print
- Museum number
- 1987,0516.72
- Title
- Object: Abstract [Composition] with floating shapes
- Description
-
Surrealist composition of shapes. c.1933
Etching and aquatint
- Production date
- 1933
- Dimensions
-
Height: 138 millimetres
-
Width: 244 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Text from Frances Carey & Antony Griffiths, 'Avant-Garde British Printmaking 1914-1960', BMP 1990, no.111.
After1987,0516.66, Trevelyan appears in 1933 to have explored a series of more precisely defined compositions containing surreal and geometric shapes confined by a brick wall against the background of a night sky. This type of subject is probably to be identified with the two paintings and one etching exhibited at the Bloomsbury Gallery in 1934 as 'Nocturnal Encounters'. In the introduction to that exhibition, Trevelyan explained that these images came as "the result of a good deal of tentative "fishing around" in the subconscious" and were "built up more slowly on a theme whose mood only was suggested by some poem".
The strangely sub-aqueous atmosphere of the print catalogued in Carey & Griffiths 1990 belongs to the same family group as 1987,0516.66. It echoes some of the images from a dream described by the artist early in 1934, which he used as a metaphor for his failing relationship with an elusive American girlfriend.
At this date Trevelyan saw himself as a kind of artistic schizophrenic as a result of the varied influences to which he was exposed in Paris. The more representational work he referred to as his "Jekylls" and the abstract experiments in oil, etching and cork as his "Hydes". "Neither group is entirely anterior to the other, and I can only explain that the Jekylls respond directly to things seen during the summer, while the Hydes are winter-cogitations on forms that seemed ever-present in the fairyland of the Subconscious" (from the introduction to the 1934 Bloomsbury Gallery catalogue). "My Jekylls and Hydes still lived in separate compartments where each had only half the necessary nourishment" ('Indigo Days', p.53).
Mary Fedden has kindly informed us that the zinc plates for this and 1987,0516.69 survive in Trevelyan's studio.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1990/1 Sept.-Jan., BM, 'Avant-Garde British Printmaking 1914-1960', no. 111
- Acquisition date
- 1987
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1987,0516.72