Hommage à GB WL TSE EP

Images(2)

Artist/Maker Dorothy Shakespear (British, 1886 – 1973)

Date1937

MediumWatercolor on paper, mounted on cardboard

DimensionsComposition: 24 1/2 × 12 3/4 in. (62.2 × 32.4 cm) Sheet: 26 5/8 × 16 7/8 in. (67.6 × 42.9 cm) Frame: 35 × 22 7/8 × 2 1/8 in. (88.9 × 58.1 × 5.4 cm)

Credit LineGift of Omar S. Pound, Class of 1951

Object number1996.10

Not on view

DescriptionOver the span of a decade, Omar S. Pound, Class of 1951, donated to the Emerson Gallery an impressive collection of watercolors and drawings by his mother, Dorothy Shakespear, along with works by a number of her contemporaries. The Wellin’s collection of her works is complemented by archival holdings related to Shakespear and her husband, the poet Ezra Pound, Class of 1905, H1939, in the Hamilton College Special Collections at Burke Library. Shakespear was born in London to two artistically inclined parents: Henry Hope Shakespear, an amateur watercolorist, and Olivia Shakespear (née Tucker), a novelist and close friend of W. B. Yeats. Dorothy Shakespear met Pound in 1909, and they married in 1914. Although extremely proficient, Shakespear’s early watercolors were executed in a traditional manner. In 1911, when the artist visited Italy and “experienced color for the first time,” her style began to evolve. A major shift occurred the following year, in the same year Pound’s poetic style also underwent a profound evolution. Shakespear’s work became abstract, with intricate shapes distilled into angular planes. This change coincided with the beginnings of a new avant-garde movement in London, led by the artist Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, among others, which would come to be called Vorticism. Shakespear remained acutely interested in draftsmanship, breaking forms down into simple planes and demarcating geometric angles with contour lines in ink or graphite. Her drawings were published in the Vorticists’ talking piece, BLAST magazine (1914–15), and in B. Cyril Windeler’s Elimus (1923), published by William Bird’s Three Mountains Press in Paris. She also created typographic designs, including the initials that complemented her husband’s poetry in A Draft of XXX Cantos, published in Paris in 1930. She subsequently created initials for all of Pound’s Cantos, along with tailpieces and illustrations for a project that was published by Omar Pound only in 1999, after his parents’ deaths. Illustrated here and on the following spread are two early abstractions and Hommage à GB WL TSE EP, which celebrates the artist’s close circle of creative friends: Gaudier-Brzeska, Lewis, T. S. Elliott, and Pound. The watercolor includes references to Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture Water Carrier (cat. no. 58), to an abstraction by Lewis, and to a medieval prison in the Gulf of Rapallo in northwestern Italy, where Shakespear resided at the time. Created in 1937, the work is nostalgic in outlook, as Gaudier-Brzeska had died years earlier, during World War I; Shakespear’s marriage with Pound was unhappy; and the Vorticist movement had ended long before. (SOURCE: Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS, 2017) "When Ezra Pound and Dorothy Shakespear Pound were still living in Rapallo [Italy] in the first years of World War II she used up her remaining Fabriano paper for three of her largest and most finished watercolors, one of which she called 'Hommage à GB WL TSE EP.' This includes Gaudier-Brzeska's sculpture 'The Water Carrier,' a Wyndham Lewis abstract and the little medieval prison in the bay of Rapallo (now a small art gallery), with the initials: EP, TSE, GB, WL, and DS (Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gaudier-Brzeska, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Shakespear) included in the painting. (Hommages was the concluding painting in the extensive exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank in London in 1974 called 'Vorticism and its Allies.')." SOURCE: Omar Pound, “The Introspective Eye: Dorothy Shakespear’s Modernist Vision,” exh. brochure. November 2, 1996 - January 5, 1997 (Clinton, NY: Emerson Gallery, 1997).

Collections

Additional Details

Exhibition History 2017
Clinton, NY (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College). "Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection," September 9 - December 10, 2017 (cat. no. 68, illus.);

2005
Clinton, NY (Fred L. Emerson Gallery, Hamilton College). "Hamilton Collects, A Century of Curiosities: The Story of the Hamilton College Collection," September 29 - December 30, 2005 (unnumbered cat., illus., 30);

1974
London, England (Hayward Gallery). "Vorticism and Its Allies," 1974.

Provenance 1996: Hamilton College (Fred L. Emerson Gallery), by gift of Omar S. Pound;
? - 1996: Omar S. Pound, presumably by descent from Dorothy Shakespear.

Published References Katherine D. Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS: THE RUTH AND ELMER WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART AT FIVE YEARS, HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION (Clinton, NY: Wellin Museum of Art, 2017), p. 164.

Signature Initialed "D.S." at lower right in blue ink.

Inscribed "'Hommage' / G.[cut-off by edge of sheet] B. / W.L. EP." at lower left in ink; "13 / 6 / 4 [measurement marks]" along lower left and lower right sides in pencil; "33 36" at lower right in pencil.