Auction details
20th Century British Art
offered by
Bloomsbury House
24 Maddox Street Mayfair, London, W1 S1PP 
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John Buckland-Wright (1897-1954) stalingrad, 1942 oil on canvas, initialled JBW at lower right, signed, titled and dated verso, 20 x 24 in., 50.8 x 60.9 cm.***Provennace: Collection of the Artist. Thence by descent to the current owner. Exhibited: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, London Group, 1945-6. A celebrated printmaker of the British Modernist school, Buckland-Wright is best known for his woodblock prints and engraved plates published either as book illustrations (most notably with the Golden Cockerel Press) or as individually editioned prints. His works on canvas, however, are extremely scarce, with only a small group of examples known to be in existence. Of these, the present work is known to be the only example that deals with military imagery, in particular the Second World War. Having served in the Scottish Ambulance Unit during the First World War, it is believed that his experiences of the front-line trenches (especially at Verdun for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French) inspired the imagery we see present in the current work. The collapsed figure lyng prostrate in the foreground, the two soldiers in the foxhole 'dug in', the terrifying looming presence of the tank in the distance, across the vast almost surrealist wasteland of 'no-man's land': all elements of the horrors of the Great War, still pertinent to the infamy of the siege of Stalingrad some 30 years later. A key figure of British art in the inter-war years, Buckland-Wright befriended many of the great artists of the day both in London and in Europe. Most notably, he joined Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris in 1933-4, a career move that would see him working side-by-side with great masters such as Picasso, Miro, Matisse and Brancusi. Their influence in post-Cubist Surrealism can be seen most redolently in Stalingrad, 1942. . ImagesClick on thumbnails to see larger images:
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