|
Upon Sorel's return to England, she
established a studio in London, where her album inspired by Jean Genet's Le
Balcon was published in 1965. The title page of this work combines line
engraving, photoengraving, and color aquatint. In other prints of the period,
she combined burin engraving, imprints from hammered nails, and images directly
offset from traditional Greek votive tablets of silvered copper. A more
substantial use of photo-etching can be seen in her Dark Satanic Mills made
around 1972. Like Michael Rothenstein at this time, her interest in collaging
photographic images through photo-engraving was triggered by the work of
Rauschenberg. However, Dark Satanic Mills, with its intriguing perspectival
vistas, has a spatial ambiguity compounded by the manner in which a central
form, derived from one of her earlier space engravings, appears to hover
somewhat in front of the picture plane. It is also one of the first to reflect
her developing study of optics, geometry, and the psychology of perception. In
the previous decade, Hayter had been pursuing similar researches; this is
reflected in a chapter he contributed to Gyorgy Kepes's Vision + Value31 in the
revision of the third edition of New Ways of Gravure, as well as in many
paintings and prints of his last two decades.
Sorel's Roots is an engraving on plastic
which features small areas of manipulated inking. The starting point was a
series of drawings of the twisted, bleached roots of ancient fig trees.
Surface-printed from plastic plates in conscious mimicry of lino or woodblocks,
the roots combine with two geometric forms, printed both from the intaglio and
the surface. Some of the intaglio is cut by drypoint, but other lines are
mechanically engraved with a router, while parts of the forms are roughened by
a drill bearing a carborundum stone, which is a car body repair tool. Surface
inking enlivens the color and texture of the two asymmetrical volcanic stones
in the foreground. As in Dark Satanic Mills, the forms are unconfined by a
rectangle and the work pays affectionate homage to Rothenstein's woodcut and
collage prints of the early 1960s, while" nevertheless remaining firmly rooted
in the artist's own sources and development.
Sorel's space engravings are a unique aspect
of her art-perspex sculptures which fuse the properties of engraving with
three-dimensional form. In them she is able to combine organic, geometric, and
associational elements. In the tradition of Naum Gabo and Moholy Nagy, these
are constructivist in derivation, an art of transparent open volumes, whose
translucency permits the manipulation of actual rather than virtual light. Some
of the sculptures have elements which hang or float, allowing gentle kinetic
movement, shifting polychromatic shadows, and reflections. Doubling apparent
volumes and introducing new symmetries, these extended images are suggestive of
time, duration, and relativity. These early space engravings, made between 1970
and 1974, use the engraved line to evoke the possibilities of space through
axonometric projection, while other engraved contours subvert Euclidean
geometry and are themselves transformed as our viewpoint shifts.
It is for her prints and space engravings,
rather than for her paintings, that Agathe Sorel's work is best known. Yet her
drawings, watercolors, and collages are an essential aspect of it and come from
her annual summer migration to the subtropical island of Lanzarote in the
Canaries, which provides the catalyst and stimulus to fuel the longer months of
making and editioning in studio and workshop. A recent space engraving. Macho
the Cockerel [Colourplate V, page 55], is a perspex and welded steel sculpture
whose genesis—on a cliff above the horseshoe Lanzarote bay—was the
confrontation between a retinue of noisy hens and a cockerel atop an
elaborately rigged motorbike, festooned with mirrors, chrome, and
yellow-and-scarlet custom sprayed decoration. Photographed from the rear, the
intersecting arches of handlebars and frame become formal, structural elements.
Schematic rendering by engraved lines of the tire treads and seat are read, in
consequence of the transparency of the sculptural ground, as virtual line in
space. As the eye of the viewer moves, optical shifts occur due to the
thickness of the material, which acts as a prism. The reflections of the cock's
comb, cloned in formalized projection in each of the flanking mirrors, give
rise to additional possibilities. By turning the handlebars, at a certain point
both crimson comb and its reflection are caught in real mirror-glass disks. The
representation of three dimensional imagery on two-dimensional surfaces
paradoxically evokes the theoretical possibility of a fourth dimension.
Finally, the main transparent elements are constructed to pivot through ninety
degrees, hence what is reflected must operate through all these permutations.
THE ARTISTS DISCUSSED HERE have two things in common: their independence and
their search for innovation and renewal in printmaking. Additionally, as
practitioners in drawing, painting, or sculpture, they all have been prepared
to challenge and transgress the artificial frontiers of craft conventions.
Apart from this, they differ dramatically. Hayter left no 'school' in England.
But the Atelier 17 ideal, the rejection of the artist as lone wolf in favor of
the collaborative workshop, with its free-ranging exchange of ideas,
philosophy, method, and process, has left its imprint upon printmaking in
Britain.
Buckland-Wright's Etching and Engraving was
undoubtedly as influential as New Ways of Gravure in bringing the best of
avant-garde European printmaking to the notice of young English artists. If
Buckland-Wright's own most innovative phase was short-lived, his book is
nevertheless a powerful testimony to his mentor. Trevelyan and Gross were
influential artist-printmakers teaching respectively at the Royal College of
Art and the Slade School at a crucial period in British postwar art. Michael
Rothenstein and Agathe Sorel are also influential teachers. Anthony Gross was
never an associate of Atelier 17. He was, with Hayter, the other significant
English artist of the School of Paris; a long-standing friend, who grew far
closer to Hayter as he reached full maturity. The increased scale and powerful
structural syntax of the landscape etchings from mid-1950 through the 1960s are
closely related to the parallel development of his canvases, and present an
interesting counterpart to Hayter's extended water series. Hayter's practice
and renewal of gravure invoked automatism of line, a strict Surrealist
orthodoxy consciously harnessed and developed to fuse with concepts and themes
which were, by turn, mythic and classical or fed by research in optics,
kinetics, and alternative geometries. The surrealism of Hayter united intuitive
and intellectual content, being simultaneously avant-garde yet rooted in the
tradition of European classicism: it was predominantly anti-realist.
By contrast, Michael Rothenstein is a realist
whose method depends upon collecting, collaging, and combining all that
delights or interests him in the visual, tactile world of images, surfaces, and
objects. In the twin fields of relief and combination prints, he has had a
major impact upon the history of the medium in this half-century. The
theoretical interests of Hayter have their complement in works like Agathe
Sorel's space engravings. Yet Sorel is at the same time impelled to retain
organic and associational elements and combine these with her interests and
researches into abstract configurations of space. As Buckland-Wright wrote in
1953: "Aesthetics cannot be relegated to a water-tight compartment. They are
part and parcel of the age, and coloured by the intellectual processes and
scientific discoveries of that age. There is no hard and fast line to be drawn
between art and intellect or art and science. Art is the synthesis of all
human, mental, emotional and psychic experience." In Britain the formation of
the Printmakers Council in 1965, with Anthony Gross as its first president and
Trevelyan, Rothenstein, and Sorel all active in its leadership, has provided a
fulcrum for group activity and professional discourse. The diversity and
richness of printmaking today and the younger generation of highly creative
artist printmakers—not disciples—is Hayter's true legacy in
England.
30 Agathe Sorel, cited note 21.
31 Gyorgy
Kepes, Vision + Value: The Nature and
Art of Motion (New York: Braziller
and London:
Studio Vista, 1965). |
