The cultural model
of Indian temple sculpture made a remarkable entry into an obscure
line of English art through the London meeting between Eric Gill
and Ananda Commaraswamy in 1908. Gill, an engraver and
self-taught sculptor, quickly assimilated the two cultural
characteristics of Indian sculpture, namely its convexity and
linearity. Using for the most part female members of his
family circle as nude models, this Indian influence resulted, on
the one hand, in the proliferation of black and white line
engravings, and on the other sculptured forms based expressed as
convexities.
Eric Gill occupies a
unique place in British sculptural life of the twentieth century.
He was born on 22 February 1882 in Brighton, the eldest son of
twelve children of Arthur Tidman and Rose Gill. Eric Gill described
his father as 'an Anglican parson, formerly a Dissenter', and his
grandfather and great-uncle were Congregationalist missionaries in
the South Sea Islands. The strong sense of vocation displayed by
these three close male relatives was inherited by Gill, who
appeared to feel from early manhood that he had a divinely
appointed task to do. This task was to communicate his vision of
art as a vehicle for the splendours of spiritual life. And in order
to do this, Gill began to produce figurative sculpture that was
uncompromising in its sacred message.
Gill came to believe
passionately that things had gone wrong with the advent of the
Industrial Revolution, and the introduction of inhuman machine
production of buildings, clothing, furniture, food and utensils. In
the centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was no
special thing called art. Art was making in general and anyone who
made anything would, if the word had existed, have been called an
artist. Art was simply the way of men with things; it was human
work . In this sense, Gill was already pre-adapted to take up the
cultural inheritance of Indian art, which for the most part is the
product of anonymous sculptors.
An entry in Gill's
diary for 10 January 1908 records that he attended a lecture at the
Art Workers' Guild, London, given by Dr Ananda Coomaraswamy on
Indian Art. Gill added the accompanying phrase 'a most splendid
paper'. This appears to be the first time that Gill became aware of
Coomaraswamy, and it seems he was immediately impressed by the man
and his knowledge. At the end of his life, Gill wrote in his
Autobiography:
"There was one person . . . to whose influence I
am deeply grateful; I mean the philosopher and theologian, Ananda
Coomaraswamy. Others have written the truth about life and religion
and man's work . . . Others have understood the true significance
of erotic drawings and sculptures. Others have seen the
relationships of the true and the good and the beautiful. Others
have had apparently unlimited learning. Others have loved; others
have been kind and generous. But I know of no one else in whom all
these gifts and all these powers have been combined. I dare not
confess myself his disciple; that would only embarrass him. I can
only say that I believe that no other living writer has written the
truth in matters of art and life and religion and piety with such
wisdom and understanding."
Coomaraswamy was
born in 1877 in Ceylon of a Tamil father and an English mother. He
studied botany and geology at London University. The Home Office in
London appointed Coomaraswamy Director of the first mineralogical
survey of Ceylon from 1903 to 1906, and after completing this work,
he travelled for the first time to India at the end of 1906. His
time in Ceylon and India stimulated an abiding interest in the arts
and crafts of those countries and their spiritual basis. In 1907
Coomaraswamy moved into a medieval building, the Norman Chapel at
Broad Campden, restored for him by C. R. Ashbee who lived and
worked a couple of miles away, at Chipping Campden. Ashbee had
formed his Guild of Handicraft, a group of workers occupied in the
arts and crafts, in the East End of London in 1888. In 1902 he took
his ideas and his workers to Chipping Campden, an attractive and
neglected Gloucestershire village, in order to test his theory that
a rural life was better for the production of art and craft work
than an urban one. Ashbee looked at the position of the worker and
his occupation in the arts and crafts world, such as silversmithing
or printing, in terms of the social well-being of the individual
and of society as a whole. Coomaraswamy allied himself to Ashbee's
ideas and ideals, but substituted the spiritual for the social.
Coomaraswamy purchased William Morris's press and used it to
publish in 1908 the first book on the arts of his native Ceylon,
Medieval Sinhalese Art. This was followed by The Indian Craftsman
in 1909, Indian Drawings in 1910, and several articles in the
Burlington Magazine between 1910 and 1916 on Indian art, later
published in book form as Rajput Painting and The Dance of Shiva,
the latter reviewed by Gill. In 1917 Coomaraswamy left Britain to
take up a post as Keeper of the Indian Collections at the Museum of
Fine Arts in Boston, a position he held until his death in
1947.
Coomaraswamy was
important for Gill for two reasons: firstly because he examined the
relationship between man's work and his leisure, and secondly
because he examined the relationship between the sacred and the
profane. Also he provided Gill with a phrase that virtually became
Gill's motto, and is thought by many to have stemmed from Gill
himself, so perfectly does it chime with his aesthetic
–
'The artist is not a special kind of man, but
every man is a special kind of artist'.
Gill was able to
test his own Christian-based ideas against those of a Hindu, and
thus gain a broader spiritual base, although many ideas were held
in common. Coomaraswamy was looking for a new metaphysical system
for man's work and life at just the same time that Gill was, but
Coomaraswamy's aesthetic parameters were much wider. He offered a
deep and first-hand knowledge of Indian and Ceylonese arts and
crafts to a British audience anxious to learn more. And Gill was in
the forefront of those thirsty for this knowledge. An appreciation
in Britain of Indian arts and crafts had first emerged in the late
1870s, spearheaded by the artists William Morris, Edward
BurneJones, John Everett Millais and Walter Crane. These men were
only too aware of how the arts and crafts in Britain were being
attacked by increasing industrialisation and they wished to focus
attention on the same position occurring in India. From 1908
Coomaraswamy took up this cause with passion. Then in the Spring of
1910 the India Society was founded, with its headquarters in
London. Among the founding members were Coomaraswamy, Walter Crane,
W. R. Lethaby, Roger Fry and William Rothenstein, all of whom were
colleagues of Gill and significant supporters of his emergent
sculptural practice.
In 1908 Coomaraswamy
published The Aims of Indian Art and in this book
cited William Blake as a most significant example of a Western
artist who worked in an imaginative rather than a naturalistic
manner. This way of thinking and working allied Blake to the
aesthetics of Oriental artists. Blake was for Coomaraswamy a great
and original spiritual thinker and artist and assumed for him the
role of a bridge between Eastern and Western art. It is not
inconceivable to imagine that Gill wanted to inherit Blake's role.
In 1910 Gill designed a tombstone based on one of Blake's
illustrations to Robert Blair's poem 'The Grave', the dramatic
composition of 'The Reunion of the Soul and the Body'. And in 1917
Gill based his wood engraving of The Last Judgement on Blake's
colour print of God Judging Adam. Gill, like Blake, believed in
social and spiritual reform, and sexual freedom. They both abhorred
the negative power of industrial mechanisation.
Gill's belief that
the ascetic and the sensual could be amalgamated stemmed from his
burgeoning knowledge of Indian art and Hindu theology. In 1913
Coomaraswamy published his The Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon
and a section of his chapter on Indian sculpture provides a most
useful gloss on these two reliefs. Coomaraswamy had been describing
how sculptures of spiritual figures were made more impressive if
they were created in a voluptuous style:
". . . in the best of Gothic art there are traces
of a conflict, a duality of soul and body. If in many works of
ancient Greece there is no such conflict, this is because the body
alone is presented: but in the best of the Indian sculpture flesh
and spirit are inseparable . . .
In nearly all Indian art there runs a vein of deep
sex-mysticism. Not merely are female forms felt to be equally
appropriate with male to adumbrate the majesty of the Over-soul,
but the interplay of all psychic and physical sexual forces is felt
in itself to be religious. Already we find in one of the earliest
Upanishads - 'For just as one who dallies with a beloved wife has
no consciousness of outer and inner, so the spirit also, dallying
with the Self-whose- essence-is-knowledge, has no consciousness of
outer and inner'. Here is no thought that passion is degrading . .
. but a frank recognition of the close analogy between amorous and
religious ecstasy . . . It is thus that the imager, speaking always
for the race, rather than of personal idiosyncrasies, set side by
side on his cathedral walls the yogi and the apsara, the saint and
the ideal courtesan"
Coomaraswamy's
description of the imager setting his two works of the saint and
courtesan side by side on a wall is virtually a description of what
was on display in Gill's contemporaneous exhibition. The very full
critical response to Gill's exhibition indicates that his
impassioned message, made public here for the first time, was in no
danger of being ignored, even if it was not yet time for it to be
assimilated into current aesthetic and ethical thinking. A
preparatory drawing exists for the relief 'A Roland for an Oliver'
and the body is drawn with greater confidence than the head. It
looks as though Gill used a variety of sources and synthesised them
together. There may have been some drawing from life; his diaries
at this time indicate that female members of his family posed
occasionally. But the face has the look of being copied from an
illustration of archaic Greek sculpture. No preparatory drawing is
known to exist for the Crucifixion panel, although there is an
interesting source for the figure of Christ. On the back of a
photograph of this relief, in an unknown hand, is the message: 'EG
1910: Early work inspired by Gauguin's Christ
jaune'.
Gauguin was
represented by forty-six works in Roger Fry's first
Postimpressionist Exhibition, although the Christ jaune was not one
of these. Gill went round the exhibition with Fry. Gill does not
give his opinion on Post-impressionist painters such as Gauguin and
Cezanne until much later. In 'Songs without clothes' in Art
Nonsense and Other Essays, published in 1929, Gill cites those
kinds of art which have been offered up as praise to God. Following
on from the primitive sculptures and paintings of India, China and
Greece, he concludes with:
“… the works of those who, called
'Post- Impressionists', coming after that last dying flare of the
idolaters, Impressionism, refusing to continue man's song of praise
of himself, now dare again to utter absolute statements, and,
however waywardly, and with whatever youthful flouting of your
materialist and hedonist prejudices, again say in paint and
stone”
Following earlier
examples of his lettered inscriptions, Gill painted the incised
Latin letters on the Crucifixion relief black and the full stops
red. With A Roland for an Oliver, Gill decorated his pagan
voluptuous woman by gilding her necklace and painting her lips and
nipples red. The Observer noted that 'the gold chain round the
woman's neck produces an effect dangerously near that of the black
stockings in some of Felicien Rops' pornographic etchings'. Indeed,
although both reliefs were greatly admired, and purchased from the
exhibition by Roger Fry and Robert Ross for the newly formed
Contemporary Art Society, there was general difficulty over the
painted decorations which adorned the woman's body. Gill was asked
to tone them down, and even in 1913 'to remove paint from nipples
of "young woman" to please C. K. Butler', a council member of the
Society. Gill continued to colour his sculpture, both sacred and
secular subjects, throughout his career.
