Edward Wadsworth
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Edward Alexander Wadsworth ( (29 October 1889) – (21 June 1949) ) was an English artist, most famous for his close association with Vorticism and copying Picasso.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Wadsworth was born in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire and educated at BGS in Bristol.[1] He studied engineering in Munich between 1906-7, where he studied art in his spare time at the Knirr School. This provoked a change of course, attending Bradford School of Art before earning a scholarship to the Slade School of Art, London.[2] His contemporaries at the school included Stanley Spencer, CRW Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and David Bomberg.
[edit] Career
His work was included in Roger Fry's second Post-Impressionism Exhibition at The Grafton Galleries, 1912, but he changed allegiance shortly after through friendship with Wyndham Lewis, and exhibited some futurist-derived paintings at the Futurist Exhibitions at the Doré Gallery. Although a member of the committee that organised a dinner in honour of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1913, he was one of a number of English painters in the nascent avant-garde that became increasingly disenchanted with the Italian's arrogance. By June of the following year, he was in a group of artists, including Lewis, who jeered Marinetti's public performance of The Battle Of Adrianople[3]. He was a signatory of the Vorticist Manifesto published in BLAST the next month, and also supplied a review of Kandinsky's Concerning The Spiritual In Art and images to be reproduced in the magazine.[4]
[edit] First World War
33 days after the magazine was published, war was declared on Germany. Vorticism managed to continue into 1915, with a Vorticist Exhibition, June 1915 at the Doré Gallery and a second edition of BLAST published to coincide with the show. Wadsworth contributed to both, but signed up for the navy shortly after. His fellow vorticists Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and T. E. Hulme were killed at the front; Bomberg and Lewis found that their belief in the purity of the machine age were seriously challenged by the realities in the trenches; Wadsworth spent the war in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve on the island of Mudros until invalided out in 1917, designing dazzle camouflage for allied ships[5]. Known as Dazzle ships, these vessels weren't camouflaged to become invisible, but instead used ideas derived from Vorticism and Cubism to confuse enemy U-Boats trying to pinpoint the direction and speed of travel[6]. Always a fan of modern ships, Wadsworth was to utilise nautical themes in his art for the rest of his career.
[edit] The Return To Order
Heralded by the major painting Dazzle Ship In Dry Dock, 1919, Wadsworth moved away from the avant-garde in the 1920s, and adopted a more realistic style. However, towards the end of his life his work became increasingly strange and surreal, although Wadsworth never had any formal links with the official Surrealist movement.
It is a myth propagated by poor journalism following WW1, that Dazzle painting of ships in 1917/8 had its origin in Cubism, Futurism or Vorticism and certainly was not a product of the art of Wadsworth or Wyndham-Lewis or any of the other Vorticists. Dazzle painting of ships was the idea of Norman Wilkinson R.N. while on his way to Portsmouth to join his ship. His idea was at first forgotten by the Navy, and he was only later given support of model makers and art students from the Royal College of Art at Burlington House to take his idea further. By using mock ups with periscopes at Burlington House, London and trials with different designs and colours at sea a zig-zag 'dazzle' effect was found to be most effective, but only after experimentation and trials. Wadsworth while at Liverpool docks first saw the designs after they were introduced late in 1917. Wadsworth's famous woodcuts came afterwards in 1919 after Norman Wilkinson's idea was well and truly tried. A paper report in 1919 reported erroneously that (by assumption) dazzle was due to avant guarde art of the time - the seeds of the myth were sown. By careful exam of the art of the day and dazzle as used by the navy, it is clear there is little common ground between the art of the vorticists or cubism and dazzle although some of the designs of Wyndam-Lewis some several years before might show some similarity. Colin A. Biddle
[edit] Later life
Wadsworth died in 1949, and is buried in Brompton Cemetery.
[edit] Influences
The graphic designer Peter Saville had seen the painting Dazzle Ships In Drydock At Liverpool (1919) by Edward Wadsworth and was struck by the image. Dazzle Ships were World War 1 warships that had been painted in fractured and disjointed lines to confuse the enemy as to their exact size and distance. Wadsworth himself supervised the dazzle painting of many ships.
After suggesting the idea and title to Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Saville carried the theme over to the sleeve design of their album Dazzle Ships. The sleeve was a gatefold which was painted in dazzle camouflage in greens and blacks. The later CD version was painted in blue and black, though the re-release of the CD in March 2008 recreates the original vinyl version of the artwork.
[edit] References
- ^ Distinguished old Fettesians
- ^ Essay on Wadsworth, Richard Cork, Oxford Art Online
- ^ Breaking The Rules, Bury, British Library, p112
- ^ Blast 1, Lewis et al., Bodley Head, 1914
- ^ [1]
- ^ Dazzle Painting
[edit] External links
- Works by Wadsworth at the Tate Gallery
- Detailed account of WWI dazzle ship camouflage, which Wadsworth contributed to
- 35651223 Edward Wadsworth at Find a Grave
[edit] Further reading
- Black, Jonathan. Edward Wadsworth. I.B. Tauris. 2006. ISBN 0-85667-603-9.
- "Edward Wadsworth" in Roy R. Behrens, Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage. Dysart, Iowa: Bobolink Books, 2009. ISBN 978-0-97-132446-6.
