Exhibitions

'Generally there is a banal level of incompetent imitation, and particularly has the youngest generation suffered. Thus the charming and academic (after the manner of the Slade School tradition) "Study of a Boy's Head," by Mr. Roberts, who is a very young man, has already given place to the most ordinary cubistic patterns. If such evolutions were legitimately worked out the evil would not be serious, for it would be seldom. Mr. Roberts has, however, managed to compress the development of a lifetime into six months. Now his only hope is to be born again' – J.M.M. (John Middleton Murray), Westminster Gazette, 21 May 1914

'As in a theatre a good performer is said sometimes to act his companions off the stage, so Mr. Roberts swept his fellow-exhibitors into secondary consideration. He showed the continuation of the spirit of a Hogarth or a Rowlandson combined with an entirely personal modernity of method. In comparison, the other paintings were mere exercises' – T. W. Earp, New Statesman, 17 December 1927

'Mr. Roberts, although he employs a somewhat "Cubist" formula, is at heart an illustrator a Gothic descendant of those old Northern sculptors who covered our cathedrals and churches with animated and grimacing figures and beasts. Let us put aside our prejudices and all ideas of what painters ought to do, and study at length the full-blooded abandon of his Cockneys enjoying themselves in their Bank Holiday haunts, and the quick movements of the small dogs instinct with life. And we have only to look at "The Pawn Shop" to realise how "photographically" Mr. Roberts could draw if he chose. The probable truth of the matter is that Mr. Roberts is afraid of his own realistic gifts and has sought for a pictorial idiom that will baulk them' – Manchester Guardian, 5 May 1928

'William Robert's [sic] mechanistic pictures "The Paddock" and the "Pawn Shop" [are among] the outstanding features of the show' – Art News, 1 Dec. 1928

'William Roberts contributes canvases filled with mechanistic figures woven into a sort of staccato pattern and executed in bright hard color which stem from no British tradition certainly and but markedly from any other, although they bear indications of having passed through cubism' – Evening Post (NY), 15 Dec. 1928

'William Roberts . . . is of the race of "comic artists," though no descriptive jokes are printed with his designs: his "Happy Family" and his "Paddock" and others are irresistible. Whether oil-paint, and on an important scale, is the proper vehicle for such observations is open to question. So fertile a humourist should be doing cartoons for The Daily Herald or posters for the Underground Railway' – Royal Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard, 29 Aug. 1930

'William Roberts shows some of his clever and amusing compositions of an abstract nature, on the whole the most desirable drawings in the exhibition. I prefer the drawings and water-colours of Roberts to the large paintings he manufactures from them. As paintings his designs lose lightness and charm, and things amusing are better quietly stated than shouted through a megaphone. Moreover, the tyrannous mannerism of Roberts's style, concealed by delicate washes of water-colour, is revealed in all its crudity when his compositions are squared up to a big scale and painted in oils' – The Scotsman, 9 July 1931

'[T]he cubistic figures of William Roberts [are] apparently remote from anything like naturalism, resembling in a heavier mood the glass mannikins of Vienna. Yet, observed with the intention of finding the essential simplicities of nature under the masquerade of cylindrical convention, there is evidence enough that these brilliantly transformed men and women are in every crowd through which we pass; gesture, pose, grimace come to seem, as in all good caricature, more real than the original reality, and the violent attack of the method is seen to cover subtleties that could only have been developed by intimate study of the contemporary scene' – Elisabeth Luther Carey, New York Times, 6 Sept. 1931

'A detail that struck a feminine observer – this artist sees the immense decorative possibilities of the knitted pull-over' – The Graphic, 7 Nov. 1931

'Roberts is an artist one cannot but admire, no matter how much one deplores his retention of frigid mannerising that prevents the full development of his remarkable gifts. One can hardly open a magazine nowadays without seeing clever plagiarisations of his style. Popular black-and-white men find him, in Fuseli's famous phrase about Blake "D— good to steal from."' – The Scotsman, 13 Jan. 1933

'At first you feel that [Roberts's] interest in life is so great that he is going to make a sort of Bateman comic drawing; but always his love of shapes as shapes proves stronger than his love of character, and he remains one of the abstract school. He does things perilously like comic drawings, but he seems to shrink from being classed with the Punch men, whose humour is always completely intelligible. He is half literary and half monumental' – The Scotsman, 7 Feb. 1935

'Roberts using a technique which is rigidly conventional and almost geometrically inhuman, gives us a result which is as intensely human as any painting done today. Admitted that Roberts’s humanity is not that of the Christmas supplement, his humour is sardonic, he does not temper the chill of his wit to the lambs that he shears so drastically, nevertheless every one of his compositions is compact with life and living observation’ – Jan Gordon, The Observer, 6 Mar. 1938

'William Roberts tries to paint subjects of more than purely private interest, but his somewhat tortuous mode of thought – a survival presumably of his Plank-art days – limit [sic] the appeal of his expression' – Anthony Blunt, The Listener, 16 June 1938

'William Roberts has been painting steadily for twenty years; he early found his individual style and his appropriate subject-matter. He has never become a fashionable painter, nor has he taken part in the formation of any group or school. Some people react strongly against his mannerism, but as mannerism it is quite comparable to the mannerism of a Cosima Tura or a Seurat – it has the same steel-like torsion of the one and the same geometrical orderliness of the other . . . Here, if anywhere, is a proletarian painter; but he is never recognised as such by those ideologists of the left who prefer to go to Mexico for a hero' – Herbert Read, The Listener, 11 Jan 1940

'Some people complain that Roberts is too bound to his own conventions, but in his case the form is dictated by what seems to be a politico-plastic creed, as suggested by the colour of his tie in the striking "Self-portrait." His human beings, tubular like robots, gambol uncouthly in moulds forced on them by social conditions. His production is limited by what might be called the elaborate growing pains of his method, so that each completed work had [sic] the aspect of being cast in epic form' – Jan Gordon, 'London Commentary', Studio 124 (1942)

'To continue with drawings, William Roberts at the Leicester Gallery has a great display (twenty-eight altogether); for those who can appreciate fine drawing a memorable collection. These things are very different from the work of [Augustus] John, and it may be instructive to compare "Ironing Board" by Roberts with John's Gipsy. For Roberts man is a machine, for John he is a spirit' – Wyndham Lewis, The Listener, 17 Nov. 1949

'As an experimenter [Roberts] was outshone by Wadsworth as well as Lewis, but Roberts had other qualities which, I think, make him one of the key figures of English painting between the wars. He was, for instance, one of the few painters to combine the intellectual inventiveness offered by Cubism and its offshoots with a compassionate human awareness . . . There is, on the other hand, nothing sentimental about his work. There is, rather, a sardonic humour freely at play in his studies of people in cinemas, indulging in Bank Holidays or watching television . . . But, above all, Roberts has a remarkable organizational ability in that he can crowd a canvas or a drawing . . . with a multitude of people, without evert losing the sense of form or space, so that what could be a jumble is turned into a carefully articulated and cohesive whole' – T. G. Rosenthal, The Listener, 2 Dec. 1965

'The paintings are composed and articulated with the thoroughness of old-fashioned machinery. Their seriousness, and their rather ponderous passing light-heartedness, partakes of the dignity of the larger mammals. For myself, I read our species more often in its monkeyish habit. Roberts is linked to the Russian Revolutionaries by an apprehension of the dignity of the life and work of ordinary men. He gives us bread – I fear we want cake' – Peter Campbell, The Listener, 3 Mar. 1971

'[Roberts's] figures often seem automatons, and yet there is something touching, poignant, paradoxical about them. There is usually a curious flatness about his figures, which nevertheless seem mountains of flesh. His painting and drawings are pervaded by rhythms, as people disport on swings in the playground, prune trees, fly kites, and so on. Roberts thinks seriously about the "art of making a picture tell a story," and even at his most abstract, those vivid dynamic lines told of men and machines, of combat and human conflict. When a Roberts picture "takes off," when he combines his wit, which he often covers with a cloak of deliberate banality, his underlying melancholy, his humour and his affection for his human creatures into one dazzlingly rhythmic composition, the results have a fresh vitality that nudges the spectator' – Marina Vaizey, Financial Times, 21 Apr. 1973

'[Roberts] has often been accused of outright misanthropy, but the pictures are there to disprove such an extreme diagnosis. For they survey, with inexhaustible avidity, the most banal incidents of urban life and turn them into compositions which imply that an unexceptional group of figures standing on a pavement deserves to be invested with the rounded solidity usually associated with monumental sculpture' – Richard Cork, Evening Standard, 2 Dec. 1976