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WORK TITLE: The Art of David Jones
WORK NOTES: with Ariane Bankes
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
http://courtauld.ac.uk/people/paul-hills * https://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=1152
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 15, 1946.
EDUCATION:Attended Cambridge University; Courtauld Institute of Art (London, England), M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Warwick University, England, lecturer, 1976-98; Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England, professor, 2003-12, professor emeritus, 2012–. Curator of exhibitions at institutions, including the Tate Gallery. Visiting professor at colleges, including the Institute of Fine Arts, Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, and Royal College of Art.
WRITINGS
Also author of the books The Light of Early Italian Painting, 1987; Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting, and Glass, 1250-1550, 1999; and The Renaissance Image Unveiled: From Madonna to Venus, 2010. Contributor of articles to publications, including Oxford Art Journal, Burlington, and Times Literary Supplement.
SIDELIGHTS
Paul Hills is a British writer and educator. After attending Cambridge University, he went on to earn both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, England. From 1976 to 1998, Hills served as a lecturer at Warwick University. In 2003 he joined the Courtauld Institute of Art as a professor. He remained in that position for nine years and now holds the title of professor emeritus at the institute. Hills has also served as a visiting professor at institutions that include the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and the Royal College of Art. He has curated art exhibitions at galleries, including the Tate, in London, the Pallant House Gallery, and the Djanogly Gallery. The focus of his exhibitions and of much of his research has been on the work of British painter and writer David Jones.
In 2016 Hills and Ariane Barkes curated an exhibition on Jones’s work and released an accompanying book called The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory, in which they analyze the artist’s life and work. In an interview with Vincent Dowd through the British Broadcasting Corporation, he discussed his personal connection to Jones, noting that the two had developed a friendship not long before Jones passed away. He stated: “I visited him around ten times in Harrow, where he lived in a residential hotel. … He had had health problems ever since his first breakdown in 1932 and he was agoraphobic–largely he was confined to his room.” In the same interview with Dowd, Hills also commented on Jones’s recognition in current times. He stated: “It’s true that not many people under forty know much about him. … But I’ve noticed that when younger people are introduced to his work they often love it. Contemporary culture seems to share his taste for the mythological–it shows up in films and in the books people buy. David Jones was fascinated by Welsh history and mythology, and he loved Arthurian romance.”
K. Rhodes, a reviewer in Choice, asserted: “This book provides a fine introduction to an artist who should, indeed, be better known.” Writing in Spectator, Andrew Lambirth suggested: “It’s good to see Jones in the company of Pisanello and Botticelli, El Greco and Hogarth, the Wilton Diptych and Rubens.” In a lengthy assessment of the book on the New Welsh Review Web site, Katya Johnson commented: “The Art of David Jones is a beautifully produced, scholarly work of art criticism recommended to anyone with an interest in the poet or the history of British and continental modernism. It offers a rich overview of the artist-poet’s career that is firmly embedded in the cultural history of Britain’s interwar and postwar years, as well as keen insight into the unique nature of his genius: ceaselessly experimental, erudite and most often compared to … William Blake.” Francesca Brooks, a critic writing on the Los Angeles Review of Books Web site, remarked: “Offering itself as a moment of discovery for new generations, the book promises to invite uninitiated audiences into this circle of visual, material and sacral revelations. Published to coincide with a major retrospective at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, and cowritten by Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills, Vision and Memory explores the diversity and the formal and thematic unity of Jones’s corpus, as well as doing important work to place him within his wider art historical contexts.” Brooks continued: “Jones is presented as an engraver; a painter of watercolor landscapes and portraits; a unique, private painter of inscriptions, history, myth, and sacramental symbol.” Brooks concluded: “Bankes and Hills have found a subtle and evocative vocabulary for renewing discussions about David Jones’s work, and when words fail, Vision and Memory offers us a veritable treasure hoard of full-color images to speak in their absence.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, K. Rhodes, review of The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory, p. 1159.
Spectator (London, England), September 26, 2015, Andrew Lambirth, “Lines of Beauty,” review of The Art of David Jones, p. 39.
ONLINE
BBC Online, http://www.bbc.com/ (October 25, 2015), Vincent Down, author interview.
Courtauld Institute of Art Web site, http://courtauld.ac.uk/ (March 29, 2017), author faculty profile.
Los Angeles Review of Books Online, http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org (March 14, 2016), Francesca Brooks, review of The Art of David Jones.
New Welsh Review Online, https://www.newwelshreview.com/ (March 29, 2017), Katya Johnson, review of The Art of David Jones.
New York Times Book Review Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (February 9, 2016), Roderick Conway Morris, review of The Art of David Jones.
LC control no.: n 81148186
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Hills, Paul
Birth date: 19461115
Found in: Jones, D. M. David Jones, 1981 (a.e.) p. 7 (Dr. Paul Hills,
lecturer in hist. of art at Warwick U.)
His The light of early Italian painting, 1987: CIP t.p.
(Paul Hills) data sheet (b. 11/15/46)
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Paul Hills is Professor Emeritus at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He curated the major David Jones retrospective at the Tate in 1981 and convened the centenary conference on the artist at the University of Warwick in 1995. His previous publications include The Light of Early Italian Painting (1987) and Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250-1550 (1999). Following completion of an MA at the Courtauld Institute, Ariane Bankes worked for many years in publishing and the commercial art world. Her articles and reviews on a wide variety of arts subjects have appeared in the Spectator, the RA Magazine and the TLS, and she collaborated with Jonathan Reekie on The New Aldeburgh Anthology (2009).
Paul Hills
Professor Emeritus
Contact Details
paul.hills@courtauld.ac.uk
Paul Hills is well known for his publications on light, colour and veils in Italian Renaissance art, as well as on the poet and painter David Jones (1895-1974). After studying at Cambridge, he took an MA and a PhD at The Courtauld. As lecturer at Warwick University, from 1976 to 1998, he directed the History of Art programme in Venice. In 1981 he curated the retrospective exhibition of David Jones at the Tate Gallery and he has continued to write catalogue essays on Jones and on contemporary artists including Ana Maria Pacheco, Antoni Malinowski and Shirazeh Houshiary. He has been a visiting professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York; The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti; and the Royal College of Art in London. He took up a professorship of Renaissance Art at the Courtauld in 2003 and taught there until his retirement in 2012. He continues to lecture and give seminars at national and international venues. His books include The Light of Early Italian Painting (Yale, 1987), Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250-1550 (Yale, 1999), The Renaissance Image Unveiled: from Madonna to Venus (National Galleries of Scotland, 2010); The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory (Lund Humphries), co-authored with Ariane Bankes, will appear in October 2015.
PhD students
Recently completed
Mary Camp, “The Portraits of Jacopo Pontormo” (with Dr Scott Nethersole)
Michela Pittaluga, Collections and Social Status: Venetian Presence in Genoese Collections of the Golden Century (1523-1656/7)
Research interests
Veils and drapery in Medieval and Renaissance Art.
The Clothing of Christ
Colour and language.
The art and poetry of David Jones (1895-1974)
Vision science and theories of perception.
Recent publications
‘Titian’s fire: pyrotechnics and representations in sixteenth-century Venice’, Oxford Art Journal, 30, Issue 2, June 2007, pp. 185-204.
‘Art History Reviewed XIII: Michael Baxandall’s “Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy” 1972’, in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. CLII, no. 1299, June 2011, pp. 404-08. Reprinted in The Books that Shaped Art History, ed. R. Shone and J-P. Stonard, London 2013, pp. 150-63.
‘Titian’s Flight into Egypt’, review of exhibition at the National Gallery, Burlington Magazine, CLIV, August 2012, pp. 588-9.
‘Lorenzo Lotto’s Shrouds and Veils’, Artibus et Historiae, no. 68 (XXXIV), 2013, pp. 9-28.
Review of exhibtion of Barocci at the National Gallery, Times Literary Supplement, 19 April 2013, pp. 17-18.
Review of exhibition of Veronese at the National Gallery, Times Literary Supplement, 2 May 2014, pp. 17-18.
Other current/ongoing professional activities
Co-curating exhibition ‘David Jones: Vision and Memory’, Pallant House, Chichester, 25 October 2015 to 1 February 2016.
Veils and Drapery in Italian Renaissance Art: Material and Metaphor is scheduled to appear in 2016 (Yale University Press)
QUOTED: "I visited him around ten times in Harrow, where he lived in a residential hotel. ... He had had health problems ever since his first breakdown in 1932 and he was agoraphobic–largely he was confined to his room."
"It's true that not many people under 40 know much about him. ... But I've noticed that when younger people are introduced to his work they often love it. Contemporary culture seems to share his taste for the mythological - it shows up in films and in the books people buy. David Jones was fascinated by Welsh history and mythology and he loved Arthurian romance."
The tragedy and gaiety of David Jones
By Vincent Dowd Arts reporter, BBC News
25 October 2015
From the section Entertainment & Arts
Share
Image copyright Getty Images
Image caption Jones' name (circled) is on a memorial to British poets of World War I in Westminster Abbey
David Jones found critical acclaim both as a painter and a poet and wrote an epic poem about World War I, yet little of his work is familiar today. Can two new exhibitions in Sussex return the artist-writer to the mainstream?
Thirty years ago, when poet laureate Ted Hughes unveiled a memorial in Westminster Abbey to the British poets of World War I, 16 names appeared on the stone. David Jones' was among them.
Compared to the likes of Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen or even Isaac Rosenberg, Jones was a less obvious inclusion. By the time he died in 1974, though, he had created a body of work much admired by critics.
As a writer, Jones was known for In Parenthesis, an epic war poem that came out in 1937. It's a complex work about more than just the war he had fought in as a young man.
The poem's reputation grew when the BBC produced a radio adaptation in 1946, remade two years later with the young Richard Burton in the cast, while admirers of his writing included TS Eliot and WH Auden.
Art historian Paul Hills is co-curator of David Jones: Vision and Memory, an exhibition that opens this weekend at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. His love of Jones' visual art began during his student years when he was introduced to the artist, then 73.
"I visited him around ten times in Harrow, where he lived in a residential hotel," says Hills. "He had had health problems ever since his first breakdown in 1932 and he was agoraphobic - largely he was confined to his room. So he got a reputation as a terrible recluse."
Image copyright National Museum of Wales
Image caption Capel-y-ffin in Wales (left) and one-time fiancee Petra Gill were among Jones' subjects
Jones has been written of as having a deep depressive streak, but Hills says that is not the whole story.
"The David Jones I knew could have the most wonderful smile. He was supremely alert and was extraordinarily welcoming and had a real gift for friendship.
"He loved having visitors and he could move from solemnity to gaiety with great speed: there was an impishness to him. I think all that is reflected in the artwork in the exhibition."
The show's other curator is Ariane Bankes, who says that while there has not been a major Jones show for 20 years, "it would be wrong to call him forgotten".
"But we both felt the time was right to reintroduce him to a wider audience," she goes on, saying people "may be surprised what they find."
"It's true that not many people under 40 know much about him," says Professor Hills. "But I've noticed that when younger people are introduced to his work they often love it.
"Contemporary culture seems to share his taste for the mythological - it shows up in films and in the books people buy. David Jones was fascinated by Welsh history and mythology and he loved Arthurian romance."
One of the most personal paintings in the show is The Garden Enclosed (1924). It shows David Jones with Petra, the daughter of artist Eric Gill.
Image copyright Trustees of David Jones
Image caption A discarded doll can be seen in The Garden Enclosed, which shows the artist with Petra Gill
Jones was engaged to Petra Gill for three years. Ultimately, though, she called off the engagement and Jones was never to marry.
"It's a powerful image," says Ariane Bankes. "It shows a man and a woman in a form of embrace, but she appears to be pushing him away.
"On the ground lies a discarded doll, which you could interpret as the end of childhood and of innocence. There's a slightly hallucinatory quality to the image and he's playing with the perspective.
"Overall it feels like the work of someone very undecided. It's not a happy painting, but it's a gem of a work and very original."
Also in the exhibition is a beautiful watercolour of Capel-y-ffin, near Hay-on-Wye in Wales. Eric Gill ran a workshop here in the 1920s, with Jones a sort of disciple.
The emotions that surrounded Jones' time there were intense. Yet Paul Hills says it would be wrong to associate Jones' work with non-stop emotional trauma.
"Since he was a young boy he'd adored sketching and painting animals," he reveals. "There's a lovely sketch of a dancing bear from when he was only seven, in which you already see a talent."
As well as the main exhibition in Chichester, a smaller display at the Ditchling Museum in East Sussex concentrates on Jones' animal images, including a delightful elephant he painted after a visit to London Zoo in 1928.
Image copyright National Museum of Wales
Image caption Jones' Elephant is one of the works on display in Ditchling
For much of his life Jones faced psychological challenges. Yet Paul Hills says, in some ways, he was a tough character.
"He volunteered for the First World War and when he was in the trenches he volunteered for missions into No Man's Land.
"In some way he relished the war and the camaraderie it offered. But undoubtedly later in life the war contributed to his problems, which at times stopped him painting."
Ariane Bankes thinks Jones came to terms with his depression and used it in his work. "In those days people might have used the word neurasthenia," she says, an alternative term for shell shock or post-traumatic stress disorder.
"In fact, David Jones called that state of mind 'Rosy', which is the middle of the word neurosis. But he was never totally bowed down by it."
Paul Hills says one of the main aims of the Pallant House show is to reveal the variety of Jones' talent. "There's tragedy, comedy, a witty gaiety, but also an intense solemnity.
"I know that sometimes confuses people, but I think it's part of his brilliance".
The exhibitions in Sussex are not the only sign of a revival of interest in David Jones. In May next year, Welsh National Opera will premiere an opera based on In Parenthesis.
David Jones: Vision and Memory is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 21 February. The Animals of David Jones is at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft until 6 March.
QUOTED: "This book provides a fine introduction to an artist who should, indeed, be better known."
Bankes, Ariane. The art of David Jones: vision and memory
K. Rhodes
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1159.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Bankes, Ariane. The art of David Jones: vision and memory, by Abane Bankes and Paul Hills. Lund Humphries, 2015. 176p bibl index afp ISBN 9781848221604 cloth, $56.98
53-3367
N6797
2014-47867 CIP
Jones, unlike his contemporaries Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, is not currently part of the canon of 20th-century British artists. The Art of David Jones addresses this inattention, providing a thorough and fully illustrated art historical account of the artist's career. A visual artist and a poet, Jones fought in WW I and, upon returning from the trenches, enrolled in art school. His early career was largely shaped by his time in The Guild of St. Joseph and St. Dominic under the mentorship of Eric Gill. Here, Jones immersed himself in Roman Catholicism, developed a primitivist style, and became a skilled engraver. Jones remained connected to printmaking throughout his artistic life, but he is recognized today for the watercolor landscapes he began producing in the 1920s, which have as much in common with American modernist work by John Marin as they do with Jones's British contemporary Paul Nash. By placing Jones's oeuvre in an art historical context that includes Old Master paintings and the romantic works of Samuel Palmer and against a broad historical backdrop that includes both world wars, this book provides a fine introduction to an artist who should, indeed, be better known. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.--K. Rhodes, Drew University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rhodes, K. "Bankes, Ariane. The art of David Jones: vision and memory." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1159+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661498&it=r&asid=c1397d2eed9b27bb0e1ea8eaf2e5a491. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
QUOTED: "It's good to see Jones in the company of Pisanello and Botticelli, El Greco and Hogarth, the Wilton Diptych and Rubens."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661498
Lines of beauty
Andrew Lambirth
329.9761 (Sept. 26, 2015): p39.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory
by Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills
Lund Humphries, 40 [pounds sterling], pp. 176, ISBN9781848221604
Spectator Bookshop, 36 [pounds sterling]
David Jones (1895-1974) was a remarkable figure: artist and poet, he was a great original in both disciplines. His was an art of 'gathering things in' that engaged imaginatively with history and myth, with his Welsh heritage and the Christian religion. But art also comes out of conflict, and the tension between the two sides of Jones's creative nature was the motive force that powered so much, both visual and written.
Thus it can be misleading to separate his writing from his painting, for they form and express a single vision. However, Jones is presently most celebrated for his writing, particularly his first world war epic poem, In Parenthesis. Before that was published, in 1937, he was known as a painter and engraver, described by Kenneth Clark as 'in many ways the most gifted of all the younger English painters'. After In Parenthesis was hailed by T.S. Eliot as 'a work of genius', and by W.H. Auden as 'a masterpiece', Jones was feted as a writer, with his painting taking a secondary role. This is unfair, but the English have always been happier with literature than visual art.
As a first-generation modernist poet, Jones was neatly classifiable, but of course he fled the pigeonhole by being an artist of great distinction as well. This book is dedicated to reassessing Jones as painter and printmaker, and restating the case for his serious consideration. As such, one of its chief joys is the wide range of illustrations, while the accompanying text is both readable and informative.
Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills have sensibly divided the narrative and analysis of Jones's life in art between them. Hills actually knew Jones in later years and Bankes has a long-standing admiration for his art; their combination makes a book at once authoritative and enthusiastic.
I found the chapter on Jones's influences particularly valuable. It's good to see Jones in the company of Pisanello and Botticelli, El Greco and Hogarth, the Wilton Diptych and Rubens. It's also good to be reminded that A.S. Hartrick, rather a forgotten figure nowadays, was Jones's tutor at Camberwell School of Art. Hartrick had known van Gogh and Gauguin and was thus one of England's few direct links to the beating heart of Modernism; interestingly, he also inspired Victor Pasmore, another giant of modern British art.
Jones was a foot soldier throughout the first world war, was badly wounded in the battle of the Somme and nearly died from trench fever in February 1918. Post-war, he continued his studies and enrolled at Westminster School of Art under Walter Bayes. Pursuing a heartfelt religious belief he converted to Catholicism and joined Eric Gill, one of the leading Modernist sculptors, in his community of craftsmen at Ditchling in Sussex. Then in 1924 Gill moved to Capel-y-ffin, near Abergavenny, where Jones continued to visit him. Gill was a pioneer of wood engraving and encouraged Jones to experiment with the medium. In the densely imagined and densely patterned wood engravings for The Chester Play of the Deluge, Jones first found his voice.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
But it was his paintings that really marked out his originality. Jones did not often paint in oils, preferring a mixture of pencil and watercolour. In early years, watercolour and gouache predominated; later on the drawn line became increasingly important. The linear tracery of the pencil works with--and sometimes against--the more painterly impulses of the watercolour, and the gentleness of his mark-making can disguise the consummate skill. His landscapes look rumpled: well-used, folded and creased, not flat but hilly and full of movement. The paint is stroked on or rubbed into the paper to create his characteristic flickering surfaces.
In later years Jones favoured insubstantial floating forms and opalescent colour, though the rhythm of the lines was still lyrical, owing something to Celtic ornament. He also made painted inscriptions of water-coloured lettering. These are beautifully composed and placed on the page, with unusual line-breaks and a mixture of forms and languages encouraging the viewer to look at the shape of the words rather than their sense. This was word as image, the closest reconciliation of Jones's cultural duality, and one of the many high points in an exceptional career.
David Jones: Vision and Memory, an exhibition of his work, will be on show at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, West Sussex, 24 October 2015-21 February 2016.
Lambirth, Andrew
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lambirth, Andrew. "Lines of beauty." Spectator, 26 Sept. 2015, p. 39. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA429720955&it=r&asid=e53d0e7374cbcf623634075a32eb937e. Accessed 25 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A429720955
QUOTED: "The Art of David Jones is a beautifully produced, scholarly work of art criticism recommended to anyone with an interest in the poet or the history of British and continental modernism. It offers a rich overview of the artist-poet’s career that is firmly embedded in the cultural history of Britain’s interwar and postwar years, as well as keen insight into the unique nature of his genius: ceaselessly experimental, erudite and most often compared to ... William Blake."
REVIEW by Katya Johnson
NWR Issue r6
The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory
by Paul Hills & Ariane Bankes
David Jones (1895–1974) is better known as a poet than an artist. His first book-length poem, In Parenthesis, published by Faber & Faber in 1937 – a mythopoeic response to his experience of trench warfare – is a classic work of High modernism, and was praised by contemporaries such as TS Eliot. His second full-length work, The Anathemata (1952), as with the work of his better known modernist peers (Joyce, Pound and Eliot) dwelt on the image of modern man through the telescope of historical and religious processes. However, for the whole of his life, David Jones was also a working artist; though he was primarily a watercolourist, he engaged with a variety of media and forms including wood engraving, book illustration and runic painted inscriptions. The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory (2015) by Paul Hills and art critic Ariane Bankes, is the first first full book-length treatment of his artwork since the Tate Britain exhibition catalogue published in 1981. It provides a fascinating insight into the extraordinary life of a key yet under-studied figure in the history of British modernism and forges illuminating connections between his artwork and his poetry.
As a painter of the mid-twentieth century, especially prolific between the 1920s and 1950s, David Jones employed a highly distinctive visual language that clearly bridges both the abstraction of the cubists, literary modernism and British neo-Romanticism – a blossoming of the post-war period. Even a quick glance at his oeuvre will reveal an impressive stylistic uniformity connecting works throughout his career: a visual lyricism which rendered everyday subjects with a magical lightness of touch. A typical David Jones watercolour takes an ordinary, even conventional subject – a vase of flowers or prospect over the sea – and distils it into a fantastical composition of pale pigments and flowing pencil lines, reminiscent of the dreamscapes of Chagall or the serenity of a Matisse oil. Yet despite the underlying romanticism and fragility of these works, the sense of spatial dislocation inherent in them as well as their simplified forms, sharply recall the influence of British Modernist practitioners such as Eric Gill, Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash.
The first half of The Art of David Jones narrates the story of how Jones came to develop his personal vision as an artist in close reference to the biography: during his times as a student at the Camberwell School of Art, as a foot soldier in the trenches and as an apprentice to the spiritualised guild of craftsmen-artists founded by sculptor Eric Gill. Such a chronological approach suits the content of his work, which was so clearly linked to his life. Jones painted what he had contact with and what seemed significant to him: whether that was friends he admired such as the poet Harman Grisewood and socialite Lady Prudence Pelham, or landscapes that enchanted him in Wales such as Caldey Island and Capel-y-ffin. His artwork in this section can at a superficial level be regarded as a diary of his life and the people he met along the way.
The second half of the book catalogues Jones’ departure from realism towards the more literary, symbolic world that his later paintings inhabit. In order to do so, the authors discuss his major themes after his nervous breakdown in 1932. These were his revival of interest in the Old Masters, chivalric and Celtic cosmography, and the Arthurian legend of the Sangrael. The more complex and difficult works dating from the early 1930s include paintings such as ‘Illustration to the Arthurian Legend: Guinever’, 1940, and the frontispiece to In Parenthesis which depicts an embattled military hero standing among a fallen, fractured landscape of barbed wire and bleak wintry trees. Finally, the book offers a chapter analysis of what many critics regard as the artist’s most intriguing period: his cycle of calligraphic inscriptions. Presented in a liturgical style and making use of an esoteric intertextual script of Welsh and Latin words, these inscriptions occupy precisely the boundary line between text and image that fascinated Jones his entire life.
The Art of David Jones is a beautifully produced, scholarly work of art criticism recommended to anyone with an interest in the poet or the history of British and continental modernism. It offers a rich overview of the artist-poet’s career that is firmly embedded in the cultural history of Britain’s interwar and postwar years, as well as keen insight into the unique nature of his genius: ceaselessly experimental, erudite and most often compared to his forebear, artist-visionary William Blake.
Katya Johnson is a PhD candidate in English & Creative Writing at the University of Aberystwyth and a blogger-in-residence at New Welsh Review
David Jones: painter, poet and mystic
Jones’s floating lines and rumpled landscapes are handsomely illustrated in Ariane Bankes’s and Paul Hills’s tribute to his ‘Vision and Memory’
Andrew Lambirth
David Jones (1895–1974) was a remarkable figure: artist and poet, he was a great original in both disciplines. His was an art of ‘gathering things in’ that engaged imaginatively with history and myth, with his Welsh heritage and the Christian religion. But art also comes out of conflict, and the tension between the two sides of Jones’s creative nature was the motive force that powered so much, both visual and written.
Thus it can be misleading to separate his writing from his painting, for they form and express a single vision. However, Jones is presently most celebrated for his writing, particularly his first world war epic poem, In Parenthesis. Before that was published, in 1937, he was known as a painter and engraver, described by Kenneth Clark as ‘in many ways the most gifted of all the younger English painters’. After In Parenthesis was hailed by T.S. Eliot as ‘a work of genius’, and by W.H. Auden as ‘a masterpiece’, Jones was feted as a writer, with his painting taking a secondary role. This is unfair, but the English have always been happier with literature than visual art.
As a first-generation modernist poet, Jones was neatly classifiable, but of course he fled the pigeonhole by being an artist of great distinction as well. This book is dedicated to reassessing Jones as painter and printmaker, and restating the case for his serious consideration. As such, one of its chief joys is the wide range of illustrations, while the accompanying text is both readable and informative.
Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills have sensibly divided the narrative and analysis of Jones’s life in art between them. Hills actually knew Jones in later years and Bankes has a long-standing admiration for his art; their combination makes a book at once authoritative and enthusiastic.
I found the chapter on Jones’s influences particularly valuable. It’s good to see Jones in the company of Pisanello and Botticelli, El Greco and Hogarth, the Wilton Diptych and Rubens. It’s also good to be reminded that A.S. Hartrick, rather a forgotten figure nowadays, was Jones’s tutor at Camberwell School of Art. Hartrick had known van Gogh and Gauguin and was thus one of England’s few direct links to the beating heart of Modernism; interestingly, he also inspired Victor Pasmore, another giant of modern British art.
Jones was a foot soldier throughout the first world war, was badly wounded in the battle of the Somme and nearly died from trench fever in February 1918. Post-war, he continued his studies and enrolled at Westminster School of Art under Walter Bayes. Pursuing a heartfelt religious belief he converted to Catholicism and joined Eric Gill, one of the leading Modernist sculptors, in his community of craftsmen at Ditchling in Sussex. Then in 1924 Gill moved to Capel-y-ffin, near Abergavenny, where Jones continued to visit him. Gill was a pioneer of wood engraving and encouraged Jones to experiment with the medium. In the densely imagined and densely patterned wood engravings for The Chester Play of the Deluge, Jones first found his voice.
But it was his paintings that really marked out his originality. Jones did not often paint in oils, preferring a mixture of pencil and watercolour. In early years, watercolour and gouache predominated; later on the drawn line became increasingly important. The linear tracery of the pencil works with — and sometimes against — the more painterly impulses of the watercolour, and the gentleness of his mark-making can disguise the consummate skill. His landscapes look rumpled: well-used, folded and creased, not flat but hilly and full of movement. The paint is stroked on or rubbed into the paper to create his characteristic flickering surfaces.
In later years Jones favoured insubstantial floating forms and opalescent colour, though the rhythm of the lines was still lyrical, owing something to Celtic ornament. He also made painted inscriptions of water-coloured lettering. These are beautifully composed and placed on the page, with unusual line-breaks and a mixture of forms and languages encouraging the viewer to look at the shape of the words rather than their sense. This was word as image, the closest reconciliation of Jones’s cultural duality, and one of the many high points in an exceptional career.
Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £36 Tel: 08430 600033. David Jones: Vision and Memory, an exhibition of his work, will be on show at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, West Sussex, 24 October 2015 – 21 February 2016.
QUOTED: "offering itself as a moment of discovery for new generations, the book promises to invite uninitiated audiences into this circle of visual, material and sacral revelations. Published to coincide with a major retrospective at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, and co-written by Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills, Vision and Memory explores the diversity and the formal and thematic unity of Jones’s corpus, as well as doing important work to place him within his wider art historical contexts."
"Jones is presented as an engraver; a painter of watercolor landscapes and portraits; a unique, private painter of inscriptions, history, myth, and sacramental symbol."
"Bankes and Hills have found a subtle and evocative vocabulary for renewing discussions about David Jones’s work, and when words fail, Vision and Memory offers us a veritable treasure-hoard of full-color images to speak in their absence."
“A deeply textured trove of learning and reference”: The Gift of David Jones – By Francesca Brooks
March 14, 2016
Francesca Brooks on Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills, The Art of David Jones
Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills, The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory, Lund Humphries, 2015, 176pp., $80
Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills, The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory, Lund Humphries, 2015, 176pp., $80
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It was in the afternoon sunshine at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge that I first saw David Jones’s painted inscription ‘Quia per incarnati’ in the flesh. In this eccentric work of painted calligraphy, with quotations from the Latin Mass crowding for space, each letter has its own life and character. When I had first seen it reproduced in black and white in Jones’s long, late-modernist poem The Anathemata (1952), ‘Quia per incarnati’ had looked like a stone carving recently unearthed from the deep past. Seen in Kettle’s Yard, however, it was clear why Jones considered his painted inscriptions to be his “own form of abstraction”: it looked like nothing I had ever seen before, ancient or modern.
Even though this Anglo-Welsh artist and First World War poet was widely acclaimed by the luminaries of his day, including T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Kenneth Clark, Jones has slipped into something like obscurity since then. Yet at times, among those who know of him, it can feel like Jones is a password or a secret key that grants access to untold revelations, treasures and insights. Say his name, profess devotion, and before you know it a lost print is being pulled down from a bookshelf, a memory is shared, a book finds its way into your hands, or a promise of some pilgrimage is made. There is always a story to be told about how and where Jones was discovered, because, with all the revelation of a religious conversion, Jones must be discovered.
This is the gift of The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory; offering itself as a moment of discovery for new generations, the book promises to invite uninitiated audiences into this circle of visual, material and sacral revelations. Published to coincide with a major retrospective at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, and co-written by Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills, Vision and Memory explores the diversity and the formal and thematic unity of Jones’s corpus, as well as doing important work to place him within his wider art historical contexts. Jones is presented as an engraver; a painter of watercolor landscapes and portraits; a unique, private painter of inscriptions, history, myth, and sacramental symbol.
Looking at one of Jones’s remote, Welsh landscapes it is all too easy to think of him, rather romantically, as a “solitary perfectionist” (as Kathleen Raine called him). After a visit to Jones in his hotel at Harrow-on-the-Hill in the 1960s, the scholar, translator and poet, Michael Alexander, characterized him as a Celtic hermit: “poring over ancient religious texts, preserving, illustrating, and interpreting them for posterity.” In a photograph from the National Portrait Gallery collection, we find Jones surrounded by books, wood carvings, totemic objects, and hand-painted inscriptions in Latin, Welsh, and Old English; he certainly appears to be a man living peculiarly out of time. In Jones’s work everything is imbued with the symbolism and resonance of his Catholicism — he converted when he was in his twenties — so that a glass of flowers arranged before a window becomes Flora in Calix Light (1950), transubstantiating before our eyes. While Vision and Memory preserves this sense of Jones’s singularity and unique vision, it also explores his work as a professional artist in London in his secular contexts.
Vision and Memory charts Jones’s first commercial exhibitions in London and his involvement with the Seven and Five Society, a post-war group which famously included British abstract artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore. Also explored are Jones’s contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of the city through circles of artists and critics, including the crowds associated with the Ede’s Hampstead house, and St Leonard’s Terrace. Jones is shown to be not just a rural landscape painter and recluse, but also a veritable artist of the city, who cultivated friendships throughout his life.
The connections made between David Jones and the work of the Masters he admired on regular visits to the National Gallery and the V&A are also enlightening. What Jones’s luminous watercolors owe to the shimmer of light breaking through an El Greco sky, or the lucent fabrics draped over his elongated figures, is a suggestive and exciting question. On the subject of his passion for the voluptuous flesh of Rubens’s oil paintings, Hills describes how Jones admired “the ease with which Rubens combined the domestic with the mythological, imbuing the portraits of his wife with the aura of Venus or Flora, or Ceres.” The visual echoes of, say, Rubens’s portrait of his wife Helene Fourment (naked except for a fur robe) in Aphrodite in Aulis (1940-1), demonstrates just how much Jones learnt from his time spent wandering London’s galleries; Jones’s Aphrodite also coyly clasps a robe to her ample flesh.
A tour of Jones’s National Gallery, according to Hills, would also include works such as Paolo Uccello’s The Rout of San Romano, El Greco’s The Agony in the Garden and Christ Among the Money Changers, as well as The Wilton Diptych. What Jones found in these paintings was a kind of archive of symbols and archetypes that were each capable of a recalling a tangled history of allusion: The Wilton’s Diptych’s white hart, for example, is an analogue for the wounded stag in Jones’s illustration for T.S Eliot’s The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. Yet Hills also reminds us that Jones did not just see the history of art as a “repository of images and styles that can be imitated, borrowed […] or stolen” but as a reminder of “the past as a living continuum.”
The chapter on “Rediscovering the Masters” finishes with the bold claim that, “Like Aby Warburg, David Jones as a critic, poet and artist pioneered a new way of engaging with the significance of art in history and culture.” If the past is a lens through which we can view Jones’s work, then its perspective is kaleidoscopic. A quick glance at the endpapers of the book, which reproduce a “Map of themes in the artist’s mind” from the Tate Archives, is powerful confirmation: in this mind-map of Jones’s literary, historical, and mythical sources, arrows of influence shoot off in all directions so that, for example, the “Arabian-Spanish complex” links to “French and German Romance” via the “Provencal Courts of Love.” Time, in Jones’s paintings, is multiple and complex.
This enrichment of our understanding of Jones’s place within art history is timely given that Jones is now widely acknowledged as having a “moment.” A hundred years after the First World War, each centenary year brings a handful of opportunities to spread the word about David Jones and have new conversations about his work. The Pallant House retrospective coincides with an exhibition of ‘The Animals of David Jones’ at the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, and in the summer The Welsh National Opera will premiere an adaptation of Jones’ account of the First World War, In Parenthesis, by the young, British composer Iain Bell. A conference at the University of York in July, David Jones: Dialogues with the Past, may well be a springboard for yet more projects in coming years.
At a more local level, David Jones was recently commemorated at his childhood home in the London suburb of Brockley with a maroon plaque, Lewisham Council’s equivalent of the famous London blue plaque. It is the Brockley connection that brings us to one of the key questions Vision and Memory raises: where does Jones belong? And what can a more nuanced sense of belonging bring to our reading of his work? Vision and Memory introduces us to a collection of Brockley paintings made in 1925 and 1926. In these paintings we move from the ordered interiors of The Dog on the Sofa or The Sitting Room, Howson Road, to the rows of suburban gardens in A Town Garden or Brockley Gardens (Summer), where the wild bloom of the trees gestures towards a landscape beyond the terraced houses of the neighborhood where Jones grew up.
This landscape beyond, we realize, is as multiple as Jones’s sense of time. Often described as an Anglo-Welsh artist and poet, the label doesn’t really do justice to Jones’s relationship to the “inward continuities” of the many different localities which inform site and place in his work. In Vision and Memory David Jones’s stylistic developments are introduced through their relationship to the climatic accidents, rhythms, textures, and palettes of the landscape surrounding him; each sojourn in a new place gifts Jones’s work with something different. For example, Bankes explains that “while the Welsh hill-rhythms around Capel played their part in loosening up his style, the bays and inlets of Caldy’s coastline presented [him with] the force of the elements and the immensity of the ocean.” A narrative develops of Jones as a local and located, landscape painter; as the Pallant House exhibition makes clear, Jones was also an artist with rich and productive connections to the rural and coastal landscapes of Sussex, having spent time living and painting in Ditchling, Piggotts, Portslade, and Brighton.
In the book’s concluding chapter on David Jones’s late painted inscriptions, “Word and Image,” the question is no longer where Jones belongs, but to whom. Existing somewhere between poetry and painting, these inscriptions were a private art made for friends to celebrate Christmas and birthdays, or to commemorate weddings, christenings, and even the occasional ordination. Jones produced around eighty of them in the period between the early 1940s and the late 1960s, and he often could not bear to part with the originals, preferring instead to keep them around him with his books and other treasured objects. Hills describes them as sharing “something in common with the folk art of embroidered samplers that were once hung in almost every Victorian home and every Welsh cottage” and their simple intimacy is an invitation for each of us to begin a dialogue with Jones’s work.
A special vocabulary is necessary for conveying the quality of a David Jones painting in words, a vocabulary that expresses the ineffable. Words such as “numinous” and “diaphanous” are repeated in the absence of a more sublime lexicon: Vision and Memory also struggles to reach beyond this problem. Looking at a David Jones painting, moving your eyes across what is described in Vision and Memory as that “deeply textured trove of learning and reference,” — the tangled pattern of line, color, allusion, and evanescent detail — has an effect akin to looking heavenwards in some grand, medieval cathedral. Bankes and Hills have found a subtle and evocative vocabulary for renewing discussions about David Jones’s work, and when words fail, Vision and Memory offers us a veritable treasure-hoard of full-color images to speak in their absence.
Reviving the Art of David Jones
By RODERICK CONWAY MORRISFEB. 9, 2016
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David Jones’s “Human Being” from 1931. The self-portrait is part of the retrospective ‘‘Vision and Memory’’ in Chichester and then Nottingham in England. Credit Private Collection, Trustees of David Jones Estate
CHICHESTER, England — The British artist, poet and critic David Jones was something of a prodigy. In 1909, at age 14, he won a place at Camberwell College of Arts and Crafts in London, where his first teacher held his work up as an example to older students, saying: “Look at that, you see, Jones leaves everything out except the magic.”
His art, especially his watercolors, continued to win him acclaim as he grew older. In 1936, the critic Kenneth Clark, then the director of the National Gallery in London, wrote that he was “in many ways the most gifted of all the young British painters.”
The next year, Jones’s first significant foray into verse, the long poem “In Parenthesis,” inspired by his experiences as an infantryman in World War I, was described by T.S. Eliot as “a work of genius.”
Yet his choice of genres worked against his long-term popularity. He wrote few short poems suitable for anthologies. And most of his painted works are watercolors, which are too delicate for permanent display, and their subtle colors make them difficult to reproduce.
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The centenary of World War I brought renewed interest in Jones’s poetry. Now, an exhibition, “David Jones: Vision and Memory,” offers a stimulating retrospective of his paintings, drawings, engravings and calligraphic works. Curated by Paul Hills, who knew Jones during his last years before his death in 1974, and Ariane Bankes, the show is at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, England, until Feb. 21 and then opens at the Djanogly Gallery in Nottingham from March 12 to June 5.
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David Jones’s “The Artist’s Worktable” from 1929. Credit Private Collection, Trustees of David Jones Estate
Jones was born on the edge of southeast London to a Welsh-speaking printer father and a mother of English and Italian descent. “From about the age of 6,” the artist later recalled, “I felt I belonged to my father’s people and their land.” But he also drew deeply on his English and Latin heritages, as the artworks throughout this exhibition reveal.
From childhood, Jones was enthralled by Arthurian and Celtic legends, and his knowledge of English literature expanded during his time at Camberwell, where the subject was compulsory. The rare self-portrait that opens the first section of the exhibition, “The Town Child’s Journey,” though painted in 1931, is of a slightly shambolic youth (His teacher at Camberwell, A.S. Hartrick, described him as “an incurable romantic”), yet seems surprisingly true-to-life, to judge by a photograph of the artist taken four years earlier.
Also on display is Jones’s portrait of the sculptor Eric Gill, whose community of Catholic artists at Ditchling, in East Sussex, Jones began to visit regularly in 1921. That same year he would convert to Catholicism and in 1922 he moved to Ditchling, where he learned wood carving and engraving.
His affinity for these is evident in miniature boxwood reliefs of the Crucifixion; a profile of Gill’s daughter, “Head of Petra”; and a droll wood engraving of him and one of the pioneers of the revival of this craft on a bucking steed: “David Jones and Hilary Pepler Mounted on Pegasus.”
Jones’s mastery of wood and copper engraving and his highly imaginative designs led to commissions to illustrate books, notably for collectors’ editions of “Gulliver’s Travels”; “The Book of Jonah”; “The Chester Play of the Deluge,” a medieval telling of the story of Noah; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner.”
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Wonderful examples of these open the next section of the show, “Voyaging Out.” They include “Noah Receives God’s Commands,” in which an angel delivers to the Old Testament patriarch a ship-building blueprint, with diagrams and, at the foot of the sheet, a ruled scale (in cubits, no doubt).
In 1924, the Gills and their entourage moved to a former monastery, Capel-y-ffin, in South Wales, giving Jones the opportunity to return to what was for him the dream-bright land of his forefathers. Here, his interest in landscape began to blossom, as he set about doing watercolors and gouaches of the Black Mountains. He also made regular painting trips to the Benedictine monastery on Caldy Island. Some of the finest of these — “Hill Pastures, Capel-y-ffin,” “Tenby from Caldy Island” and “Surf,” from 1926-29 — are on display.
An excursion to southwest France in the spring of 1928 enabled Jones to extend his horizons and palette into more exotic, sunlit pastures, giving rise to images like “Roman Lands,” “Montes et Omnes Colles” (whose title is taken from Psalm 148), and views of Salies-de-Béarn. He was disturbed to find Lourdes infested with vendors of tacky souvenirs (“like finding a Woolworth store on the summit of the Mount of Olives”). But this did not prevent him from making a memorable image of the town that recalls El Greco’s backdrops of Toledo.
In 1928, he began writing his book-length poem “In Parenthesis,” based on his years on the Western Front with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His painting continued unabated, as his travels took him to the Gills’ new home at Piggots Farm in Buckinghamshire, to Northumberland and his parents seaside house at Portslade, near Brighton, and to Wales.
“The folk tradition of the insular Celts seems to present to the mind a half-aquatic world,” he later wrote. “It introduces a feeling of transparency and interpenetration of one element with another, of transposition and metamorphosis.” A better description could hardly be found of some of his pictures in this period, with their blue-green, diaphanous, dreamlike qualities. Among the impressive array here on show are “The Artist’s Worktable,” “The Glass Door,” and “The Violin.”
Despite his fascination with the past, Jones was a resolute modernist both in his verse and his art. He exhibited with the progessive Seven and Five Society, with the likes of Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood and Henry Moore, his paintings selling better than those of any of his fellow artists.
But the strain of revisiting his time in the trenches while composing “In Parenthesis” and his relentless production of drawings and paintings precipitated a nervous breakdown in 1932. It was not until 1936 that he began to paint again.
As the final sections of the show reveal, Jones continued to create important works later in life. These included complex mythical images such as “Guenever” and “Aphrodite in Aulis” (on loan from the Tate), and intricate symbolic studies of glass chalices filled with flowers, like “Flora in Calix-Light.”
Among the most remarkable were around 80 painted inscriptions, of Latin, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon and English texts, now among the most instantly recognizable of his works. They are in a literal sense “the Word made flesh,” and it is an index of their mysterious potency that to be in their presence is a quite different experience than seeing them in reproduction.