Joash Woodrow; Reclusive Painter (Interesting)
Hyfler/Rosner
Reclusive painter whose work provides a significant link
between British and European art
Nicholas Usherwood
Thursday April 27, 2006
The Guardian
GREAT stuff:
http://www.108fineart.com/artists/joash_woodrow/joash_woodrow_portraits.htm
http://www.108fineart.com/artists/joash_woodrow/joash_woodrow_still_life.htm
http://www.london-lantern.com/articles/default.asp?snID=&cssType=0&Issue=200509&Area=0&TRCday=0&ID=602
The chance discovery in a Harrogate bookshop in 2001, by the
painter Christopher P Wood, of six volumes of an engraved
Victorian art history, wildly and exuberantly annotated in a
series of Picasso-esque drawings and collages by the then
completely forgotten painter Joash Woodrow, led directly to
the re-emergence of one of the most significant artistic
figures in postwar British art. A visit a few days later by
the Harrogate dealer Andrew Stewart to a small,
semi-detached house in north Leeds, where Woodrow had lived
alone for 20 years, uncovered an extraordinary story. The
house was filled with some 750 canvases and around 4,000
works on paper, a lifetime's achievement which a devoted
family was none the less contemplating consigning to a skip.
Joash, who has died aged 78, had recently been taken into
sheltered accommodation, having nearly set fire to the
house, but his work itself had avoided serious damage. In
the months that followed, it became apparent that this was
no isolated figure at the margins of art history but an
artist of sophisticated interests and training.
Born in Leeds, Woodrow was the seventh of nine children in a
poor but cultured Jewish family that had escaped the pogroms
in eastern Poland of the early 1900s. His father had run a
Jewish bookshop in Chapeltown before working in Montague
Burton's factory to provide for a growing family. Joash
trained at Leeds School of Art and, in 1950, won a
scholarship to the Royal College of Art.
His intense shyness does not seem to have been suited to the
competitive atmosphere there, though his tutors' reports
commented that his work already seemed more European in
feeling than most of his contemporaries, among them John
Bratby, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. A year or so after
leaving the RCA in 1953, he suffered a nervous breakdown and
took himself back to Leeds, where, supported financially by
his family, he lived and worked for the rest of his life.
With his mother and two brothers also living in the two-up,
two-down house, working conditions must have been extremely
cramped, which almost certainly explains the comparatively
small scale of Woodrow's early work. Mostly portraits and
landscapes, their dark tones illumined by flashes of
sonorous colour and intense solemnity, they reveal the
beginning of a distinctive style, one that in its
understanding of the French fauvist Georges Rouault showed
Woodrow already looking to European art for inspiration.
This gathered momentum with a number of visits to the huge
Picasso exhibition at the Tate in 1960, the crucial impact
of which was to give Woodrow an insight into his Jewish
heritage, and the understanding that the roots of his art
lay outside this country and were essentially European in
character.
Looking to the fierce expressionism of Karel Appel, Asger
Jorn and the Cobra group, the harsh, raw surfaces of Jean
Dubuffet and the Art Brut circle, and the insistence on the
quality of mark-making of Nicolas de Staël and the
tachistes, Woodrow began to uncover the source of those
artistic energies that were to carry him over the next 30
years of intense activity. With the death of his mother in
1961 - and with more room in which to paint - there was a
steady increase in the scale and ambition of the work.
A lack of success in the work he occasionally submitted to
large, open competitions like the John Moores, however,
encouraged a feeling of isolation, something his
reclusiveness only served to emphasise. By the early 1970s,
he was living and working with very little thought for
anything but the next painting, producing large-scale
canvases (anything of up to 5ft x 8ft) with quite
extraordinary rapidity. When not painting, he was drawing
furiously in the semi-industrial and urban districts of
north Leeds those subjects that were to form the basis of
some of the most original and experimental works of his
later career.
If his personal life was unhappy, there is no sign of it in
the power and exuberance of the broad brush strokes,
high-pitched colour and boldly flattened picture spaces with
which he describes this landscape - an unprepossessing
jumble of scruffy allotments, derelict factories and
scattered trees.
By the early 1990s, Woodrow's physical and mental health
began to decline, and the house was too cluttered with
paintings for him to do anything but draw. At the time of
the 1999 fire, he seems to have stopped doing even that and,
after his removal to sheltered accommodation in Manchester,
he lost interest in working altogether.
Nor did he seem very interested in the public recognition
that followed, when books and major exhibitions - at Leeds
art gallery in 2004 and Manchester art gallery, and the Ben
Uri and RCA last year - created a wave of interest that
looks certain to place him firmly as a significant link
between British and European artistic movements in the
second half of the 20th century. His brothers Saul, John and
Paul survive him.
· Joash Woodrow, artist, born April 7 1927; died February 15
2006