REBEL ETCHER

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 258, 1 November 1932, Page 10

REBEL ETCHER

BRANGWYN’S WORK COLOSSAL ENERGY. “If I were to leave off working for 10 minutes,” Frank Brangwyn onco said to a friend, ”1 believe 1 should die.” This hunger for work had led toan astonishingly large production in a variety of media. It has prevented Brangwyn from ever lapsing into the commonplace; everything he does has the impress of genius. There is never anywhere a hint of “pot-boiling”; Brangwyn works for work’s sake, and not for tho reward it brings. His capacity for work is linked with a genius for giving, says a writer in the Cape Times. All lovers of art in Cape Town are familiar with his splendid gift of etchings to the South African Art Gallery, and perhaps of all his works Brangwyn’s etchings are the most interesing. For in etching Brangwyn is a rebel. All the traditional conventions —the small and cleanly wiped plate, the fine line—Brangwyn has abandoned. His stylo would be difficult to imitate. It is probably because Brangwyn stands so definitely alon o amid a multitude of “orthodox” etchers that he was chosen as tho subject, for the first volume of a well-known series. Now a new volume of his work has been published, and Brangwyn is the first of 30 great masters, living and dead, to be so honoured. The new collection includes examples from Brangwyn’s latest work. It also includes reproductions of a few of the etchings exhibited when his gift, Io the gallery was hung as a one-man show. A New Interest. A comparison of the latest plates with the plates in another volume and those in the national collection clearly shows that Brangwyn is still experimenting. Unlike so many mannered etchers, he has found no settled formula. But the new experiments are in technique rather than in subjects. The man who would die if he stopped work for 10 minutes is still the greatest living interpreter of toil. There is nothing academic in his interpretation; for Brangwyn, like Conrad, began life as a sailor before the. mast. But. there is this difference in the later plates; toil is no longer tho predominating motif—it is now subordinated to design and often becomes an incident in a landscape. If, however, toil is becoming less the dominant note in his etchings, Brangwyn is turning more and mote to religious subjects. Be has looked long and intelligently at Rembrandt’s incomparable plates. Yot he never challenges comparison; for though arrangement ami lighting are occasionally reminiscent, Brangwyn’s technique is a law unti itself. In his plate showing Christ healing he has chosen a familiar Rembrandt subject. But how different is tho outlook ami the treatment! Brangwyn’s design seethes with movement, and is gruesome with pain and suffering; Rembrandt’s smaller plat e is filled

with beauty and a quiet dignity. In Brangwyn’s version, bridges arch in tho background; and there are other plates in the volume which recall his fondness for drawing bridges. The most interesting plates in the volume are the last two—both drypoints, and both engraved within the past 12 months. Of the first, an allegorical group called “The Afflicted,” a critic writes: “No etcher, nor Rembrandt himself, has shown in his etchings more loving pity for his kind, a wider human sympathy.” This etching has an austrer beauty and a sure economy of line far in advance of anything in Brangwyn’s earlier work. The last plate in the volume is the portrait of a Japanese art connoisseur with a background of Oriental masks and blossoms. With great cunning tho artist suggests tho flat washes of a Japanese watercolour. These two etchings are masterpieces; hey show Brangwyn in so new a light and with so new an outlook, andffi Isai es caltjsa iko (to knLsc.- b