Artist and model no. 1

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Born in Dunedin, John Buckland Wright moved to Britain with his family at the age of seven. After distinguished service in the Ambulance Corps in the First World War, he studied history at Oxford and trained as an architect. But his determination to become an artist and engraver led to his departure for Europe. He settled first in Brussels and then, from 1929, in Paris, where he worked until the outbreak of war in 1939.

Buckland Wright taught himself wood engraving in Brussels and had his first exhibition there. This led to a series of commissions from the Halcyon Press and later the Golden Cockerel Press for illustrations for limited-edition books. In Paris he met and worked with Roger Lacourière, who had introduced Georges Rouault and Pablo Picasso to the aquatint etching technique. Through Lacourière, Buckland Wright mastered the various copperplate printmaking processes of line engraving, etching and aquatint, adding these skills to his knowledge of woodcut and wood engraving. Such technical versatility was unusual among artist printmakers of the period.

In 1933 he joined Stanley William Hayter’s experimental printmaking studio, Atelier 17, becoming its co-director in 1936. There he worked alongside some of the greatest artists of the Parisian avant-garde, including Picasso, Max Ernst, André Masson, Alberto Giacometti, Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy. Artist and model no. 1 was produced during Buckland Wright’s time at Atelier 17. It depicts his favourite motif — the female nude. He reduces the model to a series of lines and shapes that are then reconstituted as pure linear abstraction on the artist’s easel. Under Hayter’s influence, he took this tendency towards abstraction even further in Jeune fille au miroir (Young woman before a mirror), also in Te Papa’s collection. While the human form is still visible, the engraved line is used to suggest movement rather than three-dimensionality.

Buckland Wright returned to London in 1939 and devoted himself to book illustrations and teaching at the Camberwell and Slade Schools of Art. In 1953, the year before he died, he published his influential book Etching and engraving: Techniques and the modern trend.

David Maskill