Robert Tavener; Printmaker and illustrator
Hyfler/Rosner
Printmaker and illustrator with a prodigious output
His lovely work:
http://www.jhwfineart.com/pages/single/1167-6.html
http://www.gac.culture.gov.uk/search/Object.asp?object_key=20115
18 September 2004
Robert Tavener, artist and teacher: born London 6 July
1920; married 1941 Catherine Skardon (died 1998; one
daughter); died Eastbourne, East Sussex 12 July 2004.
The artist Robert Tavener's work is bold and colourful. His
strikingly assured images, whether of boats, guardsmen in
their long-plumed helmets seated on horseback, or of the
Sussex landscape he loved, brought him innumerable
commissions from prestigious clients.
Yale University, Prudential Insurance, American Express,
Whitbread, McDonald's, Sainsbury's, Marks and Spencer, the
General Post Office, Chase Manhattan Bank, the Greater
London Council, London Transport, the BBC and Shell all
sought work from him. Unlike many other artists, Tavener
could always sell his pictures.
And yet it was as if all his confidence and conviction went
into his creative output. Tavener himself suffered from
continual self-doubt, anxious that his work was out of
fashion and refusing to acknowledge the praise that was due
to him and which readily came his way. A deeply private man,
he was uncomfortable promoting his work. During the course
of his career he held some 35 solo exhibitions but would not
even address the circle of friends and potential buyers who
gathered around him at the private views.
Robert Tavener was born and brought up in Hampstead, north
London, where his family had been tailors and glovers. His
interest in art even as a child was obvious - painting and
making chalk drawings on the pavements - but after school he
followed his parents' wishes and took an office job. In 1940
he was called up into the Army and served in the Royal
Artillery.
Tavener's wife-to-be, Catherine, lived in the same street in
Hampstead as him, although their first meeting was in an
air-raid shelter during the Blitz. To marry he took
unauthorised leave from his regiment to return to London -
to anyone who knew him well this was extraordinarily
untypical behaviour. In 1944 he landed at Arramanches in
Normandy three days after D-Day.
At the end of the Second World War, while still a soldier,
he studied for eight months from June 1945 in the arts and
crafts faculty at Göttingen University, the formation
college of the Rhine Army. His testimonial recommended that
he be given every possible assistance in becoming an artist.
Subsequently he studied at Hornsey College of Art for a
National Diploma in Design, specialising in lithography; he
also gained his art teacher's diploma from London
University.
He took up teaching posts at Medway College of Art in
Rochester and St Martin's School of Art in London. In 1953
he moved to Eastbourne College of Art and Design, where he
became Head of Printmaking, Illustration and Graphic Design
and Vice-Principal. On the one day a week which staff were
expected to use for their own creative work, he continued
instead to travel up to St Martin's School to teach.
Instead, his free time was mostly given over to working - in
this he was totally single-minded.
For 50 years Tavener and his wife lived in Tussocks, a
former coach house to an estate on the edge of Eastbourne.
The garden gate opened directly on to the South Downs Way
leading up to Beachy Head, where he exercised his beloved
Jack Russell terriers every day.
The house was full of books and ceramics and Tavener's own
pictures. In his studio inside the house hung an enormous
mirror which took up the whole of one wall. Here he kept his
Albion Press, cast by Harrild & Sons of Fleet Street in
1882, which he used to produce his fine prints, each one
individually engraved, rolled, proofed and printed in a
signed edition of between 25 and 75 prints.
Tavener's output - in lithography, linocut, woodcut,
screen-printing, watercolour and gouache - was prodigious.
He described his work as
English countryside and English architecture. Shape,
pattern, colour, texture, design. In other words, my subject
matter is a personal interpretation of the richness,
variety, beauty, and the underlying relationship with the
past, of our landscape and building.
His architectural subjects included Oxford and Cambridge
colleges, York Minster, Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster
Abbey, and Wren's City churches.
From the 1950s Tavener was commissioned to design posters,
promotional material, magazine and book covers and
illustrations. Hamish Hamilton, Longmans, Oxford University
Press, Methuen and Penguin Books all employed him as an
illustrator. For the BBC he produced small linocut or pen
illustrations to listings in the Radio Times.
A great deal of Tavener's work is owned by public
institutions, including over 25 public art galleries through
England and Wales, and overseas in the United States.
Every year for 34 years, he exhibited at the Royal Academy
Summer Exhibition, and he also showed at the Glyndebourne
Festival, the Barbican, and the London Weekend Television
Centre on the South Bank and at many other exhibitions
sponsored by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the South
East Arts Council. In 1966 he was elected to the Royal
Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers and he was also a
member of the Society of Sussex Painters.
Physically slight, Tavener was always smartly dressed,
frequently with a cravat. In his youth he swam and played
badminton and tennis. He was a highly intelligent man with
an academic manner and a sharp sense of humour; he was also
very well read - there were scribbled notes and quotations
from books all over his house.
After his retirement from Eastbourne College in 1980 he
continued to work freelance as a printmaker and watercolour
painter and also lectured and taught on residential courses.
Following the death of his wife in 1998, however, his own
health declined and, except for the occasional watercolour,
he worked little. For a long time turning the printing press
was too much physical labour. All the while he continued to
struggle with his personal faith and his lack of confidence.
A purchase of seven more pictures by the Government Art
Collection, to add to the number of his works already in
their ownership, brought Tavener satisfaction a few weeks
before his death.
Simon Fenwick