David Jones: Vision and Memory.
Billingsley, Naomi
David Jones: Vision and Memory
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
24 October 2015-21 February 2016
David Jones (1895-1974) is undoubtedly one of the most important
religious artists in Britain in the last century. This exhibition, and
accompanying book, curated and written by Paul Hills and Ariane Banks,
offers a welcome reassessment of Jones' work, bringing together an
impressive body of material from public and private collections.
The exhibition follows a broadly chronological trajectory, in five
rooms; the book expands this narrative, illuminating the themes and
works in the exhibition in greater detail, and addressing additional
material. The focus is on Jones as visual artist, though his work as a
poet is cited where it informs his visual work, and lines of poetry
appear as epigraphs in each room of the display.
Beginning with The Town Child's Journey, we see examples of
remarkably accomplished childhood drawings, through to works produced at
and after Ditchling. Jones joined Eric Gill's community of
craftsmen in the Sussex village in 1922, having converted to Roman
Catholicism the previous year. We see in these years both an artistic
and a spiritual flourishing, with new techniques applied to sacred
themes. From the end of that decade, several drypoints of the Nativity
are a particular delight; Jones pays particular attention to the beasts
in the stable--characteristic of his sacramental view of the world, and
reflecting his particular love of animals. (Jones' depictions of
animals is the theme of a concurrent display at the Ditchling Museum of
Art + Craft, which runs to 6 March, and includes plenty of interest to
A&C readers, such as the Agnus Dei from the safe door of the Guild
chapel at Ditchling, on loan from a private collection.)
The second room focuses on three sets of engravings produced for
the Golden Cockerell Press: the Book of Jonah, the Chester Play of the
Deluge, and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Here we see Jones'
mastery of wooden-graving, a technique learnt from Gill at Ditchling.
These three narratives all centre upon a cycle of suffering and
redemption, a theme which resonated with Jones' own experience of
life shaped by war.
The theme of war reemerges more explicitly in the fourth room,
which takes its theme from Jones' dry-point The Wounded Knight,
1930, which speaks to Jones' own wounds of war and love (his broken
engagement with Eric Gill's daughter, Petra), and his nervous
breakdown in 1932. The print is a characteristic fusion of motifs from
Christian iconography and mediaeval legend into a highly personal
subject. We see here too an earlier student study, Soldiers playing dice
at the foot of the cross, c.1921 in which Calvary is reimagined in the
trenches, linking the sacrifice of war to the sacrifice of Christ.
In the third and fifth rooms, the focus is on Jones'
watercolours. From seascapes to portraits to still life, here again
Jones' sacramental view of the world, and of art, is evident in the
visionary quality of these works (recalling Samuel Palmer). Some of
Jones' most magnificent works in this medium were produced in the
period following Jones' second breakdown in 1947, including the
complex Vexilla Regis, 1948, and compositions of flowers and glassware
in which still life becomes a vehicle for meditation on the Eucharist.
Another format which Jones took up late in his career was painted
inscriptions. Here, letters and words become visual subject, with short
extracts from poems or the Latin Mass painted to form a block of
letters, usually in two or more colours, and sometimes with a border of
text in smaller letters. He called these works his 'own form of
abstraction'; they bring together the craft of poet and painter,
and in several cases, using text from the Christmas liturgy, are simple
and powerful visualisations of the Word made flesh (Jones had some of
these designs reproduced as Christmas cards for his friends).
We also see in this final room an earlier work, Jones'
frontispiece for Gill's tract 'Christianity and Art',
1927; this small wood-engraving, known as The Artist can be read as a
kind of self-portrait, and as a vision of the universal artist, imagined
here in a setting which recalls a monastic scriptorium or portraits of
the Evangelists. The exhibition, and the book, are an excellent and
overdue scholarly reaffirmation of Jones' accomplishments as a
visual artist. I suspect for many, the greatest delight will simply be
in the opportunity to see so many of Jones' works--a good number of
which are normally hidden in private collections (and in some cases
reproduced for the first time in the book). The visitors' book was
full of words such as 'inspiring' and 'meditative'
and I overheard one fellow-visitor exclaiming to her companion
'Marvellous works, aren't they?' Many ACE members are
likely to agree with them.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Naomi Billingsley is the Bishop Otter Scholar for Theology and the
Arts in the Diocese of Chichester.
'David Jones; Vision & Memory' tours to the Djanogly
Gallery, Nottingham, 12 March to 5 June 2016.
