|
CERI RICHARDS
'A GREAT WELSH ARTIST'
A New Book by Mel Gooding
Ceri Richards was born in Wales in 1903 and lived
for most of his life in London. A draughtsman of genius and
a painter of rare energy and imagination, Richards trained
at the Royal College of Art in the mid-1920s, where began
his fiercely intelligent life-long engagement with modern
European art. He read and was deeply affected by Kandinsky,
and responded with profound intelligence to Picasso, Matisse
and Ernst. Later, he was to extend his creative scope to include
Rubens and Delacroix, and to assimilate poetry and music to
his artistic purposes. His restless imagination was constantly
fed by the most intent and assiduous attention to the energies
and forms of the natural world.
Image © Bernard Mitchell 2002.
In the 1930s Richards made a number of relief
constructions and paintings that constitute a major contribution
to symbolic Surrealism and rank with the best European art
of the period. A great deal of his work in the 1940s continued
to give a surrealist inflection to an apocalyptic imagery
that identified the cataclysm of the war with the cyclic drama
of nature. In art and poetry - in Rubens' Rape of the Sabines
and Delacroix's Lion Hunt, in the poetry of Dylan Thomas -
he found mythic allegories of sex and violence, procreation
and destruction that constituted a complex and utterly original
poetic response to the events of the time. In the late '40s
and early '50s, in paintings and drawings of music room interiors,
of London costermongers and, for the 1951 Festival, of Trafalgar
Square, Richards developed an intensely lyrical vision of
the everyday world in which brilliant colour, refracted light
and an exuberant visual music are components of domestic or
urban joy. In the late 1950s and early '60s he made a series
of great semi-abstract seascapes on the theme of La Cathedrale
Engloutie, which match the lyricism and sombre sonorities
of Debussy's prelude. Later he made a number of paintings,
lighter in mood and more graphic in treatment, of other themes
- Clair de Lune, Jardins sous la pluie, drawn from Debussy.
'Elegy for Vernon Watkins,' Lithograph 1971.
Ceri Richards Graphics, National Museum of Wales 1979.
Richards, himself a gifted musician, was unusually
responsive as an artist to music and poetry. His extraordinary
versatility enabled him to shift styles and to treat his subjects
and themes with a dazzling virtuosity. Few artists of his
time have encompassed such oppositions of subject and mood.
But for all its diversity of imagery and its variations of
mood there is underlying coherence to all Richards's work.
It is to be found in the constant recurrence of visual motifs
and symbols, always associated with the mythic cycles of nature
and of human life, or with the other great theme of his life's
work, the central necessity of art to human existence: these
figures include the human form, the arabesque, rock formations
and plant forms, sun, moon and roundel, seed-pod, leaf and
flower, and musical instruments, especially the piano. It
is to be found, too, in a constant inventive brilliance of
technique and execution, a characteristic clarity and certainty
of image that derives above all from a graphic gift that matches
those of the great predecessors, Delacroix, Matisse and Picasso,
to whom he paid the closest creative attention.
Poetry London, September-October
1947, three lithographs to the poem ' The force that through
the green fuse drives the flower' by Dylan Thomas.
In 1962 Richards represented Great Britain at
the Venice Biennale, and in 1981, ten years after his death
in London, he was the subject of a major retrospective at
the Tate Gallery. In Ceri Richards, to be published
by Cameron and Hollis in July 2002 (distributed by Thames
and Hudson, London) Mel Gooding traces the sources and course
of his work and places it in its biographical, historical,
artistic and intellectual contexts, with over 100 colour illustrations
and a wealth of documentary photographs. It will be of the
greatest interest to anybody interested in twentieth century
European art, and win a new generation of admirers for a great
artist.
Mel Gooding
READ ABOUT THE BOOK
LAUNCH HERE
|
|
Ceri Richards drawing of Dylan Thomas
FACTS:
- Ceri Richards was born in Wales in 1903, but he lived
most of his life in London.
- Richards trained at the Royal College of Art in the mid-1920s.
- Ceri Richards represented Great Britain at the Venice
Biennale in 1962.
- The book - 'Ceri Richards' by Mel Gooding
will be published by Cameron and Hollis and will be released
in July of 2002 by Thames and Hudson.
'Nijinsky', frontispiece, The Collected
Poems of Vernon Watkins. Golgonooza Press 1986. (A drawing
by Ceri Richards from 1912).
TO FIND OUT MORE
Visit the Glynn Vivian Gallery in Alexandra Road, Swansea,
where a gallery has been dedicated to
Ceri Richards.
'The Ballad of The Outer Dark,'
Vernon Watkins, front cover of dust jacket. Enitharmon Press
1979.
Poetry London, September-October
1947, three lithographs to the poem ' The force that through
the green fuse drives the flower' by Dylan Thomas.
Drawings from the Collected Poems of Dylan
Thomas
SPECIAL BOOK OFFER FROM DYLANS BOOKSHOP,
SWANSEA
Roberto Sanesei
: The Graphic Works of Ceri Richards. Printed and published
in Milan 1973. Translated by Richard Burns. Large 4to, profusely
illustrated
in colour and monochrome.
Out of Print, an invaluable reference work and very
hard to find. We have a few copies only @ £150.
WITH TWO FINE
SIGNED LITHOGRAPHS
ELEGIAC SONNET. A large and stunning portfolio, sumptously
produced in the
Immagini e Testi series , edited by Luigi Majno and Roberto
Sanesi for
M'Arte Edizioni Milan 1970.
Each portfolio contains a lithographed reproduction of Vernon
Watkins
original manuscript of his unpublished elegy for Dylan Thomas
and two
beautiful original Ceri Richards Lithographs, numbered signed
and dated. The
edition was of 149 copies only printed bt the Curwen Press.
We have the last few remaining portfolios of this late,
and great work and
can offer them at £750.
http://www.dylans.com
E-mail: JeffTowns@dylans.com
Salubrious passage,
Swansea SA1 3RT, Wales, UK.
Tel / Fax: 01792 655255
Mobile 07850 759199
|
