EASTBOURNE.- Towner Art Gallery announced Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship, English Artist Designers: 1922 to 1942. This major exhibition brings to life the significant relationships and collaborations within one of the most widely influential - though largely unexplored - English artist designer networks of the twentieth century.
Focused on Eric Ravilious and his personal and professional relationships with Paul Nash, John Nash, Enid Marx, Barnett Freedman, Tirzah Garwood, Edward Bawden, Thomas Hennell, Douglas Percy Bliss, Peggy Angus, Helen Binyon and Diana Low, the show also marks the 75th anniversary of the artist’s tragic death in Iceland during the Second World War.
Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship comprises over 400 paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, engravings, books, ceramics, wallpapers, textiles and other ephemera by practitioners who embraced both fine art and design. It highlights key moments in the artists’ lives and work from first meetings at the Royal College of Art to the evolution of their artistic practices into commercial and industrial design during the turbulent times of the 1930s and 1940s.
The exhibition also reveals the influence of members of the group on Ravilious’ prolific career including the role of Paul Nash in the artist’s development as the most significant wood engraver of his generation; the deep, connecting interests of Ravilious, Nash, Edward Bawden and artist-poet Thomas Hennell in landscape painting; the role of Barnett Freedman in encouraging his peers to take up lithography, which lead to Ravilious creating the works High Street and Submarine Lithographs; and the pivotal location of Furlongs, Peggy Angus’ East Sussex home, where many of Ravilious’ most important landscape paintings were made, as well as his first paintings of interiors. The exhibition presents important but never, or rarely shown works by Ravilious including a recently discovered painting, HMS Actaeon (1942).
Ravilious & Co casts a new light on the creativity of the women within the network and includes newly discovered work by Ravilious’ precociously talented wife, the wood engraver Tirzah Garwood who also specialised in marbled papers; watercolours, engravings and illustrations by Helen Binyon, the artist’s lover and confidante; never before exhibited early wood engravings by Enid Marx; and a range of fabric, textile and wallpaper designs by Diana Low and Peggy Angus, two other important contributors to the pattern of friendship.
Ravilious & Co presents an authentic immersive representation of a 1930s bookshop comprising nearly a hundred books, book covers and illustrations by Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, the Nash brothers, Ravilious and those who influenced them during an especially formative period in the production of artists’ books. The exhibition also features a design shop, reminiscent of Dunbar Hay, a mid-century London retailer founded to encourage links between artists and industry that sold works by Ravilious, Marx and others. The artist designers made significant contributions to commercial design from the end of the 1920s for Wedgwood, the BBC, London Transport, the GPO and many more.
A dedicated space within the exhibition documents rarely seen artworks and key artefacts illustrating the end of Ravilious’ life on 2 September 1942 off Iceland where he was working as a war artist.
In April 2017, Thames & Hudson published Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship, the first biography about the group, by the co-curator of the exhibition, Andy Friend, with an introduction by Alan Powers.
Ravilious & Co brings together works from twenty-six galleries and museums including Tate, National Portrait Gallery, V&A, the British Museum, Imperial War Museums and over thirty private collections. Towner Art Gallery holds the largest public collection of works by Eric Ravilious in the country, with a selection of his finest watercolours, prints and ceramics including many paintings of his beloved Sussex landscape.
