William Roberts (painter)

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William Roberts RA (* 5. June 1895 in London , † 20th January 1980 in London) was a British painter of Cubism and co-founder of Vorticism .

life and work

William Roberts
The Return of Ulysses ,
around 1913, oil on canvas, 30 × 45 cm
Castle Museum and Art Gallery , Nottingham
The First German Gas Attack at Ypres or on Commons
1918, oil on canvas, 30.48 × 36.58 cm
National Gallery of Canada
The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915
1961/62, oil on canvas, 183 × 213.5 cm
Tate Gallery
Please following Note note

William Roberts was born the third child of the carpenter Edward Roberts and his wife Emma, ​​née Collins, in the London borough of Hackney. At the age of fourteen he began training as a poster painter in a printing and advertising company (Sir Joseph Causton Ltd.) in 1909 and attended evening classes at St Martin's School of Art in London. A grant from the London County Council enabled him to study at the Slade School of Art in 1910. Here his fellow students included the artists Dora Carrington , Mark Gertler , Paul Nash , Christopher Nevinson , Stanley Spencer and David Bomberg .

Roberts was fascinated by Post-Impressionism and Cubism , stimulated by the same interests of his friends in the Slade, here in particular David Bomberg, and his trips to France and Italy in 1913 after completing his studies.

In late 1913 he worked for Roger Fry 's designer workshop Omega Workshops , which gave him his first cubist-style paintings such as The Return of Ulysses , which was first exhibited in 1913 at the New English Art Club , now owned by the Castle Museum and Art Gallery in Nottingham . After Roberts left Omega Workshops, he found connection with Wyndham Lewis , together with others they formed the core cell of the British variant of futurism, for which Ezra Pound had suggested the name vorticism . They were inspired by the touring exhibition and its manifesto that stopped in London in 1912 by Italian futurists under the direction of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti . He was represented with illustrations in both issues of the Vortizist magazine BLAST (No. 1, 1914 and No. 2, 1915). He later described himself as a cubist.

First World War

In 1916 Roberts was called up and served on the Western Front. He made use of the opportunity to work as a war painter and applied to the Canadian War Records Office , but also worked as a war painter for the British Ministry of Information , for which he created the painting A Shell Dump, France (1918/1919). One of his better-known works, however, is The First German Gas Attack at Ypres (1918), which was not created from his own perspective and depicts the gas war in Ypres in West Flanders in the manner of Otto Dix and George Grosz . These works established his reputation as a war painter.

Interwar period

In 1915 he met Sarah Kramer (1900-1992), the sister of his former Slade fellow student Jacob Kramer , with whom he had a son, the later poet and guitarist John David Roberts (1919-1995), and whom he married in 1922. Sarah became a frequent subject in his pictures in the following years.

After the First World War, he turned thematically to a kind of documentation of urban life, painting cockneys riding a bike or picnicking , but also created a number of portraits, including of TE Lawrence (1922; now in the Ashmolean Museum , Oxford ), of John Maynard Keynes and his wife , Lydia Lopokova (1932; today in the National Portrait Gallery , London), plus scenes from Greek / resp. Christian mythology.

In June 1922 he was commissioned with illustration tasks for TE Lawrence's autobiographical work " The Seven Pillars of Wisdom " ( Seven Pillars of Wisdom ).

In 1923 William Roberts had his first solo exhibition, held at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea, London. In 1925 he became a visiting professor at the Central School of Art ; he held this position until 1960.

Roberts was one of the British painters who represented the country at the 1932 Venice Biennale . In December 1933, the Anglo-German Club hosted the first exchange exhibition of new art between England and Germany in Hamburg, in which works by Roberts were shown for the first time in Germany, including The Park Bench (1933).

Second World War

At the beginning of the Second World War, Roberts was already too old for active military service, but applied again as a war painter, which, however, did not materialize for transport reasons. During this time he created a number of works from life on the home front , including Munitions Factory (1940) and The Control Room, Civil Defense Headquarters (1942). He spent the war years in Oxford , where he painted rural scenes and only traveled to London to teach.

Post-war years

In 1946 William and Sarah Roberts moved back to London. In the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1948 he showed two of his works there for the first time, a self-portrait and a portrait of Sarah as a gypsy. Until his death he was regularly represented at the summer exhibitions.

The Tate Gallery hosted a major exhibition in 1956 called Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism, which showed 150 of his work and few of the other Vorticists, which was not without consequences. Roberts felt offended by the portrayal of the other Vortizisten as Lewis' "henchmen" and published a series of "Vortex Pamphlets" in which he polemicized against the exhibition, the catalog, even against the treatment in the press. He also considered the treatise of his person by the director of the Tate, John Rothenstein , in his second volume, Modern English Painters , published in 1956, as detrimental to his artistic career. To make his work better known, he published collections from 1957 with reproductions, of which Some Early Abstract and Cubist Work 1913-1920 (London, 1957) was the first.

Recognition after 1960

In 1961, Roberts received an award from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation “in recognition of his artistic achievement and his outstanding service to British painting” (“in recognition of his artistic achievements and his special services to British painting”). In the same year he began one of his most famous paintings, The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 , which he completed in 1962, now owned by the Tate Gallery. In 1965, organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain , it also hosted a first larger exhibition with 107 oil paintings and 98 works with watercolors, drawings and studies, which was also shown on a smaller scale in Newcastle upon Tyne and Manchester .

In 1966 he was elected a full member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

His memory, promotion and research into his life's work is the task of the William Roberts Society, founded in 2002 . His works can be found in numerous museums around the world.

Publications

  • The Resurrection of Vorticism and the Apotheosis of Wyndham Lewis at the Tate. London 1956. (= Vortex Pamphlet No. 1, englishcubist.co.uk ).
  • Cometism and Vorticism - A Tate Gallery Catalog Revised. London 1956. (= Vortex Pamphlet No. 2, englishcubist.co.uk ).
  • A Press View at the Tate Gallery. London 1956. (= Vortex Pamphlet No. 3, englishcubist.co.uk ).
  • A Reply to My Biographer Sir John Rothenstein. London 1957. (= Vortex Pamphlet No. 4, englishcubist.co.uk ).
  • Vorticism and the Politics of Belles-Lettres-ism. London 1958. (= Vortex Pamphlet No. 5, englishcubist.co.uk ).
  • Some Early Abstract and Cubist Work 1913-1920. London 1957.
  • Paintings 1917–1958 by William Roberts ARA. London 1960.
  • William Roberts ARA Paintings and Drawings 1909–1964. London 1964.
  • 8 Cubist designs. London 1969.
  • Paintings and Drawings: William Roberts RA. London 1976.
  • Five Posthumous Essays and Other Writings. Valencia 1990.

literature

  • Andrew Gibbon Williams: William Roberts: An English Cubist. Lund Humphries, London 2004, ISBN 0-85331-824-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ David Boyd Haycock: A Crisis of Brilliance. Five Young British Artists and the Great War. Old Street Publishing, London 2009, p. 65.
  2. ^ Andrew Gibbon Williams: William Roberts: An English Cubist. Lund Humphries, London 2004, p. 8.
  3. ^ William Roberts: Early Years. London, 1982. Reprinted as: A Sketch of his Early Life . In Five Posthumous Essays and Other Writings. Valencia, 1990, pp. 69-82.
  4. ↑ Autobiographical Sketches. In: Five Posthumous Essays and Other Writings. Pp. 145-146. Foreword to: Some Early Abstract and Cubist Work, 1913–1920. London, 1957; Reprinted in Five Posthumous Essays and Other Writings. Pp. 168-169.
  5. ^ New English Art Club: The Fiftieth Exhibition. In: The Times . December 1, 1913, p. 71.
  6. ↑ BLAST. No. 1, 1914 archive.org , p. XIII ( Dancers  - Internet Archive ), p. XIV ( Religion  - Internet Archive ).
  7. ↑ BLAST. No. 2, 1915 archive.org , p. 55 ( Combat  - Internet Archive ), p. 87 ( Drawing  - Internet Archive ).
  8. ↑ The First German Gas Attack at Ypres ( Memento of November 2, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) on the website The Color of Tears: The First World War from the perspective of painters. Retrieved May 24, 2013.
  9. ^ Pauline Paucker: Sarah (1900-1992). In: William Roberts and Jacob Kramer: The Tortoise and the Hare. Ben Uri Gallery, London 2003, pp. 35-36.
  10. ↑ Michael Parkin: Obituary: Sarah Roberts. In: The Independent . December 5, 1992 (English).
  11. ^ Colin Cooper: A Poet and His Music. In: Classical Guitar. Volume 17, No. 1, 1998, pp. 28-29 (English).
  12. ^ William Roberts: A Reply to My Biographer Sir John Rothenstein. , London, 1957; Reprinted in: Five Posthumous Essays and Other Writings. P. 159.
  13. ^ The Seven Pillars Portraits, Index to Illustrations. ( Memento of August 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) On the castlehillpress.com website, accessed May 25, 2013.
  14. ↑ Mr. William Roberts. In: The Times , November 9, 1923.
  15. ^ British Art at Venice, The International Exhibition. In: The Times. April 15, 1932.
  16. ^ The Park Bench (1933, oil on canvas, 40.5 × 51 cm).
  17. ↑ Roberts, William . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 28 : Ramsden-Rosa . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1934, p. 430 .
  18. ^ Imperial War Museum , London, file reference GP / 55/2.
  19. ↑ Cometism and Vorticism - A Tate Gallery Catalog Revised. London 1956; Reprinted in: Five Posthumous Essays and Other Writings. Pp. 151-152.
  20. ^ John David Roberts: A Brief Discussion of the Vortex Pamphlets. In: Five Posthumous Essays and Other Writings. Pp. 151-157.
  21. ^ John Rothenstein: Modern English Painters. Lewis to Moore. Volume 2. Eyre & Spottiswoode, London 1956, pp. 283–288 (English, Textarchiv - Internet Archive ), accessed on May 25, 2013.
  22. ^ Andrew Gibbon Williams: William Roberts: An English Cubist. Lund Humphries, London 2004, ISBN 0-85331-824-7 , p. 134.
  23. ^ William Roberts, RA in the database of the Royal Academy of Arts (English), accessed May 24, 2013.

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personal data
SURNAME Roberts, William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roberts, William Patrick (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British painter
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 20th January 1980
Place of death London