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Lot Essay
Although he never went to art school, Lawrence Atkinson benefited immensely as a painter from his early involvement with music. It was, for a while at least, an obsession. After studying music in both Berlin and Paris, the young Atkinson taught singing as well as giving concert performances in Liverpool and London. So he was ready, like other emergent artists at the beginning of the 20th century, to explore the whole notion of painting with the freedom enjoyed by composers. Kandinsky, who exhibited his pioneering abstract art in London between 1909 and 1914, was described by Roger Fry as the creator of ‘pure visual music’, and another critic declared that ‘we are justified in saying that Mr Wyndham Lewis plays Bach to Herr Kandinsky’s Chopin.’
When London’s defiantly controversial Rebel Art Centre opened in the spring of 1914, the interior of this notorious house in Great Ormond Street was filled with outspoken avant-garde decorations. Atkinson became very involved in designing them, and one astonished newspaper reported that in his startling abstract designs it was ‘impossible to find the slightest trace of any regularity in the symmetry, the tonality, the colouring or any other ordinary antediluvian practice!’ By now, Atkinson felt determined to break away entirely from his previous affiliation with the British Fauves. He had exhibited with them at the Stafford Gallery in October 1912, and a decade later Horace Shipp’s book on Atkinson revealed that ‘at the commencement of his career’ he had produced many ‘landscape studies’ which were ‘much nearer to that of Gauguin, a statement of his subject in terms of bold colour patches. Often he would emphasize the decorative value of these by definite, heavy outlines, seeing his subject as a mosaic of beautiful colour and rhythmic form.’
By the time he became committed to the Rebel Art Centre, though, Atkinson had transformed his work. Kate Lechmere, the artist who generously paid the rent for the Centre in 1914, recalled later that ‘Atkinson was a regular visitor at the Rebel Art Centre, and Lewis took a special interest in him.’ Atkinson taught Lechmere music as well, but most of his energies were now devoted to visual art. In the summer of 1914, he joined the newly-formed Vorticist movement when Lewis invited him to sign the manifesto in its belligerent magazine BLAST. And Atkinson may well have painted Vorticist Composition around this time, intending it as a coolly confident manifestation of his commitment to extreme formal simplification.
At first glance, it looks uncompromisingly abstract. Everything in this large and impressive painting has been reduced to very minimal elements, far removed from the Fauvism which had previously fascinated him. But the longer we look at Vorticist Composition, the more we feel tempted to speculate about Atkinson’s possible starting-point in a representational subject. The pale green form at the base of the painting may well be a table-top, from which a still life rises up almost to the top of the canvas. Although the forms themselves resist easy identification, they might be an abstract sculpture. Atkinson did, after all, concentrate on making sculpture after the First World War, and was awarded a Grand Prix for his carving L’Oiseau at the 1921 Milan Exhibition.
In Vorticist Composition, however, these sculptural forms are more akin to the mechanistic subjects which inspired so many of the Vorticists. Gazing at Atkinson’s painting, we realise that he must have agreed with BLAST’s description of Britain as an ‘industrial island machine’. But his still life refuses to be pinned down. At the centre, a small bright red form glows out from the painting, radiant with energy. Yet it is positioned very close to some controlling black bars, redolent of a slender metallic structure as they stretch up towards the highest point in the canvas. They seem aspirational and insistent, demonstrating their rigid strength while thrusting through space. There is undoubtedly a suggestion of defiance in this painting, as if Atkinson wants to stress the combative spirit running through the rebellious pages of BLAST.
In June 1915 Vorticist Composition was probably included in the Vorticist Exhibition, held at the Dore Galleries in London. And by that time, the First World War had already claimed an appalling number of young soldiers’ lives, proving just how devastating machine-age weaponry could be. In this respect, the sense of struggle and tension explored by Atkinson’s painting turned out to be eerily prophetic. Both he and the other Vorticists were right to insist on investigating the fast-changing machine-age world, and Atkinson was equally perceptive in hinting at vulnerability throughout his painting as well.
Ultimately, though, Vorticist Composition counter-balances all this tension with a more luminous, stable alternative. The slender vertical forms ranged in an orderly row across the upper half of his painting introduce a more lyrical mood. It is echoed in one of the poems which the multi-talented and adventurous Atkinson published in his 1915 book called Aura, where he describes how,
`
The blue
Of the moment
Envelops me
In her silent
Prophecies;
And guides my
Rudder-less boat
To undiscovered Countries ...'
We are very grateful to Richard Cork for preparing this catalogue entry.
When London’s defiantly controversial Rebel Art Centre opened in the spring of 1914, the interior of this notorious house in Great Ormond Street was filled with outspoken avant-garde decorations. Atkinson became very involved in designing them, and one astonished newspaper reported that in his startling abstract designs it was ‘impossible to find the slightest trace of any regularity in the symmetry, the tonality, the colouring or any other ordinary antediluvian practice!’ By now, Atkinson felt determined to break away entirely from his previous affiliation with the British Fauves. He had exhibited with them at the Stafford Gallery in October 1912, and a decade later Horace Shipp’s book on Atkinson revealed that ‘at the commencement of his career’ he had produced many ‘landscape studies’ which were ‘much nearer to that of Gauguin, a statement of his subject in terms of bold colour patches. Often he would emphasize the decorative value of these by definite, heavy outlines, seeing his subject as a mosaic of beautiful colour and rhythmic form.’
By the time he became committed to the Rebel Art Centre, though, Atkinson had transformed his work. Kate Lechmere, the artist who generously paid the rent for the Centre in 1914, recalled later that ‘Atkinson was a regular visitor at the Rebel Art Centre, and Lewis took a special interest in him.’ Atkinson taught Lechmere music as well, but most of his energies were now devoted to visual art. In the summer of 1914, he joined the newly-formed Vorticist movement when Lewis invited him to sign the manifesto in its belligerent magazine BLAST. And Atkinson may well have painted Vorticist Composition around this time, intending it as a coolly confident manifestation of his commitment to extreme formal simplification.
At first glance, it looks uncompromisingly abstract. Everything in this large and impressive painting has been reduced to very minimal elements, far removed from the Fauvism which had previously fascinated him. But the longer we look at Vorticist Composition, the more we feel tempted to speculate about Atkinson’s possible starting-point in a representational subject. The pale green form at the base of the painting may well be a table-top, from which a still life rises up almost to the top of the canvas. Although the forms themselves resist easy identification, they might be an abstract sculpture. Atkinson did, after all, concentrate on making sculpture after the First World War, and was awarded a Grand Prix for his carving L’Oiseau at the 1921 Milan Exhibition.
In Vorticist Composition, however, these sculptural forms are more akin to the mechanistic subjects which inspired so many of the Vorticists. Gazing at Atkinson’s painting, we realise that he must have agreed with BLAST’s description of Britain as an ‘industrial island machine’. But his still life refuses to be pinned down. At the centre, a small bright red form glows out from the painting, radiant with energy. Yet it is positioned very close to some controlling black bars, redolent of a slender metallic structure as they stretch up towards the highest point in the canvas. They seem aspirational and insistent, demonstrating their rigid strength while thrusting through space. There is undoubtedly a suggestion of defiance in this painting, as if Atkinson wants to stress the combative spirit running through the rebellious pages of BLAST.
In June 1915 Vorticist Composition was probably included in the Vorticist Exhibition, held at the Dore Galleries in London. And by that time, the First World War had already claimed an appalling number of young soldiers’ lives, proving just how devastating machine-age weaponry could be. In this respect, the sense of struggle and tension explored by Atkinson’s painting turned out to be eerily prophetic. Both he and the other Vorticists were right to insist on investigating the fast-changing machine-age world, and Atkinson was equally perceptive in hinting at vulnerability throughout his painting as well.
Ultimately, though, Vorticist Composition counter-balances all this tension with a more luminous, stable alternative. The slender vertical forms ranged in an orderly row across the upper half of his painting introduce a more lyrical mood. It is echoed in one of the poems which the multi-talented and adventurous Atkinson published in his 1915 book called Aura, where he describes how,
`
The blue
Of the moment
Envelops me
In her silent
Prophecies;
And guides my
Rudder-less boat
To undiscovered Countries ...'
We are very grateful to Richard Cork for preparing this catalogue entry.