Janet Wells’ quarterly review of the Arts, Gallery and Museum scene.
Dulwich Picture Gallery
Tirzah Garwood: After Ravilious
Ends May 26
Eileen Lucy Garwood (1908 – 1951) was nicknamed Tirzah by her family when an infant and it stuck; however, until this exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, you may not have recognized the name – other than the wife of Eric Ravilious (1903 -1942) – who, these days, has a popular following.
Tate Britain’s recent exhibition Now You See Us was dedicated to female artists whose work hadn’t had the recognition it deserved during their lifetime: I suggest Tirzah Garwood fits into this category.
Both lives were tragically short: Ravilious, killed in 1942, while on active service in Iceland; Tirzah died of cancer aged 43. The title of the exhibition is apt – in so far that it distinctly compares her work during their relationship to that which she produced after Ravilious’s death.
The couple met when he was teaching drawing and wood engraving at his old art school, Eastbourne School of Art: Tirzah was a student there, between 1925-1928. Her parent’s had recognized her drawing ability, and they had encouraged her decision to study illustration. Until art school she had produced drawings based on illustrations within Victorian children’s books.
Garwood came from a well-established middle-class family while Ravilious didn’t. In her autobiography she remembers her thoughts as a seventeen-year-old student: … with my family’s training behind me, I quickly spotted that he wasn’t quite a gentleman……. She also recalled his halfhearted flirtations with the girls. However, it was with Ravilious’s encouragement that she began to develop her skill in wood engraving – a skill that was acknowledged in her lifetime.
She had moved away from the fairies, cute little rabbits, and quaint little gnomes her tutor had scorned upon. As well as the technically fine drawings, she displays a satirical wit -that is surprising for someone of her age. In 1929, she had been commissioned to illustrate a calendar for the Curwen Press – which was never produced. Grouped together: The Crocodile; The Wife; The Cousin; The Grandmother and the Vegetable Garden. In The Train Journey 1929, she includes her own portrait among the passengers; the countryside is seen through the opposite carriage window: It demonstrates her skill in conveying the look and feel of different fabrics together with three – dimensional design. There is a Ravilious print on the same subject (Train Landscape) without passengers. In Hall of Mirrors, she appears to challenge the conventional 20th century view of women in a comic, distorted self-portrait.
She and Ravilious rented a flat by the river, in Hammersmith, London: Ravilious was one of a bunch of highly talented artists that had come out of the Royal College of Art and Garwood found herself as part of a busy social group . They married in 1930 and in order live closer to nature, they linked up with artist Edward Bawden and moved to Brick House in Great Bardfield, Essex. Interesting to note that Garfield, after her marriage, had abandoned wood engraving: She and Charlotte (Edward Bawden’s wife) felt obliged to take on the responsibility for maintaining a functioning base for the constant stream of visitors – comprising of what is now known as the Great Bardfield Artists
She and Charlotte developed a technique for paper marbling which produced abstracted natural forms or patterns. Garwood’s papers began to sell and became so highly regarded that the V&A bought two sets: After Ravilious plane went missing in 1942, this source of income helped her through difficult times. Examples of these subtle coloured papers are displayed in the first two galleries.
Ravilious and Garwood moved again: They bought Bank House in Castle Hedingham, Essex. At this point, Garwood occasionally assisted Ravilious in his work: A set of commissioned murals that they painted together in Morcombe; she also helped him with his engravings for a new edition of Twelfth Night – for which she wasn’t credited: Their daughter, Anne Ullmann, recently revealed that some of Garwood’s wood engravings had mistakenly been credited to Ravilious
Their first son, John was born in 1935. James, in 1939 and then their daughter Anne in 1942. She continued to be creative, but with small children to care for, her work was restricted to making clothes, patchwork quilts, and she began her house portraits. A stream of orders still came in for her marbled papers. The exhibition has her enormous scrapbook on show. Her house portraits have been described as sophisticated naive: They are a mixture of three-dimensional collage and print, set into box frames. She demonstrates the same observant eye as in her wood engravings. Ravilious produced paintings on the same subject using his own familiar style. To compare the influences between Garfield and Ravilious, there are several Ravilious paintings included in the first two galleries.
1942 was a disastrous year: She was diagnosed with breast cancer and after an emergency mastectomy, Eric Ravilious went missing in Greenland and was presumed dead. As a record for her children, she began to write her autobiography which she finished in 1943. She remarried in 1946, to Henry Swanzy, a BBC literary producer, and they moved to Primrose Hill.
She began to paint in oil by 1944 – a medium she hadn’t previously used but quickly learnt to handle. Unusually for a 20th century artist, the images in this final stage of her creativity return to her pre art school topic of toys, fairies, flowers and insects although now, we have a strange surreal element and an overtone of darkness. Toy trains were a theme: Horses and Train 1944; Etna – the toy train sitting within a backdrop of the Sussex Downs; A doll – like child among giant flowers; portraits set inside the interior of a dolls house.
Tirzah Garwood, Horses and Trains, 1944, oil on canvas glued to card, 40.7 x 58.5 cm, private collection.
When her illness returned, she finally had to go into a nursing home, and yet she continued to paint (on small canvases) sometimes, from her bed. The final picture in the exhibition is Spanish Lady. Probably a self-portrait; a pale figure standing in a ghostly night garden with giant spring flowers and a hovering owl.
The Barbican Art Gallery
Noah Davis
6 Feb to 11 May
Noah Davis 1983 – 2015: At the time of his untimely death from cancer, at the age of 32, Davis had already made his mark on the American art scene. The Barbican hosts the UK’s first retrospective of the American artist’s work of paintings, sculpture and works on paper.
Noah Davis Installation view Barbican Art Gallery 2025 c Jemima Yong Barbican Art Gallery.
Davis and his wife (the sculptor Karon Davis) had founded the Underground Museum, Los Angeles which had converted from four store fronts -funded from an inheritance from his late father – and was free and open to everyone. By the time he died, he had planned eighteen exhibitions, for the Underground Museum using the Museum of Contemporary Art L A’s collection, motivated by the desire to change the way people view art, the way they buy art, the way they make art.
Although Davis was a figurative painter, he was a great admirer of Mark Rothko: He used rabbit-skin glue (like Rothko) which required him to work quickly, building up fine layers of oil paint – his figures appear to be immersed in a field of colour. He also used architecture to look at intersections of race and class in urban America. His painting “Missing Link” features Lafayette Park, a vast housing project in Downtown Detroit. In 2014, he imagined how culture in an inner city might look: Pueblo del Rio, LA, had become one of the most impoverished and dangerous areas in the city but in his paintings, Davis sought to reimagine how it should have remained – with its shared lawns and outdoor spaces: Pueblo del Rio, Arabesque, 2014.
Davis believed that he had a responsibility to represent the people around me and he had a series of showing people in “normal scenarios” and to this end he produced figurative paintings using as references, anonymous vintage photography found in flea markets, personal archives, film and television. There are scenes that feel both realistic and dreamlike, joyful and melancholic.
Just before his death in August 2015, he made three paintings: The first from a found photograph of two girls asleep on a sofa; used to represent honour rest and togetherness; A vintage photo of a funeral to confront the imminent pain of his own death and a photo his wife took, of a man walking in front of Self-storage containers – for the solitude with which we exit the world. A poignant scene from an archive film shows Davis working in his studio; his small son happily painting alongside his father..
There is an events programme around the exhibition which is supported by US Embassy in London.
