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Lot Essay
Unlike most of the rebels associated with the Vorticist movement, Lawrence Atkinson was self-taught as an artist. But he had studied singing and music in Paris as well as Berlin, before becoming a teacher of singing back in Liverpool and London, where he also gave concert performances. Atkinson’s love of music undoubtedly helped him to feel liberated from the whole notion of art as a representational pursuit. Other abstractionists working in this period likewise derived inspiration from music, which gave them an invaluable sense of freedom. So Atkinson was ready to join the Vorticists at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914, and then sign the manifesto in BLAST’s first issue before showing his avant-garde work at the Vorticist Exhibition in the summer of 1915. Horace Shipp, who wrote a monograph on Atkinson after the First World War, declared that he had ‘always aimed at a medium and a method which would prove transparent, revealing clearly the non-materiality.’ Atkinson now realised that art even had the potential to surpass music, and Shipp described him as ‘in the greatest sense of the word…a mystic.’
Hence the deeply reflective quality of Atkinson’s Abstract Composition, probably executed sometime after he had published a book of poetry called Aura in 1914. Compared with his ink and wash drawing called The Lake, now in the Tate’s collection, Abstract Composition is a fundamentally mysterious image. As the title suggests, The Lake can be seen in terms of Atkinson’s desire to combine abstraction with a landscape image – probably seen from above, like Wadsworth’s Study for Cape of Good Hope. But Shipp, who received The Lake as a present from the artist himself, insisted that Atkinson believes ‘the artist also is most likely to fulfil his function by releasing his mind from the obsession of the conscious and working at the dictates of those forces deep down within us all.’ Hence Atkinson’s attempt, after the First World War, to develop an art which Shipp boldly described as ‘Pure Abstraction.’
It differed from the earlier period when Atkinson created his Abstract Composition. Here, more than a hint of urban architecture can still be detected. In the centre of this tall, complex design, suggestions of roads, fences and even buildings are visible. They give the picture an air of restless energy, and a sense of combat runs through the entire image. Yet the aggression is nowhere near as forceful as it appears in plenty of work by other Vorticist artists. And the colours are subdued, for Atkinson avoids the most belligerent aspects of the aesthetic rebellion running through BLAST magazine. He is a more ethereal artist, who wants to achieve subtlety rather than exclamatory force. That is why his Abstract Composition is filled with a sense of quiet assurance, as Atkinson defines the infinite complexity of diagonal forms as they seem to rise up and unfold above the lighter, more crowded cluster at the base of this fascinating and mysterious image.
Richard Cork
Hence the deeply reflective quality of Atkinson’s Abstract Composition, probably executed sometime after he had published a book of poetry called Aura in 1914. Compared with his ink and wash drawing called The Lake, now in the Tate’s collection, Abstract Composition is a fundamentally mysterious image. As the title suggests, The Lake can be seen in terms of Atkinson’s desire to combine abstraction with a landscape image – probably seen from above, like Wadsworth’s Study for Cape of Good Hope. But Shipp, who received The Lake as a present from the artist himself, insisted that Atkinson believes ‘the artist also is most likely to fulfil his function by releasing his mind from the obsession of the conscious and working at the dictates of those forces deep down within us all.’ Hence Atkinson’s attempt, after the First World War, to develop an art which Shipp boldly described as ‘Pure Abstraction.’
It differed from the earlier period when Atkinson created his Abstract Composition. Here, more than a hint of urban architecture can still be detected. In the centre of this tall, complex design, suggestions of roads, fences and even buildings are visible. They give the picture an air of restless energy, and a sense of combat runs through the entire image. Yet the aggression is nowhere near as forceful as it appears in plenty of work by other Vorticist artists. And the colours are subdued, for Atkinson avoids the most belligerent aspects of the aesthetic rebellion running through BLAST magazine. He is a more ethereal artist, who wants to achieve subtlety rather than exclamatory force. That is why his Abstract Composition is filled with a sense of quiet assurance, as Atkinson defines the infinite complexity of diagonal forms as they seem to rise up and unfold above the lighter, more crowded cluster at the base of this fascinating and mysterious image.
Richard Cork