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Lot Essay
John Armstrong was a great thinker but his attendance at St. John's College, Oxford and St. John's Wood School of Art preceding and after the First World War was irregular. Instead, he spent his study periods wandering into deep meditation; watching people walk by in the street and contemplating objects all around him. This intense thought married with a classical education allowed him to cultivate his visual memory and construct fresh interpretations of classical imagery in his very own individual style.
'The Philosopher' is clearly unaware of his displacement of bodily parts and although this work is a product of Armstrong's mind and narrowly divorced from the Surrealists' exchanges of the unconscious, he is unhindered by the Surrealists' preoccupations of Freudian theories. Armstrong clearly explained this narrow division between his own work and the Surrealists, 'I paint what comes into my mind and to paint without visualising the final result is impossible to me. The image (built up of subconciously remembered things which in my case have been miscalled surrealist) must be clear and a constant attempt made to keep it from being overlaid with afterthoughts' (see Exhibition catalogue, John Armstrong, London, Ewan Mundy and Celia Philo, October 1989, p. 2).
Although Armstrong was clearly not a Surrealist he did influence a number of Surrealists and designed Alexander Korda's prophetic, surrealist film Things to Come - Britain's first million dollar movie based on H.G. Well's fantastical novel The Shape of Things to Come.
'The Philosopher' is clearly unaware of his displacement of bodily parts and although this work is a product of Armstrong's mind and narrowly divorced from the Surrealists' exchanges of the unconscious, he is unhindered by the Surrealists' preoccupations of Freudian theories. Armstrong clearly explained this narrow division between his own work and the Surrealists, 'I paint what comes into my mind and to paint without visualising the final result is impossible to me. The image (built up of subconciously remembered things which in my case have been miscalled surrealist) must be clear and a constant attempt made to keep it from being overlaid with afterthoughts' (see Exhibition catalogue, John Armstrong, London, Ewan Mundy and Celia Philo, October 1989, p. 2).
Although Armstrong was clearly not a Surrealist he did influence a number of Surrealists and designed Alexander Korda's prophetic, surrealist film Things to Come - Britain's first million dollar movie based on H.G. Well's fantastical novel The Shape of Things to Come.