Eric Ravilious seems to be known—to the extent he’s known at all—as an illustrator. Brits of a certain age grew up with books illustrated with his drawings and woodcuts, and decorated with his covers. A British Rockwell Kent or Edward Gorey? The 1937 “Design for Wedgewood Alphabet Mug” according to the catalog “is perhaps Ravilious’s best-known creation.” It’s gently sentimental but at the same veined with strangeness.
The first thing that strikes you is ER’s delight in machinery and tools of all sorts. There was a good juxtaposition, hanging a 1939 “Design for a Dunbar Hay Embroidery” of kitchen utensils next to a 1940 drawing of “Bomb Defusing Equipment.” The cutlery and tea kettle are displayed in exactly the same way as the hammer and tongs: maximum legibility, suffused with white light, in loose, decorative array. The Bomb kit even comes with a written inventory, which is clearly legible.
ER makes everything legible, but he doesn’t—unlike Charles Demuth, who seems another close relative—imitate the style of mechanical drawing. He draws tools, screws, waterwheels, funnels, guns, battleships as part of the scene. Unlike the modernists, he doesn’t emphasize the mechanical over the natural. And unlike the traditionalists, he doesn’t edit out the marks of modern life. He makes a place for all of it.
This sensibility informs his watercolors. It saves him from sentimentality and nostalgia—even when tackling the most sentimental and conventionally picturesque motifs.
“Lifeboat” (1938) might be his more purely genial picture. But he outgrew that mode. In “Duke of Hereford’s Knob” (1938), the church, tombstones, and pasture filled with cows is presented with acidic intensity. “Interior at Furlongs” (1939) presents a room exploded by daylight, like the weird furniture-filled landscapes of De Chirico.
More often, the conflict is explicit. “The Westbury Horse” (1939) is about to be hit on the nose by a steaming train. Later (1940), the ancient horse is merely glimpsed from the interior of the train’s dowdy interior. “The Wilmington Giant” (1939) is viewed through a tangle of barbed wire. The picturesque stone wall near a rugged coast proves, on inspection, to be an armed fortification. And the horizon is completely filled with a convey of big, smoking warships.
ER’s best pictures attract and repulse. At first they seem easy, but when you attend to them, they begin to baffle. They seem carefully composed, but they’re always on the verge of disintegrating. Even the most genial pictures have puzzles. The watercolors painted as rent for staying at Ironbridge Farm are ravishing still lives of flower arrangements in sunny interiors. What could be less complicated? But what is that color chart next to the vase (1942)? What is that image of another still-life watercolor pinned to the wall (1941)?
ER’s pictures of pictures are a study in themselves. Dramatic maps of Great Britain and London loom over vague figures in “Home Security Control Room” (1941) and “The Operations Room” (1942).
The exhibit demonstrates how WWII provided Ravilious with subjects and scenes that resulted in his most remarkable pictures. “South Coast Beach” (1939-42) is characteristic. The concrete blocks and barbed wire raise his battle against conventional prettiness to a new height.
The longer you look at “Ship’s Screw on a Railway Truck” (1940), the more it looks like a Christmas card that has been slyly vandalized by a surrealist prankster. The overall prettiness, delicacy and decorativeness become sources of conflict and puzzlement. Why is this extravagant metalwork exposed to the snow? Are the intricate details of the cart functional? What’s that gold block lying in the snow?
But the work as a War Artist also literally killed him, when he was lost in a plane crash in 1942. The story is so tragic that you want to know more.
Most of the work at Dulwich comes from a very constricted time period: the last six years of ER’s life. Hence the unusual reticence in the guides: usually at retrospectives you have to tune out the biographical information; Dulwich, in contrast, provided almost nothing. I accept the implied command: “First, look hard at the work.”
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