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Ceri Richards
Mel Gooding. Moffat: Cameron and Hollis, 2002
£39.95, 192 pages, ISBN 0-90650-620-4
Ceri Richards, National Museum and Gallery of Wales, Cardiff, until
October 2002.
Mel Gooding's new book on Ceri Richards, the first major publication
on his work, establishes that Richards was one of the best and most
significant artists of the 20th century in Britain. Gooding has
also curated the exhibition at the National Museum and Gallery of
Wales to mark the artist's centenary in advance, before going on
tour into next year. The exhibition will complete its tour in Swansea,
close to the village of Dunvant where Richards was born.
One's first impression of the book is of the wide-ranging talent
and achievement of Welsh born Ceri Richards. Born in 1903; he was
a draughtsman of exceptional talent. His paintings display tremendous
energy and an original and authentic dialogue with the major figures
of European modernism: Kandinsky, Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. Richards
took an intelligent approach to the visual arts and music: some
of his finest works combine his interest in both. In the late 1940s
and 1950s, he did many paintings on the subject of their interaction
in life, inspired stylistically by Matisse's decorative flatness.
Interior with Piano, 1949 is reproduced in the book side-by-side
and on consecutive pages, with sketches and preliminary watercolour
studies. Richards was steeped in knowledge of Matisse at the time;
he had attended the much-celebrated exhibition in December 1945
of Matisse and Picasso at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is
obvious from works of this time that Ceri Richards aspired to Matisse's
1940s interiors, rather than Picasso's brutal, linear, anti-war
statements.
Richards was already in 1948 developing a uniquely original
response to the visual ideas of the late Matisse, investing
them with a tough painterly lyricism of his own, appropriating
the economy of the Matissean 'sign' but revelling in redundancy
and excess, and, the spirit but not the manner of the great
Frenchman, inventing a language of Apollian celebration. What
Matisse provided for Richards was a doorway into a room of his
own.1
The significance of the domestic space is explained succinctly
by Gooding who quotes from Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
(1st English Translation, 1964) "'Space' in Gaston Bachelard's
phenomenology is psychological and metaphysical in its workings
on the mind and spirit".2 Artists' studios and domestic spaces are
more than simply workplaces. They represent privacy where the artistic
process can be nurtured. The interior space, and the objects within
it, both spatially and aesthetically contrived, the mundane and
accidental all become vital components in the artistic process.
Bachelard wrote, "The house allows one to dream in peace …
The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity to its depths".3
Of Richards' interiors of this period, Gooding writes, "Female figures
are invariably portrayed in a state of reverie, and their surrounding
space encloses a world from which contingency and violence of nature
is temporarily banished".4 These paintings are crowded, dramatic
and intensely interesting. 'Signs' are given, ideas are alluded
to, colour gloriously orchestrated; solid blues, greens and reds
dominate canvases, drawing under their symbolic power: walls, musical
instruments, flesh, food. Like Matisse, who was greatly interested
influenced by flat Islamic patterning in floor rugs, Richards uses
floral wallpapers to represent a rich domesticity.
They stand for a life enjoyed, even in its way luxurious, in
the sense that they are things the need for which is a matter
of feeling and spirit; they are beautiful things, the accoutrements
of a civilised life in a sheltered space. In the house on Wandsworth
Common, Richards was himself surrounded by the female family
of his wife and two daughters, and by objects familiar and valued.
These paintings with their reverberant colourism, their decorative
arabesque vigour, their fullness of good things, sweet sounds
and floral perfumes, reflect that contained domesticity. They
are deeply tender in feeling, but detached in mood.5
In addition, the combination of music and painting in these works
operates on another level, that of harmonies and dissonances of
colour. In this, Richards found the writings and painting of Vasily
Kandinsky greatly inspiring. Music could be used to represent reverie
but it could also be more dramatic and engaged with the world at
large. A complex set of signs and an original approach to a range
of intellectual and artistic predecessors by Richards results in
an art that makes connections to all aspects of his brilliant oeuvre.
Very few artists in Britain managed to encompass such oppositions
of subject, theme and mood.
Ceri Richards was born in a small mining village in Wales in 1903.
He was the eldest of three children. Their father Tom Richards was
a devout Christian and unconcerned with worldly advancement. He
wrote poetry, directed and acted in local plays, and for 25 years
he conducted one of the finest choirs in Wales. He and his wife
Sarah brought their children to play piano and sing. Ceri Richards
was gifted musically and played in chapel at 15, as well as piano
accompaniments for concerts. In 1924 he accepted a scholarship to
the Royal College of Art, supplementing it with a small income for
playing the organ at the Roman Catholic Church in Fulham. Throughout
his life he played piano every day, and during the early years of
his marriage he often played in chamber music duets, trios and quartets
with friends.
He was particularly sensitive to music, being both a passionate
listener and highly accomplished executant, capable of sustained
and inventive improvised compositions. From childhood, music
was central to his imaginative life.6
Richard's upbringing was enriched by the peculiar mix of Welsh
non-conformism, the poetry of Welsh hymns, the music of Bach, Handel
and secular music. They all constituted an environment "in which
the spiritual, expressed in perennial myth and through music, poetry,
drama and religious rhetoric, was completely absorbed into everyday
life".7 In addition to music and poetry, Richards also experienced
the rich and varied landscape in Wales: rocky coastline, salt marshes,
the sea, the elements.
The visual arts, however, played no part in Richards childhood
or adolescent development. In fact, it was quite unthinkable from
a Puritan working-class background that he should become an artist.
After he left school he started an apprenticeship as an electrician
and with it he took night classes in engineering draughtsmanship
at the Technical School in Swansea. The electricians' firm failed
and Richards (who was now aware of the Swansea School of Art and
Crafts) chose to study drawing; his family gave their complete support.
There he received an academic training in drawing and craft disciplines
but very little teaching in painting. At the end of the final year
at Swansea, he won the scholarship he needed to go to the Royal
College of Art in London. Richards was a remarkable draughtsman;
his rigorous early training played a vital role.
Mel Gooding, the author of this fine study, is Richards' son-in-law.
Married to Richards' daughter, Rhiannon, he expresses with some
regret that it was only in the final year before Richards died,
that he felt able to talk to him directly about his work and his
ideas on art. Gooding did not in fact record any conversations with
Richards or carry out any formal interviews. Following Richards'
death in 1971, it was ten years before Gooding began to write about
art and another ten years before he published his first book.
Richards' wife Francis, was an artist in her own right. Gooding
describes her as having 'a marvellous visual insight and a formidable
intelligence. She had no doubts as to Richards' genius and a precise
understanding of its nature'.8 It is to Gooding's great credit that,
in spite of a somewhat slow start to this book, it is a wonderful
study. It is warm and intensely human, as indeed the author portrays
Ceri Richards to be himself. Richards' art in all its complexity
and variety is studied with a personal commitment but also with
a scholarly distance. Cameron and Hollis have produced a high quality
publication with excellent reproduction and design.
1 Gooding Mel. Ceri Richards. Moffat: Cameron and Hollis, 2002,
p.93
2 Ibid, p.93-4
3 Ibid, p.94
4 Ibid, p.94
5 Ibid, p.97
6 Ibid, p.8
7 Ibid, p.9
8 Preface, ibid.
Dr Janet McKenzie, Deputy Editor, Studio International
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