CRW Nevinson, Making the Engine, from Making Aircraft, all prints 14 x 18in (35.5 x 46cm), sold individually at prices of £3750-15,000 from Abbott & Holder.
Summertime exhibitions can be a chance for dealers to bring out impressive stock that they’ve squirreled away for several months. This year works on paper specialist Abbott & Holder takes it a step further by unveiling a set of prints that have lain out of sight for more than 100 years.
Britain’s Efforts and Ideals is a large cycle of lithographs commissioned during the First World War by the British government to sell to the public. Featuring 18 artists, the group was published in 1917 and comprises two series: nine sets of six prints in black and white depicting Britain’s Efforts in the Great War and 12 larger prints in colour representing its Ideals.
The exhibition at Abbott & Holder in Bloomsbury runs until July 6 and is part of London Art Week. It is also a collaboration seldom seen in the art world between a commercial gallery and an institution, in this case the Imperial War Museum (IWM) where these particular prints have been kept, un-accessioned, since the 1920s.
A view of the show at Abbott & Holder.
Group history
Initially the collection in question was sold through the Fine Art Society dealership. When the Ministry of Information shut down in 1918, the group was moved to the new IWM where the prints continued to sell, and then to Grosvenor Galleries. By 1923 public interest had waned and the collection was transferred to be stored at His Majesty’s Stationery Office, before returning to the IWM where it could receive proper care.
Other examples of the series were distributed to major British institutions including The British Museum, the Tate Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they entered their permanent collections. The present assortment, however, was always meant to be sold.
Dealer Tom Edwards of Abbott & Holder says: “There’s lots of prints from Efforts and Ideals that you see around, but some of the sets you’ve never seen before. To see them all together is remarkable. It’s a very large body that hasn’t been on the wall in a commercial gallery before.”
Tom Edwards of Abbott & Holder.
He was invited by the IWM to view the series and apply to sell it. Following a successful tender, the remaining examples of the signed lithographs – those not purchased from 1916-23 – went to the gallery while a small selection of unsigned prints are on offer through the museum itself. Each sale generates proceeds that go to the IWM’s restricted fund for commissions and purchases.
Despite knowing the series before, Edwards remains impressed by the level of organisation needed to compile it. A large and complicated project, an equivalent was never attempted again even in the years of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (founded in 1939).
“Very little is known about the formal process”, he says. “My sixth sense is that the central figure is FE Jackson who spearheaded the revival of lithography. He had technical oversight of the project but was also a strong committee man and organiser and it would make sense that he was someone who could bring everyone together.”
Frederick Ernest Jackson, Defence Against Aggression (England and France – 1914), lithograph, 1917, edition of 200, signed, 2ft 1in x 17½in (63.5 x 44.5cm), £750 from Abbott & Holder.
Jackson (1872-1945) was certainly at the centre of the project, supervising the production of the prints as well as contributing his own work, Defence Against Aggression, to the Ideals. Thomas Derrick, a teacher at the Royal College of Art, oversaw the project. The result of their labour was a collection of images that are at once distinct, congruent and sent a clear message about how Britain wished its people to understand its attitude towards the war.
Making moves
The nine series in Efforts include Making Soldiers by Eric Kennington (1888-1960), Making Sailors by Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956), Building Ships by Muirhead Bone (1876-1953) and Making Aircraft by Christopher Nevinson (1889-1947).
Each contains six works on their given theme. For example, William Rothenstein’s Work the Land comprises Ploughing, Drilling, Burning Couch Grass, Potato Planting, Timber Hauling and Threshing.
As a group, Efforts represents the home front as much as the battlefront – part of a bid to engage the interest of the wider public.
Frank Brangwyn’s The Look-Out from Making Sailors, all prints 14 x 18in (35.5 x 46cm), £1800 for the set of six from Abbott & Holder.
Of these artists, only two, Nevinson and Kennington, had served on the Western Front. By 1916, both were being noticed for their modernist style and sometimes the challenging content, but for this series, both produced accessible images.
“The series is controlled”, Edwards adds. “The artistic styles are coherent as a group, even though some are younger and modernist – everyone has toed the line.”
At the exhibition, Efforts are offered in their original groups of six, except for the more expensive Nevinson works which are offered individually. In many cases, there is more than one impression of each picture still available.
Despite the huge number of images in the series, few represent the Great War as it is conjured up today. Think of the First World War and images of trenches, mud, blasted trees, wounded soldiers and wasteland come to mind. Such scenes are inspired by eye-witness accounts put into films and writing and paintings by artists such as Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. But as Edwards points out, these generally did not come until later.
This throwback quality is especially apparent in Ideals, the larger colour lithographs (each offered separately at the show). In these images, the war is transformed repeatedly from gritty human reality into elegant allegory, offering a snapshot of the conflict in the visual language of an earlier generation.
“All that complex imagery is of another time, they feel utterly 19th century”, Edwards says. Indeed, many of the artists were Victorians themselves, born in the 1860s or 70s: Maurice Greiffenhagen (1862-1931), Charles Haslewood Shannon (1863- 1937) and Gerald Moira (1867-1959).
Archibald Standish Hartrick, On Munitions from Women’s Work, all prints 14 x 18in (35.5 x 46cm), £1800 for the set of six from Abbott & Holder.
Warm welcome
Reaction to the Abbott & Holder show has been positive right from the start.
“There was a very good initial response because you get the war collectors along with more general buyers. Every day we’re selling things”, Edwards says. And there is some urgency to the sale for interested buyers. Though there are a lot of prints on offer overall, “it’s still a tiny amount from the edition of 200”, he adds. At least two series from Efforts have already sold out: Bone’s Building Ships and Brangwyn’s Making Soldiers.
However, all works will remain on display at the gallery until the end of the show.
The gallery supplements the exhibition with events and talks in association with the IWM. A full list is available online.
