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Lot Essay
Although William Roberts was only nineteen when he signed the belligerent 1914 Vorticist manifesto in BLAST magazine, this precocious young artist felt immensely confident. After leaving the Slade School in the summer of 1913, he had travelled through France and Italy. The following year, Wyndham Lewis was impressed enough to contact Roberts, and borrowed two of his pictures for display in London’s controversial Rebel Art Centre. Bomberg was already very friendly with Roberts, and both men shared a love of the experimental dancing performed at Ormonde Terrace.
Roberts executed a magnificent ink and gouache drawing called The Toe Dancer, now owned by the Victoria & Albert Museum. He then pushed his work even further towards abstraction, most spectacularly in Study for Two-step II. Newspaper journalists became very suspicious of such radical art. But his friend Bernard Meninsky, a fellow painter, now invited Roberts to celebrate St. George’s Day with a line drawing for a special number of the Evening News, published in April 1915.
Refusing to compromise his revolutionary approach to art, Roberts executed a Study for St. George and the Dragon in pencil. Although he made no attempt to draw the courageous patron saint of England in a figurative style, which would have appealed to most readers of the Evening News, the newspaper went ahead and reproduced it as A Futurist St. George. The same title was given to Bernard Meninsky’s drawing as well, because he had also produced a semi-abstract image. Meninsky would never again work in such an avant-garde style. And the Evening News cautiously advised its readers that ‘with care and patience this drawing may be understood of the Philistine.’ But the drawing created by Roberts was far more uncompromising in its approach to formal simplification, so the Evening News admitted that ‘to the uninitiated in the mysteries of Futurism, this drawing will appear rather like a distracted jig-saw puzzle.’
The uncompromising image produced by Roberts does not allow us to glimpse St. George’s horse. Nor can we confidently identify the dragon, even though an upturned head with an eye can be discerned in the lower right corner of the drawing. St. George himself is seen as a mechanistic modern fighter, thrusting upwards with bold diagonal force towards the upper left side. Above him, abstract forms convey the presence of architectural elements, and the overall strength defined with such confident audacity by Roberts also conveys the increasingly fierce combat of the First World War. Only a year after executing this highly impressive drawing, he joined the Royal Field artillery. So his Study for St. George and the Dragon prophesies the machine-dominated conflict which awaited him on those devastating battlefields.
Richard Cork
We are grateful to David Cleall and Bob Davenport for information provided about this lot.
Roberts executed a magnificent ink and gouache drawing called The Toe Dancer, now owned by the Victoria & Albert Museum. He then pushed his work even further towards abstraction, most spectacularly in Study for Two-step II. Newspaper journalists became very suspicious of such radical art. But his friend Bernard Meninsky, a fellow painter, now invited Roberts to celebrate St. George’s Day with a line drawing for a special number of the Evening News, published in April 1915.
Refusing to compromise his revolutionary approach to art, Roberts executed a Study for St. George and the Dragon in pencil. Although he made no attempt to draw the courageous patron saint of England in a figurative style, which would have appealed to most readers of the Evening News, the newspaper went ahead and reproduced it as A Futurist St. George. The same title was given to Bernard Meninsky’s drawing as well, because he had also produced a semi-abstract image. Meninsky would never again work in such an avant-garde style. And the Evening News cautiously advised its readers that ‘with care and patience this drawing may be understood of the Philistine.’ But the drawing created by Roberts was far more uncompromising in its approach to formal simplification, so the Evening News admitted that ‘to the uninitiated in the mysteries of Futurism, this drawing will appear rather like a distracted jig-saw puzzle.’
The uncompromising image produced by Roberts does not allow us to glimpse St. George’s horse. Nor can we confidently identify the dragon, even though an upturned head with an eye can be discerned in the lower right corner of the drawing. St. George himself is seen as a mechanistic modern fighter, thrusting upwards with bold diagonal force towards the upper left side. Above him, abstract forms convey the presence of architectural elements, and the overall strength defined with such confident audacity by Roberts also conveys the increasingly fierce combat of the First World War. Only a year after executing this highly impressive drawing, he joined the Royal Field artillery. So his Study for St. George and the Dragon prophesies the machine-dominated conflict which awaited him on those devastating battlefields.
Richard Cork
We are grateful to David Cleall and Bob Davenport for information provided about this lot.