AN ENGLISH CUBIST

WILLIAM ROBERTS:

The Art World

a selection of pictures

Illustrations © The Estate of John David Roberts. Reproduced with the permission of the William Roberts Society.

Click on the images for more information on the works concerned and the background to them – and, in some cases, to see other versions of the works.

The Connoisseur, 1923

Artist and Model, c.1930

Hanging a Masterpiece, 1934

A satire on commercial art galleries and the commission charged on sales.

No! No! Roger, Cézanne Did Not Use It, 1934

A satire on the Bloomsbury Group's reverence for Paul Cézanne.

He Knew Degas, 1938

Walter Sickert is reduced (in Roberts's eyes) to painting images from newspapers, cut out by his wife.

Rejected? No, Accepted!, c.1938

After the Royal Academy hanging committee has rejected a Wyndham Lewis portrait of T. S. Eliot and Augustus John has resigned from the RA in protest, John is imagined as painting a portrait of Lewis and submitting it to a hanging committee of Wyndham Lewises.

Artist and Wife, 1940

I'll Put a Tuck in 'Em, 1948

The title refers to a response made by Stanley Spencer to Wilfrid Evill's criticism of the large sagging breasts in one of Spencer's pictures.

La Nature Morte, 1948

The Critic Intervenes, c.1948

The Grand Chantrey Stakes – study, 1949

A satire on the controversial role of the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings – a celebrated painter of horses – in the administration of the Chantrey Bequest to buy works of art for the nation.

Art Gallery, 1956

Wyndham Lewis and Sir John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery, look on as art critics visit an exhibition.

The Something Road Group, c.1956

The title is presumably a parody of artists' groups taking their name from specific locations, such as the Euston Road Group.

The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915, 1961–2

An 'imaginative evocation rather than an historically accurate record' of the launching of the Vorticist magazine Blast, which actually took place with a meal at the Dieudonné Restaurant in St James's in July 1914.

The Amateur and the Professional, 1970

The image is of Winston Churchill and Picasso.

The Avant-guard [sic], 1970