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拍品專文
Abstract Drawing (i) (the present lot), Abstract Drawing (ii) (lot 126) and Abstract Drawing (iii) (lot 127) were designed for the home of novelist and playwright Mrs Olivia Shakespear. In 1909, Shakespear hosted weekly salons at her house in Pembroke Mansions, and she became the centre of an arts and literary movement which included Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, T.E. Hulme and her previous lover, William Butler Yeats.
In 1914 her daughter Dorothy Shakespear married Ezra Pound. Dorothy was a talented artist herself, and by 1914 had assumed her own Vorticist style. In 1915 she designed the striking cover for Ezra Pound's volume of poetry, Ripostes, and her work would also feature in BLAST. W.B. Yeats wrote of her, 'She looks as if her face were made out of Dresden china. I look at her in perpetual wonder. It is hard to believe she is real; yet she spends all her daylight hours drawing the most monstrous cubist pictures' (A.D. Moody, Ezra Pound, Poet: The Young Genius 1885-1920, New York, 2007, p. 252). Although she never exhibited formally during her lifetime, Shakespear's work featured in the seminal exhibition of 2010-2011, The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18, which started at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina, and toured to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice and Tate Britain.
When discussing Abstract Drawing (i), (ii) and (iii), Paul Edwards writes, 'In these three works, the hieroglyphic or pictographic elements of Archimedes Reconnoitering the Enemy Fleet have become more fluid and biomorphic and are allowed to interpenetrate in indefinite spatial dispositions. The scope they offer for visual exploration and speculative interpretation is almost infinite. All three have a human connotation. [Abstract Drawing (iii)] appears to be topped with a suggestion of a head, perhaps wearing a schoolboy's pink cap. [Abstract Drawing (i)] has embedded in it, between the two sections at top and bottom that comprise smaller horizontal figures behind phallic shapes, a helmeted warrior figure (with a baby-like pink face). [Abstract Drawing (ii)] has a torso and head at the top, accompanied by a spirit "double" that appears to emanate from and partly obscure the torso. The drawings are produced with amazing delicacy and glow with touches of vivid colour. They are unlike anything else in English (or European) modernism' (exhibition catalogue, Wyndham Lewis, Madrid, Fundación Juan March, 2010, p. 213).
We are very grateful to Paul Edwards for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
In 1914 her daughter Dorothy Shakespear married Ezra Pound. Dorothy was a talented artist herself, and by 1914 had assumed her own Vorticist style. In 1915 she designed the striking cover for Ezra Pound's volume of poetry, Ripostes, and her work would also feature in BLAST. W.B. Yeats wrote of her, 'She looks as if her face were made out of Dresden china. I look at her in perpetual wonder. It is hard to believe she is real; yet she spends all her daylight hours drawing the most monstrous cubist pictures' (A.D. Moody, Ezra Pound, Poet: The Young Genius 1885-1920, New York, 2007, p. 252). Although she never exhibited formally during her lifetime, Shakespear's work featured in the seminal exhibition of 2010-2011, The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-18, which started at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina, and toured to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice and Tate Britain.
When discussing Abstract Drawing (i), (ii) and (iii), Paul Edwards writes, 'In these three works, the hieroglyphic or pictographic elements of Archimedes Reconnoitering the Enemy Fleet have become more fluid and biomorphic and are allowed to interpenetrate in indefinite spatial dispositions. The scope they offer for visual exploration and speculative interpretation is almost infinite. All three have a human connotation. [Abstract Drawing (iii)] appears to be topped with a suggestion of a head, perhaps wearing a schoolboy's pink cap. [Abstract Drawing (i)] has embedded in it, between the two sections at top and bottom that comprise smaller horizontal figures behind phallic shapes, a helmeted warrior figure (with a baby-like pink face). [Abstract Drawing (ii)] has a torso and head at the top, accompanied by a spirit "double" that appears to emanate from and partly obscure the torso. The drawings are produced with amazing delicacy and glow with touches of vivid colour. They are unlike anything else in English (or European) modernism' (exhibition catalogue, Wyndham Lewis, Madrid, Fundación Juan March, 2010, p. 213).
We are very grateful to Paul Edwards for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.