John Buckland Wright - Master of the Burin
Foreword
In the 1930's, 1940's and early 1950's three artists did a great deal to launch British engraving into the exciting waters of contemporary European art: the New Zealander John Buckland Wright and two Englishmen William Hayter and Anthony Gross. They all had French attachments and were quite independent of the influences of earlier and highly successful schools of British engraving. Buckland Wright helped Hayter to found his famous Atelier 17 in Paris. At this workshop, in which artists experimented at novel methods of printmaking, JBW (as became known by his initials) worked with artists such as Matisse, Chagall, Picasso, Miró, Dali. Later when teaching at the Camberwell and Slade Schools of Art, he was able to communicate to his pupils his experience of how these artists worked.
JBW's work is characterized by the portrayal of the sensuous nude, in which the female form is depicted with grace and charm. The source for his artistic expssion has its origin in his experiences during the First World War. Having joined the Scottish Ambulance Service, he was seconded to the French Army at Verdun, the sector in which the French suffered the greatest devastation during the First World War. There he witnessed harrowing scenes of human devastation while rescuing wounded and dying men from the front line trenches. Following the war, JBW found relief in drawing the female figure that incorporated the romantic ideal of Greek philosophy into the very essence of the emotional expssion of his work. Through his art he was able to come to terms with the horrors he had experienced during the war and to restore unity and tranquillity to the devastated landscapes, to repair the damage that war had wrought on his love of nature. Once more he would fill his world with beauty of a timeless quality he had experienced in the gardens and countryside of New Zealand and England. He found his emotional renewal through his art. It was in this way that he was able to expss his fundamental belief in the renewal of life and of the human spirit and to rediscover the joy he felt as a young man in nature's soothing beauty.
This exhibition is a wonderful opportunity for JBW's compatriots to view a comphensive retrospective collection of one of the greatest book illustrators of the 1930's and 1940's. I would like to congratulate Dr Donald Kerr and Otago University Library for putting together an exhibition where we are able to appciate JBW's work as a book illustrator and of which he said of himself 'I pfer the freer, more or less abstract sphere of poetry, or the synthesising of a whole story into one cut, which creates an atmosphere rather than picturing any definite scene. I dislike pure illustration as much as anecdote'.
Christopher Buckland Wright
November 2006
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Special Collections, Auckland City Libraries; Hocken Collections; Dr John Holmes, and Christopher Buckland Wright for his generosity and input into this exhibition on JBW.
References
The Engravings of John Buckland Wright. Aldershot [England]: Ashgate Editions, 1990
Christopher Buckland Wright, Endeavours & Experiments. Upper Denby, England: Fleece pss, 2004
John Buckland Wright (1897-1954): For My Own Pleasure. London: Wolseley Fine Arts, 2003
John Buckland Wright (1897-1954): The Continental Years. London: Wolseley Fine Arts, [1997]
John Buckland Wright (1897-1954): The Golden Cockerel Years. London: Wolseley Fine Arts, 2001
John Buckland Wright (1897-1954): The Surrealist Years, 1934-1954. London: Wolseley Fine Arts, [1999]
Anthony Reid, A Check-list of the Book Illustrations of John Buckland Wright. Pinner, Middlesex: Private Libraries Association, 1968
Surreal Times. Denby Dale, [England]: Fleece press, 2000
Special thanks to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Special Collections, Auckland City Libraries; Hocken Collections; Dr John Holmes, and Christopher Buckland Wright for his generosity and input into this exhibition on JBW.