“C.R.W. Nevinson: The Complete Prints” Book and Exhibition
Commemorating the centenary of the First World War and coinciding with the opening of an exhibition at Osborne Samuel, London, Lund Humphries publishes the first comprehensive survey of C.R.W. Nevinson’s printmaking career on 25 September 2014.
A whole generation of artists, including Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash and Wyndham Lewis are often said to have been afflicted by a ‘crisis of representation’ as they struggled to come to terms with the scale of the destruction wrought by the Great War. Of that group, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946) emerged as an irrepressible artistic force, whose paintings and prints made during his engagement as an official war artist, run the gamut from the confident early swagger of futuristic works enraptured by mechanised war, to the scarred and scorched forms of a hardened artist-witness.
Drawing on over sixteen years’ worth of research and unpublished archival material, C.R.W. Nevinson: The Complete Prints (£150) provides, for the first time, a comprehensive survey of Nevinson’s maturation as artist and printmaker. Jonathan Black’s book illuminates Nevinson’s prodigious compositional talents and demands the resurrection of popular interest in a body of work that was cruelly cut short by an illness inflamed by the very processes involved in creating printed works.
This landmark publication includes a complete catalogue raisonné of Nevinson’s 148 prints and offers readers a unique and arresting visual compendium of the Great War and following it, the fascinating interwar period in the smog of London and the dazzling lights of Jazz-Age Paris and New York. Befitting for an artist who was devoted to the highest standards of craftsmanship in whatever medium he pursued, the book is immaculately reproduced on high-grade art paper and is lavishly bound in real cloth.
C.R.W. Nevinson: The Complete Prints by Jonathan Black
Published in Association with Osborne Samuel
Includes 158 colour illustrations; 208pp
September 2014; 290 x 240 mm;
Hardback; 978-1-84822-157-4; £150.00
About the Author: Dr Jonathan Black is a Senior Research Fellow in History of Art at Kingston University. His numerous publications include The Sculpture of Eric Kennington (2002), Form, Feeling and Calculation: The Paintings and Drawings of Edward Wadsworth (2006), The Face of Courage: Eric Kennington and the Second World War (2011) and (with Sarah Ayres) Abstraction and Reality: The Sculptor of Ivor Robert-Jones (2014). He has also been associated with a range of exhibitions as an adviser, co-curator and curator.
The exhibition C.R.W. Nevinson: A Printmaker in War and Peace runs at Osborne Samuel, London from 25 September - 18 October 2014 www.osbornesamuel.com
Other exhibitions around the UK including Nevinson’s work include: Efforts & Ideal: Prints of the First World War at the National Gallery of Wales, Cardiff (2 Aug - 7 Jan 2015) and Rebel Visions: The War Art of C.R.W. Nevinson (24 Oct - 25 Jan 2015) at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.
Image courtesy of Osborne Samuel.
