Kenneth Rowntree A Centenary Exhibition Kenneth Rowntree 1915 –1997 Kenneth Rowntree A Centenary Exhibition Harry Moore-Gwyn Sacha Llewellyn Paul Liss With essays by Alexandra Harris, John Milner, Alan Powers and Peyton Skipwith The Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden 5 April – 12 July 2015 Pallant House Gallery, Chichester 22 July – 18 October 2015 Published by Moore-Gwyn Fine Art and Liss Llewellyn Fine Art, on behalf of the artist’s estate, on the occasion of the centenary of Kenneth Rowntree’s birth Contents Forewords 6 A Strange Simplicity 9 Alexandra Harris Early Rowntree 21 Alan Powers Design and illustration 61 Peyton Skipwith The Later Work 87 John Milner Chronology 121 Bibliography 123 Contributors 127 Forewords The Fry Art Gallery and Pallant House Gallery in the wider context of Pallant House Gallery’s Fig. 1 Study for the Freedom Kenneth Rowntree has always been highly re - artistic styles, from Ravilious to David Hockney, are delighted to co-host the first comprehen - collection of Modern British art, including ab - Mural for the Lion and Unicorn garded by those familiar with his work. The from the Euston Road School to the Dadaism sive retrospective exhibition devoted to the stract and Pop artists of the 1950s and 60s Pavilion, Festival of Britain , 1951, essays in this catalogue, which embrace new of Kurt Schwitters. His work, however, remains work of Kenneth Rowntree since his death in with whom he taught at the Royal College of oil on card, 10.2 x 71.8 cm, research and scholarship, reveal him to be unmistakably his own. 1997 which, coinciding with the publication of Art and Newcastle University. private collection. an artist of great scope and variety. His early This catalogue is published on the occasion this book, marks the centenary year of his birth. We are especially grateful to Moore-Gwyn work reflects the inspiration and creative dia - of the centenary of Rowntree’s birth, and ac - Kenneth Rowntree holds a prominent Fine Art and Liss Llewellyn Fine Art, not only logue that came out of his friendship with companies exhibitions at The Fry Art Gallery, place in the Fry Art Gallery collection, along - for initiating this project and curating the Eric Ravilious (1903 –1942) on account of Saffron Walden and Pallant House, Chichester. side his contemporaries Eric Ravilious, Edward exhibition in Saffron Walden and Chichester, whom Rowntree moved to Great Bardfield dur - This is the first substantial reassessment of Bawden and Michael Rothenstein. Indeed, it but also for publishing such an exceptional ing the 1940s. During this period he was par - Rowntree’s work since John Milner’s mono - was through his friendship with Ravilious, who survey of Rowntree’s many-facetted work, ticularly preoccupied with Kenneth Clark’s graph (2002). It is hoped that this current ini - had met him at the Ruskin School of Drawing which will delight and enthuse new audiences Recording Britain project. tiative will contribute futher to ensuring in Oxford, that Rowntree and his architect wife, far beyond the boundaries of Essex or West At the end of the war he joined the teach - Rowntree the significant place he deserves Diana, moved to the idyllic Essex village of Sussex. ing staff at the Royal College of Art. In 1951 within the history of 20th century British art. Great Bardfield in 1941. Whilst living in Essex he was commissioned to undertake murals We are grateful to David Oelman, Simon he designed the lithograph of the tractor that David Oelman for the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion for the Martin and their respective fellow trustees was to become synonymous with rural life for Chairman, The Fry Art Gallery Festival of Britain. As Professor of Fine Art in and staff at The Fry Art Gallery and Pallant a whole generation of schoolchildren as one Newcastle (1959 –1980) he was at the epicen - House Gallery for their enthusiasm and sup - of the iconic series of School Prints, which Simon Martin tre of an important northern school of mod - port in hosting the exhibition. We are addi - also forms part of Pallant House Gallery’s col - Artistic Director, Pallant House Gallery ernism that revolved around his friends Victor tionally grateful to Sasha and Bonamy Devas, lection. The exhibition places Rowntree’s work Pasmore (1908 –1988) and Richard Hamilton without whom this project would never have (1922 –2011). Even in retirement, his work, in come to fruition. its return to figuration from abstraction, dis - plays his consistent qualities of humour and Harry Moore-Gwyn inventiveness. Rowntree’s oeuvre is both in - Paul Liss fluenced by and anticipates a wide variety of Sacha Llewellyn harry Moore-gwyn moore-gwyn FINE ART 6 7 Kenneth Rowntree: A Strange Simplicity Alexandra Harris One of the most appealing British artists of luminosity of his watercolours to the ludo- the mid-twentieth century, Kenneth Rowntree board reds and greens of his murals or the knew how to tease, please and baffle, how to rich flash of electric blue which tells us the communicate joy without complacency, how quality of the moonlight as it falls on a dormer to charm without any hint of preciousness. window in Northumberland. His pictures of ordinary English streets and Twelve years younger than John Piper, fields, back-rooms of pubs, churches in Edward Bawden, and Eric Ravilious (who be - Mexico and weathervanes in Nantucket are came a friend), Rowntree had the advantage deeply satisfying works of art which point out of knowing and responding to the work of new things in the world. a remarkable generation of artist-designers He had an unerring feel for strange yet who opened new possibilities in English art. satisfying compositions in which everything He also had the challenge of making his own is idiosyncratically alive and at the same time way among these strong influences and, in settled, iconic, and complete. He made big the 1960s and 1970s, of bringing his love of things small (York Minster a child’s building- places and solid objects to bear on the new block left on the horizon) and small things kinds of contemporary art he enthusiastically Fig. 2 Cornish Landsape , 1952, big (a tea-pot turned, improbably, into a embraced. oil on board, 37.5 by 44.7 cm, Byzantine basilica). His colouring, in all its Though he kept returning to the same mo - Tate (TO3934) versatility, is pitch-perfect – from the mellow tifs (transforming them so that visual rhymes appear across the gaps between pictures), and though his work was remarkably coherent across a long career, his range was tremen - dous. He was an English vernacular painter of platforms, rail-signals, tractors, leaning tele - graph poles. He was a modernist designer who sat at an Isokon table orchestrating min - imal forms; he was an international abstract artist; he was an intrepid world traveller whose pictures were as likely to include a koala bear as a Dorset hill figure. His way of seeing may have been singular but it was also generously expansive. Rowntree enjoyed looking at things straight-on: the white shape of a Welsh farm - house between hedged fields, or a rust-red Cornish gate right in front of us, framing a 9 Cat. 1 Toy Boat at Selsey , 1956 Cat. 2 Oil and gouache, 61.4 by 76.5 cm Nantucket , 1959 Literature: John Milner, Kenneth Rowntree , Lund Humphries, 2002, p. 66, illustrated (pl. 62) A projected design for Vogue Exhibited: Tyne and Wear Museums, Kenneth Oil with collage, 32 by 24 cm Rowntree: paintings, drawings and collages , Literature : John Milner, Kenneth Rowntree, December 1976 – January 1977, cat no. 99 Lund Humphries, 2002, p. 56, illustrated (pl. 50) The Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden (Acc. No. 715) Private Collection 10 11 Cornish cow on the other side. If he put a jug we glimpse next-door’s Anderson shelter and Fig. 3 View from the hotel of on the table he had no qualms about putting the roof of a greenhouse two doors down. We the Gyfarllwyd Falls, Devil’s it firmly in the centre. Faithful to the four- look directly at the wall (and a row of cab - Bridge (Cardiganshire) from square practicality of earlier folk painters, he bages) while also coming sideways upon gar - A Prospect of Wales (1949), Fig. 4 Holiday in Sweden, 1938, (just the corner of it) and the framed sepia just for pleasure and with no desire to ‘trompe’ often brought the wall of a building flat up dens intended to be admired lengthways and National Library of Wales. oil on canvas, 50.8 by 69.7 cm, print above. Hundreds of other painters looked or trick us.) Many of Rowntree’s subjects, how - against the picture plane. He liked toy boats which, in any case, we can barely see. It’s the John Milner. at the sublime landscape outside; Rowntree ever, were well off Gilpin’s beaten track. because they were so perfectly boat-like, and kind of crabwise view we tend to get into our looked at it in the very human context of a ho - John Piper admired his attention to unsung he decorated his blue skies with cloud-like neighbours’ lives, and Rowntree is good with tel bedroom, comfortable and slightly worn, corners of the areas he visited, which was sig - clouds: clearly-defined cumulous puffs or funny angles. where you might store your pyjamas in the nificant praise from a connoisseur of in-be - white lozenges you might hold in your hand. For every subject that he paints just-so in wooden drawer while glancing out across the tween places. ‘You always had an eye for things He had a way of making things toy-like, the centre of the canvas, another is askew or ravine.