Gerardo Dottori: The Futurist View

Alessio Stefanelli from Perugia, Umbria–Dottori’s home town–was our speaker for the evening. Photo: ©Annmarie Meredith 2014

The great thing about a visit to the Estorick Collection are the artistic surprises that lie in wait for you. First you walk through the garden and think 'it would be nice to spend more time out here', then you step into a small hallway, pass the bookshop on the right, café to the left, continue along a white washed corridor and then into one of the galleries where you might be assaulted by paintings of intense colours or unexpected sculptures or beautifully crafted drawings. This can make you pause briefly while you collect yourself.

This is what happened to me last week at the Islington Art Society's annual visit to the Estorick to see Gerardo Dottori's exhibition 'The Futurist View'. I am woefully ignorant about many 20th century artists and visits like this do help fill the gaps in my knowledge.

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto in 1909. The Futurists glorified and emphasised speed, technology, youth, violence, cars, aeroplanes and industrial cities and rebelled against harmony and good taste. Gerardo Dottori (1884-1977) became a leading figure of the movement during the years between the two world wars and signed the Futurist Manifesto of Aeropainting in 1929.

There are a number of his Aeropaintings on display in this exhibition which depict landscapes and visions of Umbria from the viewpoint of a passenger in an aeroplane. They have an hypnotic quality to them so you could easily lose yourself for a long time once you have been drawn into these slightly unrealistic but harmonious landscapes.

Gerardo Dottori's reputation suffered after the end of WWII when being a Fascist was no longer socially or politically acceptable. Presumably the Estorick have now decided that enough time has passed since 1945 to safely introduce him to a new audience. Certainly we could not have asked for a more enthusiastic speaker than Alessio Stefanelli who, coming from the same town in Umbria as Dottori, told us that he has grown up seeing the very same landscapes that are depicted in these paintings and his enthusiasm made me want to go and visit the area for myself.

Emilio Greco: Sacred and Profane

The Estorick Collection has chosen this year to exhibit Emilio Greco's work to celebrate the centenary of his birth in 1913. This is the first exhibition at the Estorick Collection to be devoted to sculpture but my attention was drawn straight away to his life drawings. They were very confident and full of life and I felt that they might have been produced just last week. His obvious enjoyment of voluptuous female nudes sets the tone in the first gallery and the accompanying sculptures develop in three dimensions the forms and curves Greco depicts in two dimensions in his drawings.

I was visiting this exhibition along with members from the Islington Art Society and a number of us were very taken with some of the very fine details in his sculptures in particular the eyelashes on one male nude. They appear to be real, fine eyelashes until you look really closely and see they have been made with scratches into the clay before the piece was cast in bronze. This attention to detail along with Greco's awareness of, and artistry in creating solid but alive forms of the human body runs like a thread through the entire exhibition.
 
Emilio Greco (1913-1995) was born in Catania, Sicily and he began to learn the craft of making sculpture when he was apprenticed as a young teenager to a stone mason and sculptor of funerary monuments. He taught sculpture in Rome, Carrara and Naples and he began receiving recognition for his own work from the 1950s. One of the pieces of work that enhanced his reputation was his design for the Monument to Pinocchio (1953) which is located in Collodi's Pinocchio Park. The design is unlike anything else in this exhibition and was my least favourite exhibit.

Greco was contemporary with Pablo Picasso and you can see Picasso's influence in at least one of his drawings. I really liked this piece and it helped show me that Greco was part of a vibrant European artistic movement where any artist can influence any other. However Greco was also his own man and distinct from other artists and you can see this clearly in the second gallery where there are examples of his sacred work. There are studies for a major project for a set of monumental doors for Orvieto Cathedral which include bas-relief modelling. This project took years to be completed and may well have caused Greco untold anxiety but this sacred work does reveal a depth to this artist which is only hinted at in his smaller nude studies.

The Poster King - Edward McKnight Kauffer

In the summer I joined the Islington Arts Society. This was partly to expand my circle of artistic acquaintances and partly to get the opportunity to exhibit my art.

One of the benefits of membership was an invitation on Wednesday evening to visit the Estorick Collection to see the exhibition The Poster King - Edward McKnight Kauffer and listen to a talk by the curator.

The core of the Estorick Collection is work from the Futurist movement and also includes modern Italian art dating from 1895 to the 1950s. Almost the first thing the curator did was to ask a question of himself: What is an artist born in Montana in the United States and settled in England doing on show in a gallery designed to promote Italian art? The answer, which is a bit tenuous, was that Edward McNight Kauffer drew a lot of his inspiration from Fauvism, Vorticism and Constructivism and this includes the work of Italian artists.

I'm familiar with Kauffer's poster designs for the London Underground encouraging passengers to explore the Surrey Hills in their spare time or rush to the Winter Sales or visit the Natural History Museum. I had no idea though that he had been at the forefront of commercial art when it was in its infancy in the early years of the 20th century.

His talent was spotted when a very young man by Joseph E McKnight, a professor at the University of Utah. This man became a benefactor and paid for Kauffer to continue his education in Paris in 1912. As a mark of gratitude Kauffer eventually incorporated his benefactor's surname into his own. At the outbreak of WWI Kauffer had to leave France and made for England and in 1915 received a commission to design posters for London Underground.

There were examples on display of finished artwork for some of the posters which I found fascinating. Having been a graphic design student in the 1970s I could appreciate the labour involved in creating these works. Whereas I recall struggling and failing to create anything worthwhile Kauffer had set the standards for commercial art for the rest of us to follow 60 years before.

Kauffer's heart appeared to lie in the pictorial side of posters rather than the typography. I know to my cost that doing typography well is very difficult to achieve and there are two examples on display where he had to patch over mistakes (I would love to have seen what was underneath).

The work Kauffer did for London Underground led him to receive commissions from various companies and publishing houses. this included work for Shell and BP - by this time the typography was being done by someone else - so Kauffer could concentrate on developing ways of incorporating new technology like photo-montage into his images. By 1925 Kauffer was so famous there was a retrospective exhibition of his work, and he was only 35. He continued being very productive until the outbreak of WWII when, as a US citizen and with commissions becoming scarce, he and his wife returned to live in the US.

It appears he did this with much regret and, although he continued to work, the last decade of his life didn't live up to the success he had enjoyed while settled in England.