Ode to Humanity: A portrait of Frank Brangwyn by Daniel Brusatin
London. July 31st, 2018
Daniel Brusatin’s career seems to be ceaselessly driven by a desire to bridge the abstract and the figurative. It seems to the author that his greatest artistic achievement in this subject, thus far, is in his monumental triptych: Ode to Humanity. It may come as a surprise to contemporary audiences that this summit was reached by gazing back on to one of Britain’s most under-appreciated painters. He was an artist whose genius was known throughout the world in his day, but whose ability to scatter his work across myriad areas of art and design ended up diluting his reputation. Frank Brangwyn’s ability to break the boundaries between mediums, challenging the historic place of painting and seeking to unify it with other arts, notably glass, is clearly a vision echoed by Daniel Brusatin almost a century later.
Perhaps the genius of Frank Brangwyn has been forgotten in this country as it was so hard to pin down to a single style or medium. Certainly not a Victorian, and revolutionary to the Edwardian public, he arrived “like one of those ‘Nova’ stars that emerge from nowhere and which used to upset all calculations by their size and brilliance.” Across various ponds to Europe and America, he is remembered as a great painter and torch-bearer of Art Nouveau; indeed there are Museums dedicated to Brangwyn from Bruges to Japan. But here it seems the upheavals of the war and the subsequent revolutions in British art thereafter have left Brangwyn confined to the rather dusty domain of the Arts and Crafts movement. He was influential in this area, and he did train in the Morris & Co. workshop, if only for a couple years; but his influence on 20th century painting is rarely discussed back in Blighty, rather shamefully in all honesty.
He was a terrible self publicist, possessing neither the PR genius of a Picasso or a Dali, nor the Trumpian self-branding abilities of a Warhol. His infrequent declarations that he was merely “a decorator” did not help. But this was not only a classic English act of self-deprecation, but an appeal to the public to take the idea of a democratised art seriously. This is why he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time making cushions and wallpaper prints for the English petite-bourgeoisie; he was not some tub-thumper for the downtrodden but one who believed art should be accessible to and uplift all, not just the privileged few who could buy his paintings.
Perhaps his smouldered light results from this keen political awareness that his paintings espouse. The Morris connection puts viewers in mind of the overly sentimentalised visions of socialism and industrialism from the lowest dregs of the Arts and Crafts, but when one really looks at Brangwyn’s works these parallels fall away. A closer look reveals the torsions of muscle, the dignity of expression, and sheer strength of will in his subjects; here is not some pithy bourgeois empathy for the working man. Brangwyn honed his skills not in the studio but in the world, travelling across Europe through Anatolia by sailboat and steamer, envisioning a new way to represent man in all his sweat and toil. This worldliness and compassion for universal human dignity put him ahead of his contemporaries in the illusion of 20th century painters. In these works one truly senses his greatness, feeling that “what is true for him is true for all men at all times.”
Beyond his subject matter, reevaluation of his technique is certainly in order. For although his immortalisations of steel workers or longshoremen might seem uncontroversially figurative, there exists a little germ of revolution in almost every choice of colour and composition. Some make the mistaken charge that Brangwyn’s qualities as a painter stem from a purely novel technique taken from his work in design. These qualities do affect his paintings, but there is a symbiotic dialogue at play and his early training as a painter and draughtsman is what made his works in design so striking. The two feed from each other and the resulting paintings do not play to base novelties but sublimely carry the art forward, whilst being deeply connected to the most radical traditions of the Arts and Crafts and Pre-Raphaelites.
The traditions that those revolutionaries sought to revive are visible in every composition, recalling the wondrous achievements of the gothic in stained glass, while still pushing the medium of paint forward into the 20th century. The power of those medieval windows derived from the vividness — almost magical to pre-modern eyes — of each piece of glass glowing in isolation, and yet each form existing as an integral part of the whole. As if each sliver of glass were part of some immense and oscillating technicolour cloud of fireflies. At the time they quite literally outshone the medium of painting with which they cohabited, not to be eclipsed until the Renaissance. Yet Brangwyn seems to have been attempting to always inject this forgotten idea into his paintings, and in succeeding he, perhaps, revolutionised the art.
When looking at his monumental painting The Buccaneers, the energetic construction of the boat and its swashbuckling crew seem to herald the radical futurist dynamics yet to emerge from the continent. The vivid colours and hard dark lines separating members of the crew, the crimson sail, the sun-bleached Mediterranean cliffs and houses behind, at once recall the qualities of light through stained glass, the dark, hard fringes are so many lines of lead. One can find rhymes with Kandinsky on his long road to pure abstraction, and it is here that Daniel Brusatin’s homage begins to truly represent and push Brangwyn’s legacy and ideas further than even the great man himself could have imagined.
If one first looks to the three smaller abstract canvases, Brusatin’s inspiration becomes immediately apparent. Taking one of Brangwyn’s more famous paintings of swans and isolating three smaller compositions within that work, Brusatin has taken these moments and reimagined them as pure explosions of abstract whites and crimsons and ultramarines. Both men evidently share an all-consuming love of colour; a reverence for nature’s simple glories; and a fresh, continental style. Even when separated by a century of human experience these abstracts are as clear an aesthetic conversation as if both were standing beside you. But crucial is the shift in perspective; taking those natural forms of the flower or swan’s wing and sequestering them into abstracted colour. It behoves the viewer to question that line between the abstract and figurative, a recurring theme throughout Brusatin’s career. This idea is further expanded in the three large murals that serve the full compliment of this ode to Brangwyn.
The three unified works, each 120x300cm, honour Brangwyn’s excellence as a painter on a large scale, from his murals in churches to his commission for the House of Lords — which was shamefully rejected by that exalted house for lack of mediocrity. In this medium there were no British equivalents, and abroad perhaps only Diego Rivera or a Jose Maria Sert could be called his peers. Brusatin’s work honours this excellence not just in its monumental size but in its architectural qualities. The triptych’s verticality connects our world to the heavens like the tree of life; the gaps between the works become Hellenic columns; the arches frame our species’ experience from hunts across ancient forests, gliding through cloistered halls, towards gleaming, untravelled worlds among the cosmos.
Collections of painted figures, taken from Brangwyn’s series of studies for the 1914 Panama-Pacific exhibition, are scattered across these three canvases. In monochrome Brusatin has reimagined that torsion of muscle and tendon that always stood out in Brangwyn’s work; which above all else seemed to honour the trials and struggles of industrial man as he toiled like the expelled Adam. Brusatin’s figures range from hunters to fishermen, but are only suggested through abstract lines between drapes of canvas and print, their labour as fractured as post-modern man. Their humanity shown by virtue of action rather than the whole figure, merely an outline of hand or limb.
Truly remarkable in this work is its power of suggestion, where figures emerge from the background through hinted shape and form. This is pure Brangwyn, who was master of balancing background and foreground, and he would surely be proud to see his mass produced wallpapers finally being treated as the art he always proclaimed. A Morris print, probably made by Brangwyn himself, drapes across the background, at once seeming to be both a curtain and the void beyond. A figure peers under the drapes, concealed and yet revealing spirals of patterned colour like a galaxy hanging in the enveloping cosmic dark. What they see is invisible to the viewer, but as in life the meaning is not in the finding but in the seeking. The figures are in parts painted: monochrome and dignified as a Greek marble; and in other parts beautiful, bare canvas, which here possesses a raw beauty to rival the paints and prints surrounding it. A flurry of warm dappled colour blows delicately across the entire work, as light as petals, and yet each point fundamentally in its right place, they arrest the viewer and seem to dilate time around the work.
Perhaps Brusatin would not have imagined his true honouring of Brangwyn would be in his work’s execution, not its subject. For while the radical reinterpretation of composition is profound, I am sure Sir Frank would have found most delight and admiration in Brusatin’s aesthetic mastery. It highlights the supremely — read: “merely” — decorative side of Brangwyn’s art, where the background in no way detracts from the figures admirably filling it: “while at the same time in the individual figures and fruits and flowers there is just sufficient tactile quality to make them emerge from a background of subtle depth.” The work is quite simply a masterpiece of the early twenty-first century, not only honouring a forgotten genius but honouring the creative will of a species.
Although there are museums dedicated to Brangwyn from Belgium to Japan, in his country of birth Brangwyn is little known. Even abroad he is seen largely in the context of the arts and crafts movement and art nouveau, but he was always on its modernising wing, and saw “no fundamental antagonism between beauty, function, and machine production”. It was this ability to not only look back at a lost past but forward into a brighter future, that make Brangwyn’s works still feel so fresh today, not lost in pure sentimentality like so many other artists of that era. His belief that art should be beautiful, and understandable to the public, is an idea Mr. Brusatin carries forward in his works and in this series in particular.
It was said of Brangwyn that while we may have had “many masters of colour, of line, of tone, of painting, of drawing, of etching, of design or architecture, of miniature and murals” in Sir Frank Brangwyn one could find “a master of all, and of all time”. Here the author proposes, quite forcefully, that in Mr. Brusatin we may see the emergence of another such master.
The complete series is viewable on Daniel Brusatin’s website: https://www.brusatin.co.uk/odetofrankbrangwyn