WAKEFIELD.- The Hepworth Wakefield is celebrating the work of British artist Gertrude Hermes OBE, RA with the first UK retrospective of her work in 30 years, featuring over 120 works.
This exhibition offers a new and fresh perspective on one of the most important British female artists of the twentieth century, and for the first time draws together the dialogue between her two-dimensional and three-dimensional work, showcasing her artistic journey - from schoolgirl, to teacher, engraver and sculptor, illustrator and craftswoman.
Hermes (1901-1983) was one of the most highly acclaimed British print-makers of her generation. While her exquisite wood engravings and prints earned her awards, titles and recognition, her first love was sculpture, much of which has remained unseen by a wider public until now. The exhibition Wild Girl: Gertrude Hermes, Sculptures & Prints seeks to redress this balance by presenting a compelling insight into Hermes’ audacious draughtsmanship and its extraordinary and explicit relationship to her sculpture.
On display are more than 40 sculptures by Hermes including decorative commissions and over 80 works on paper. These are presented alongside rarely seen school-girl notebooks, sketchpads, artists’ woodblocks, private press books, zoo drawings and a portrait of Hermes by her former tutor Leon Underwood.
Hermes’ work as a designer of architectural features, door-knockers, car mascots and commissioned book illustration is also re-examined in light of her prodigious sculptural output. Architectural and decorative commissions included a fountain for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, as well as weather vanes and door furniture.
Wild Girl presents the two distinct strands of the artist’s sculpture: carvings of organic forms, and highly representational sculptural portraits of friends, family and commissioned subjects, including a bronze of two of her children Judith and Simon (c. 1939). The persistence of natural forms in the work is demonstrated across time and medium; for example, an early drawing from nature featuring the heart shape of a fern's reproductive organs in her school girl sketchbooks, reappears many years later in the form of a sculptural work The Heart (1934) and the intricate engraving Five Senses (1934).
Other examples of Hermes' love of nature can be seen in her earliest sculptures, stone carvings of cows, birds, frogs and a rabbit made during the 1920s through to Butterfly (1937) a hand carved sculpture in walnut which made its debut at the London Group exhibition in 1937. While she was carving these extraordinary and vital sculptures, Hermes' was also addressing the same subjects in her engravings, often as illustrations for books such as Gilbert White's Natural History of Selbourne or the famous The Compleat Angler.
In 1945 Hermes began to introduce colour into her graphic work which still focused on natural themes. One of the most extraordinary of these was based on a drawing Hermes made while staying at the country home of her dear friend, the author Naomi Mitchison, in Carradale, in the Mull of Kintyre, Scotland. Ring Net Fishers depicts five fisherman on a boat hauling in a circular or ‘ring’ net which is one of the ways salmon are caught off the Scottish coast. This relationship with Mitchison was one of many that contributed to the networks of creativity, influence and friendship that included Henry Moore, P. L. Travers (for whom she illustrated the first edition of I Go by Sea, I Go By Land) and Frieda Lawrence.
Wild Girl: Gertrude Hermes, Sculptures & Prints opened alongside a new exhibition of the work by Italian-born contemporary artist Enrico David, with both artists exploring the critical dialogue between drawing and sculpture.
Born in Bromley, Kent, Gertrude Anna Bertha Hermes was the second of five children born to German parents, Louis August Hermes (1866-1949) and his wife, Helene, née Gerdes (1872-1949), of Altena, near Dortmund. Her father was a textile dealer and artistic director of Sambrook Whitting, manufacturers of patterned silk wear.
From 1919-20 Hermes studied at Beckenham School of Art and in 1922 she enrolled at the Brook Green School where she trained under Leon Underwood. Her fellow students included: Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Edna Ginesi and Blair Hughes-Stanton, whom she later married in 1926. Together the couple became leading lights in the early twentieth-century's wood-engraving revival and their collaborative designs for Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom attracted critical acclaim. She had two children with Blair, Simon Hughes-Stanton and Judith Russell, before the couple divorced in 1933.
A member of the English Wood-Engraving Society 1926; Society of Wood-Engravers 1933; London Group 1935; R.E. 1951, Hermes worked for the Cresset Press 1926, the Gregynog Press 1932, the Golden Cockerel Press 1936. Some of her key commissions included the design of a carved fountain with a mosaic pool floor and door fittings for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford on Avon, 1930.
Hermes exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1934 and was elected associate to the Royal Academy in 1963, a full member in 1971 and was awarded an OBE in 1981. She famously kicked up a fuss and wrote a letter to the RA in 1966 in which she protested against the fact that female Academicians were not invited to the dinner that followed the AGM. The next year female academicians were admitted alongside other distinguished female guests including Barbara Hepworth and Barbara Castle.
Her work was shown internationally. In 1937 Hermes produced a commission for the British Pavilion at the Paris World Fair and showed at the Venice International Exhibition in 1939. During the Second World War years 1940–5 Hermes lived in Canada and the USA where she worked on various commissions and drafted drawings of battleships and tanks. Hermes taught at the Camberwell School of Art 1945, and went on to teach wood engraving and animal engraving at Central School of Arts 1948 and later life drawing and wood engraving at St Martin's School of Art. From 1966 Hermes taught at the Royal Academy Schools, focusing on wood and lino block printing.
Her career was abruptly curtailed in 1969 by a stroke, which also tragically ended the flow of the large carved wood pieces that she was making on her own account.
