- Venue
- Cartwright Hall Art Gallery
- Location
- Yorkshire
This exhibition celebrates a lifetime of work by Ilkley born artist Anthony Earnshaw. Earnshaw developed an interest in surrealism in the 1940s, via the poetry of Rimbaud and a passion for Jazz. A self-taught artist, Earnshaw earned a living as a lathe turner and crane operator, producing what he termed ‘daft pictures’ during his breaks. Many pieces included in the exhibition register this experience in industry. The combination of social realism and surrealism in his work is perhaps the most striking aspect of his practice.
A reel of films with Earnshaw as their subject, including the film, ‘Two English Surrealists’ (1987), produced by Alex Marengo for the BBC and presented by artist Patrick Hughes, document Earnshaw in various northern landscapes and settings. Surrealist practice in these contexts seems misplaced. Although surrealism’s politics were of the left and its sentiments distinctly anti-bourgeois – its main proponents and practitioners were, on the whole, in positions of privilege – a central contradiction at the heart of the movement. In the series ‘A View from Back o’ Town’, referred to as Earnshaw’s ‘social realist period’, flat caps and top hats operate as visual signifiers of class division. He frequently depicted himself wearing a flat cap, celebrating his regional and class identity in drawings such as ‘No smoking at the Tate Gallery’ (1983/86), in which Earnshaw depicts himself in typical working-class attire confronting René Magritte’s La Durée poignardée (Time Transfixed, 1938). Here Earnshaw juxtaposes the kitchen-sink reality of working life with the imaginative pursuits and heightened realism of surrealist theory.
Earnshaw adopts many of the techniques and media typically associated with surrealism. Surrealist concepts, such as that of the ‘found object’, for example, are appropriated in assemblages known as ‘boxes’ which are heavily represented in the show. On entering the exhibition, ‘Lost Property’ (1979), a collection of combs, is assembled and fastidiously labelled with the place of origin and the date Earnshaw encountered each comb clearly marked. Far from the exoticism of outmoded objects discovered at Parisian flea markets and arcades by the French surrealists, Earnshaw’s assemblage simultaneously functions as a surrealist sculptural installation and a document of life in Leeds in a particular historical moment.
Earnshaw’s paintings similarly combine the strategies of surrealism with a record of social reality. The Distribution of Wishes (1965) and The Future of Pets: Whatever became of Rin Tin Tin (1966) depict dream-images, the latter of which features a disembodied wolf amidst red brick terraces which foreground the silhouetted outline of factories on the horizon. Earnshaw explored a variety of painterly techniques, many of which are represented in the show: Pushing Knobs and Pulling Levers (1960) and the earlier 2 Ghosts (1958) demonstrate a more abstract style, whilst sand on canvas pieces from the early sixties indicate a commitment to experimentation with form as well as content. Earnshaw’s drawings and lithograph prints are also represented. A large lithograph print ‘Secret Alphabet 5’, dominates the foot of the gallery. In the tradition of other surrealist alphabets produced by Czech artist Jindrich Heisler and those of Karel Teige, these hidden alphabets are optical illusions which convey wit and humour as well as precision and skilfulness, qualities which are similarly evidenced in Earnshaw’s comic strip, ‘Wokker’, which was published in the Times Education Supplement for a year from late 1972.
Earnshaw’s talent was later recognised and he was employed as a lecturer in Fine Art, before retiring to focus on his work. He became acquainted with George Melly and collaborated with Eric Thacker to produce the wonderfully illustrated Musrum (1968) and Wintersol (1971). The exhibition’s opening event was attended by a range of Earnshaw’s friends and family, academics, collectors and active members of the Leeds Surrealist Group. The exhibition is supplemented by an independently funded publication, published by Sheffield based RGAP, containing contributions by leading scholars in the field – a thorough and overdue assessment of his work.
Surrealism functions in Earnshaw’s work in two key ways: he utilises its techniques in order to articulate his own experiences and political positions. He also deploys its philosophies, exploring how surrealism encourages an alternative view of the world without having to depart from that world in order to critique it. Through his unique form of social surrealism, Earnshaw communicates one of surrealism’s central tenets, as articulated by André Breton: ‘there is no longer anything fantastic – there is only the real’.
