by Cheerful, curious, inventive and funny, the English artist Tirza Garwood (1908-51) is as original as it is previously almost unknown. If you have never seen one of her works, you are not alone: the last exhibition took place more than 70 years ago, after her early death from cancer at the age of 42. Lovingly curated by James Russell, this retrospective at the Dulwich Picture Gallery is virtually their first. It’s a bright surprise from start to finish.
Garwood’s earliest eagle-eyed woodcuts were made when she was a teenager: feathers snowing from upholstery during spring cleaning; Girls in one-piece swimsuits tackle summer waves; a woman who retreats desolately to bed for the winter. She began The four seasons (1927) at Eastbourne School of Art, aged 18, taught by Eric Ravilious, who himself had only three years’ experience with this hard-won medium. The artists would later marry.
Garwood’s woodcuts are concise in every way. They hear the ticking of a grandfather clock as a woman dozes, a gramophone horn watching her with the same watchful impatience as the spaniel at her feet. They notice the sly sideways glance of a card player sneaking a glance at her neighbor’s hand, and the tiny difference between ten schoolgirls marching around a bend in a crocodile, no less, the smiling one distracted by a terrier, and that Scratch eagerly sucking to the form guide at the front.
Garwood laughs at her own oversized reflection in a hall of mirrors in which the crisscross pattern of her wool suit is repeatedly enlarged. She satirizes the trend of table-turning séances, in which five pairs of white hands hold on to a devastating disc of darkness. There is a deft speech from her own father, who pointedly ignores the window cleaner staring at him through the glass with his cloth raised, while he pauses, pen pompously raised, about to sign an important document. Their gestures are subtly coordinated to highlight the class differences on both sides of the window.
From the beginning, Garwood had an extraordinary gift for texture and tone. With the finest lines, she conjures up the interior of a railway carriage rolling through the English countryside, from scratchy horsehair seats to stiff leather gloves, felt bells, fur collars and the strangely irregular sheen of pre-war silk stockings. The noses of the three passengers on the left raise their eyes in comical steps to the view through the window, which finds its miniature echo in a tiny mirror on the wall.
Ravilious depicted a similar situation in his almost mystical image Train landscapebut his compartment is deserted, while hers is teeming with human presence. Some of his works are usefully presented here to show different minds looking at similar worlds.
After her marriage and the birth of three children, Garwood had much less time for the demanding creation of woodcuts, and her questioning observations appear in watercolor, collage and cardboard relief. There is a hauntingly strange sense of scale – of animals and even people dwarfed by the flowers and grasses that so often appear in close-up in their foreground; of dolls that act as living creatures in small paintings.
She made collages of leaf prints that become tiny forests, overlaid with a stranded missionary’s hut made of wood veneer or a boy scout’s paper-cut tent. Her young daughter Anne kneels on a windowsill, looking for something that might be happening outside, with one foot sticking out of the collage. The world is getting smaller. In 1942, Ravilious disappeared during a war flight off the coast of Iceland. Garwood had her first surgery for breast cancer.
And still she works, and she works and raises her children in a drafty house in Essex. She makes abstract marbled papers for the market, whose watercolor delicacy is almost Japanese. She conjures up the most fascinating facades – a village shop, a Methodist chapel, a semi-detached house at night – into frames. Unique hybrids of mid-century watercolor and dollhouse, they are similar to, but go beyond, the wartime Recording Britain project, in which English artists such as Graham Sutherland and John Piper made sympathetic images of endangered buildings and landscapes.
All the paintings – still small, but now in oils – in the last room here, were created in bed during Garwood’s final months in a nursing home. An angry cat, a goose-stepping gander, a “prehistoric encounter,” as she called it, between a turtle and a frog in a jungle of mares’ tails: her visions are as wild and vivid as they are ultimately confident. reflective. The most touching thing is a portrait – a self-portrait? – a ceramic figure that belonged to the family.
Pale, long-necked, looking into the distance, the woman stands with folded hands under a starry night sky. A pale, perhaps protective daffodil towers above her. There is no self-pity here, only dreams of the wonderful in this life; We should all be so brave as we face our end.
This enchanting show offers so much more and fits perfectly with the elegant galleries in Dulwich. If only you could say the same thing Dora Carrington (1893-1932), who attracted the greatest admiration in Chichester. Pallant House Gallery did their best for their art – surreal landscapes, male and female nudes, interiors, portraits of friends and lovers – and in the end gave us more of a memory.
There are too many (and too few) among the 100 works. from) all those lovers and would-be lovers: fellow Slade students Paul Nash, Dorothy Brett and CR Nevinson. Mark Gertler, in particular, outdoes Carrington at every turn. Right next to hers hang his hieratic portraits of a Spanish boy and a young servant, which look like halting pastiches.
This show undoubtedly has the best of Carrington. Her wonderfully powerful nude rear view, painted around 1913 as a student, is just as beautiful as the more mature and famous one by Laura Knight Self-portrait with nude of the same year. The Tate borrowed Carrington’s fancy Farm in Watendlathwhere the green hills gather like bodies around the gleaming white farmhouse and the laundry beneath. The highlight is her portrait of Lytton Strachey reading in bed: eyes to words, bony hands to the sky as if he were holding a Bible. She was in love with Strachey, who only loved men. Two months after his death, she shot herself.
Less context and more Carrington might have been convincing. Sensitively written labels want us to find their images passionate, disarming, romantic, but they are too insecure – and unfulfilling – for such words. Carrington had no ambition to show her work that she did not sign, and my impression is that her writing was far stronger in the popular diaries and letters. The worst thing about this exhibition is the decor, furniture, photos of Bloomsbury antics and their tinfoil mirror paintings for Fortnum & Mason; all of them only fit Charleston.
Star ratings (out of five)
Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious ★★★★
Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury ★★
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Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious is on view at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until May 26, 2025
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Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until April 27th
