts.

William Roberts lecturers: David Buck-man (2010), Andrew Causey (1999),

Elizabeth Cayzer (2002), David Cleall(2008 and 2013), Richard Cork (2007),Mark Glazebrook (2005), FrederickGore (2000), David Boyd Haycock(2011), Andrew Heard (2004), TomLubbock (2009), James Malpas (2001),Simon Martin (2012), Richard Slo-combe (2015), Timothy Wilcox (2006),Andrew Gibbon Williams (2003).

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Bathers c.1925, the etching presented to the British Museum in the name of the WilliamRoberts Society

Apple Pickers 1936 – one of the works seen in the WRS visit to Cambridge in April 2011

commissions in the post-war years.Plans for a hall of remembrance tohouse them were abandoned, and inJanuary 1919 the paintings were givento the Imperial War Museum. Thecommittee had aimed to representBritish artistic plurality and resistdomination by the Royal Academy,with pictures being based on personalexperience rather than reimaginingepisodes from the war. When exhibit-ed at the RA late in 1919, however, themodernist works of Lewis andRoberts were denounced as Bolshev-ism in art, and the press outcryprompted questions in Parliamentabout state expenditure on suchthings. The IWM consequently dis-tanced itself from these pictures, andin 1921 they were among 48 works

(also including pictures by StanleySpencer, John Nash and Henry Lamb)given on long-term loan to the not par-ticularly enthusiastic Tate Gallery,effectively decontextualising them aswar art – although it seems that theywere hardly shown at all in the inter-war period before they eventuallyreturned to the IWM in its new homein Lambeth.

THE 1965 ROBERTSRETROSPECTIVE

by David Cleall

Almost 50 years ago, in the winter of1965, the Tate Gallery and the ArtsCouncil staged a major William Robertsretrospective exhibition. Norman Reid

WILLIAM ROBERTS ANDTHE ART OF THE FIRST

WORLD WAR

The last of the William Roberts Soci-ety’s annual lectures was given on 11April by Richard Slocombe, senior artcurator at the Imperial War Museum,who spoke on William Roberts andthe art of the First World War, lookingat how Roberts and his modernist fel-low artists responded to the war andalso at the reaction to the art thatresulted.

Dr Slocombe described how a pre-war critical attitude to the modernistaesthetic of Roberts and his fellowVorticists as ‘an unhealthy, foreign(i.e. German) affliction’ intensified asthe war began, only to soften as thescale of the loss of young livesbecame apparent – for modernism wassomething practised by the young.And when in March 1916 (the monthbefore Roberts was called up)C. R. W. Nevinson’s painting of amachine-gun post, La Mitrailleuse,was exhibited in London, presenting,with the authority of someone whohad served at the front, a vision ofhumanity bent to the will of amachine, critics had to concede thatthe colours and harsh angularity offorms previously found disagreeablewere now qualities that gave powerfulexpression to a subject that demandednew forms of representation.

When, after two years as a gunnerin the Royal Field Artillery, Robertswas seconded to undertake a commis-sion for the Canadian War Memorials

Fund, he was warned that ‘Cubist’work was unacceptable, but in theresulting The First German GasAttack at Ypres (see the October 2014newsletter) he managed an adroit bal-ancing act between this constraint andartistic expression. His subsequentcommission from the British WarMemorials Committee (BWMC)required him to hand over to the stateall the work he created in a particularperiod, and the collection of worksnow in the Imperial War Museum notonly details his experience of and atti-tudes to the war, but also documents atransition to a stylised figuration witha strong satirical element. In The GasChamber, for example, gas maskstransform soldiers into clumsy, robot-ic figures rendered almost blind andhelpless by the equipment intended toprotect them, and Signallers showsscant sign of team spirit among thosesupposed to be working together.

The view that war debased thosewho took part in it, reducing man toan animal or even a mechanical status,found expression in WyndhamLewis’s A Battery Shelled (1919),commissioned by the BWMC, wherethe gunners under fire in the back-ground appear dehumanised, insect-like, scuttling for cover impelled by aprimitive instinct for survival. Dr Slo-combe saw a similar point of view inWR’s Tommies Filling Their WaterBottles with Rain from a Shell Hole(1918), in which soldiers scramble forwater from a dirty puddle.

Particularly interesting was theaccount of the fate of the BWMC

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Signallers 1918 (© IWM (Art.IWM ART 1167))

Ronald Alley contributed a conciseintroductory essay to a detailed, well-illustrated catalogue. Roberts’s coverillustration – a pen-and-ink drawingprinted on lemon-yellow card – showedhim looking back over three phases inhis life: first the Slade, then his warexperiences, and finally Roberts theARA.

It is difficult to imagine that Robertswould not have been very satisfied withthe show, although we have no record ofhis response other than that he waspleased by the space allocated and theresulting uncramped hang. Nor is the

public response documented – thoughEdward Burra went in November anddeclared himself ‘fascinated by theWilliam Roberts exhibition at the Tate’.

The art critics varied in their respons-es, though many of them provideddetailed and thoughtful analyses ofRoberts’s work and some were very wel-coming of an opportunity to re-evaluatethe artist.

Andrew Forge in the New Statesman(26 November 1965) declared that ‘TheWilliam Roberts exhibition whichRonald Alley has arranged for the ArtsCouncil at the Tate is a real event. It

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had recently succeeded Sir John Rothen-stein as director of the Tate, and in anearly staff reorganisation Ronald Alleybecame keeper of the modern collection.Alley had been with the Tate for a num-ber of years, and this promotion enabledhim to more effectively continue hiswork in revitalising the modern collec-tion.

William Roberts was now 70. In 1961he had been given an award by theCalouste Gulbenkian Foundation ‘inrecognition of his artistic achievementand his outstanding service to Britishpainting’, and his earlier election as anAssociate of the Royal Academy had ledto various duties on the RA council.However, he was known mainly throughthe large-scale works exhibited eachyear at the RA Summer Exhibition, andthe extraordinary range of his work hadnot been recognised. Now a major retro-spective was planned, and Ronald Alleywould curate it.

Alley had championed Roberts in hisrole as purchase adviser to the Cecil Hig-gins Art Gallery in the late 1950s, and itis likely that a number of recent TateGallery Roberts acquisitions – TheDiners, Athletes Exercising in a Gymna-sium and The Vorticists at the Restaurantde la Tour Eiffel – were also the result ofhis support. Roberts couldn’t have beenserved by a better curator than Alley,who was passionately enthusiastic aboutmodern art and had close friendshipswith many internationally recognisedartists, including Jackson Pollock, MarkRothko and Francis Bacon. He also hada reputation for the thoroughness andaccuracy of his research – completing a

catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s work in1964. Most important to an effectiveworking relationship with the Robertseswas Alley’s unpretentious and self-effacing manner.

Alley set to work tracking down thekey pieces in Roberts’s output. The twomajor private collections of the artist’swork cooperated with him – ErnestCooper lent 15 oil paintings and 18drawings, while Honor Frost, the execu-tor of the late Wilfrid Evill (who haddied in 1963), lent 7 oil paintings and 7drawings. Other private collectors lent afurther 45 pictures, including such rarelyseen and important works as DockGates, The Garden of Eden, Christ Driv-ing the Money Changers from the Tem-ple and Susanna and the Elders, and 68works came from national collections(including the Tate). Most excitingly ofall, Alley brought the huge CanadianWar Memorials commission The FirstGerman Gas Attack at Ypres across fromCanada, The Chess Players from NewJersey, and Interval Before Round Tenfrom Australia. The Robertses lent 33works, including a 1909 Study of theArtist’s Father, Brother and Sister, por-traits of Sarah, and self-portraits includ-ing the recent self-mocking Self-portraitWith Knotted Handkerchief (1964) – anindication that Roberts didn’t want to beseen as taking himself too seriously. Agrand total of 222 items (212 plus 10 lifestudies) were exhibited at the TateGallery from 20 November, with aslightly smaller exhibition moving on tothe Laing Gallery in Newcastle in Janu-ary 1966 and finally to the WhitworthArt Gallery in Manchester.

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Trafalgar Square 1926 – a painting exhibited in the 1965 retrospective but never since

lucidity of Roberts’ formal sense whichgive his work its convincing claim onour attention.’

Terence Mullaly in the Daily Tele-graph (6 December 1965) enthusiasti-cally commented that ‘Thanks to theArts Council it can now be asserted thatin our own time only Stanley Spencerdeserves as high a place in this company[“that very English tradition of highlyindividual and eccentric painters”] asWilliam Roberts.’ Mullaly particularlypraised the ‘savage, yet restrainedpower’ of the First World War paintings,but also added that ‘What is now clear is

that there is a gentle and more reflectiveside to his work. [That] is to be seen inhis portraits.’

Keith Roberts in the Burlington Mag-azine (January 1966) stood alone inlaunching quite a personal attack onRoberts: ‘The whole affair has beenorganized and catalogued by RonaldAlley with a zeal and scholarly precisionworthy of a better artist. For when all issaid and done … Roberts is a minor fig-ure.’ As the review continues it seemsthat Roberts’s satirical depiction of theBloomsbury set has particularly rattledthe reviewer:

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confirms that Roberts is one of the mostunfairly neglected artists of our time. Italso shows him to be a more complexand disturbing artist than we had everimagined.’

David Thompson in The Spectator(26 November 1965) wrote:

It’s a highly stylised art, but exceed-ingly lively, and as it’s done withunflattering precision both on a verylarge and a very small scale, it addsup to something pretty impressive …He has a marvellous eye for tellingand curious detail, a keen observer’sinterest in gesture and expression …This is one of those overdue and emi-nently worthwhile retrospectives thatmake one ashamed one didn’t knowmore about an artist before … [T]hisexhibition makes nonsense ofLewis’s claim to have been the be-alland end-all of Vorticism.

T. G. Rosenthal in The Listener (2December 1965) noted that

above all, Roberts has a remarkableorganizational ability in that he cancrowd a canvas or a drawing, such asCamel March of 1923 … with a multi-tude of people without ever losing thesense of form or space. WilliamRoberts is no path-finding genius, buthe is very much an artist to berespected and an essential chapter inthe history of twentieth-century Eng-lish painting.

The Times (20 November 1965)struck a more negative note: ‘currents of

opinion in England have alternatedbetween welcoming his work and for-getting it entirely … Mr. Roberts is real-ly a modernist in style but not in spirit.’However, the critic singled out thesmaller, earlier pictures for praise –works such as Rustic Scene – and com-mented, ‘[In] the earlier, adventurouslycoloured bicycle picture “Les Routiers”he has captured vitality in the formsthemselves, not merely reflected in thefaces.’

Frederick Laws in The Guardian (24November 1965) noted, ‘He is one of thefew English artists to have seen the pos-sibilities of Cubism early and to havesought to domesticate it … He has per-sisted in the service of an individualvision without fashionable approval orpopular success.’ Again the early workwas favoured, as being ‘of great powerand inventiveness’.

Frank Whitford in the Arts Review (11December 1965) discused at length whathe saw as the shortcomings of an artistwho had hardly allowed his work tochange over the years; however, he con-cluded by noting that ‘paradoxicallythese paintings which are so stylised,often forced and mannered in theextreme, are nevertheless frequentlymemorable and extremely stimulatingand exciting. How is it that paintingswith such obvious and glaring faultsdeeply affect the imagination?’Whitfordanswered this question with reference toThe Gutter, where ‘each gesture, eachinflection of the hand and tilt of the bodyfits in with its neighbour like a piece ofturned and polished steel fits into amachine. It is the completeness and utter

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The Playground, the left-hand section of The Gutter 1934–5

That a supposedly modernist avant-garde artist should attack kindredspirits may seem ironic; that is untilone begins to appreciate how superfi-cial Roberts’s own ‘modernism’ real-ly is. His jibes at the BloomsburyGroup are not only tiresome butunjustified since his own position isactually very close to that of Bell andGrant. His art represents a character-istically English dilution, along narra-tive lines, of an essentially formalconcept stemming from Europe.

In other circumstances this mighthave led to a Roberts pamphlet, but inthe context of what appears to have beena very successful exhibition Robertsseems to have let this pass, and within afew months he must have felt vindicatedby being elected a full Academician atthe RA.

WR ON DISPLAY

The Creole (aka Portrait of a Negress –Hélène Yelin) 1923 – see the September2012 newsletter – is on loan to TateBritain from the Potteries Museum aspart of the display ‘Spaces of BlackModernism: London 1919–39’ until 4October.

The Seaside c.1965–6 is part of theexhibition ‘One Day, Something Hap-

pens: Paintings of People’ (from the ArtsCouncil Collection) at Leeds Art Gallerytill 4 May, then touring to NottinghamCastle, 20 June–6 September; High-lanes, Drogheda, 17 October 2015–7February 2016; The Atkinson, South-port, 20 February–22 May 2016; Town-er, Eastbourne, 15 October 2016–8 Jan-uary 2017.

The pencil study for The Park Bench1933 continues in the exhibition ‘GreatBritish Drawings’ at the AshmoleanMuseum, Oxford, until 31 August, andThe Toe Dancer 1914 and Two-step I andII 1915 continue in the exhibition‘Gaudier-Brzeska: New Rhythms. Art,Dance and Movement in London1911–1915’ at Kettle’s Yard Gallery,Cambridge, until 21 June.

TOM DEVONSHIRE JONES

We were sorry to hear of the death inFebruary of WRS member the RevdTom Devonshire Jones, aged 80.Described in his Daily Telegraph ob-ituary as having been ‘the leadingnational figure in promoting closercollaboration between religion and thevisual arts’, from 1981 to 2000 he wasthe vicar of the Robertses’ localchurch, for which he borrowed WR’sThe Crucifixion c.1922 from theMethodist Art Collection.

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Printed in Great Britain by Parchments of Oxford.Except where indicated, all illustrations are © the estate of John David Roberts.

The cover of WR’s 1965 retrospective, showing him as a student at theSlade, as a gunner during the First World War, and as an Associate of the

Royal Academy