William Roberts: An English Cubist

by Andrew Gibbon Williams
Lund Humphries, Burlington, VT, 2004
152 pp., illus. 40 b/w; 60 col. Trade, $56.00
ISBN: 0-85331-824-7.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa

ballast@netins.net

Some people (myself among them) have long admired the second tier of artists in Vorticism, a hybrid Cubist-Futurist group that formed in London at the start of World War I (in part in opposition to Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops). The founders of Vorticism were British painter and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis and American poet Ezra Pound, who together are also remembered as the originators of an irreverent short-lived magazine, titled BLAST, that premiered in 1914. While the fame of Lewis and Pound is deserved, of additional interest is the work of others in that movement, of whom the next three might include American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, and British painters Edward Wadsworth and William Roberts. Quite a lot is known about Coburn (thanks to his autobiography); and in an interesting memoir by Wadsworth’s daughter, she recalls her father’s wartime work as a dock supervisor for the bizarre "dazzle camouflage" of ships, of which he made wonderful paintings and prints.

As for William Roberts (1895-1980), it is tempting to assume that he, if anyone, was surely a loyal and active participant in Vorticism, if only because his best-known painting is a tableau portrait of eight members of the group (himself among them), seated at a table in a famous London restaurant called the Tour Eiffel. Three of them have copies of the first issue of BLAST, and the painting’s formal title reads The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915. Unlike most "docudrama" art, this painting is of value both as an esthetic achievement (regardless of subject) and as an historical record. As it turns out, Roberts’ connection to Vorticism was ambivalent at best. As is revealed in this first biography, he very soon grew spiteful of Wyndham Lewis, who had let it be known without asking, that Roberts was his protégé (a submissive underling), while Roberts believed that he had made original and important contributions to Vorticism. He made that portrait of the group not in 1915 (that date is part of its title instead), but, curiously, more than 45 years later, in 1961-62, when Roberts was in his late 60s. By that time, resigned to less than full respect, and more resentful of Lewis than ever, instead of correcting the notion of himself as a disciple of Lewis, he must have decided to capitalize on the advantage of it.

Throughout the intervening years, he had done everything possible to bolster his artistic stature with the hope that he might then be able to earn a better income. It is not commonly realized, for example, that he produced six pencil portraits (of British diplomats and military officers) and a drawing of a camel march for Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), the autobiography of T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), and following that, in the same year, painted a portrait of Lawrence in an airman’s uniform. Ten years later, he was commissioned by John Maynard Keynes to paint a double portrait of the eminent economist seated beside his ballerina wife (both shown smoking cigarettes). He also did commissioned work for Frank Pick and the London Underground, failed miserably as a War Artist during World War II, but later made beautiful drawings for use as illustrations for his son’s poetry.

Perusing this endlessly interesting book, which includes reproductions of numerous artworks by Roberts that most of us have never seen (there are 100 reproductions in all), one is tempted to conclude that his most compelling pieces are those that are the least well known, and that he was especially gifted at portrait drawing (see his self-portrait drawing made in 1909-10, or a red chalk portrait of his son, dated 1941); and at highly unusual figurative works that began about 1930, and which slowly allowed him to settle permanently on a lonely but exquisite island among Cubism, Purism, Fernand Leger, and Art Deco.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Volume 20 Number 3, Spring 2005.)