13 APRIL 1985, Page 35

Engraving

Crystal-clear

Alan Powers

Fifty Years on Glass: engraved glasses by Laurence Whistler (The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood 4 March- 25 April; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 8 May-30 June)

Rex Whistler is chiefly remembered for his work on a large scale, like the murals at Plas Newydd and the Tate Gallery. His brother Laurence, poet, architectural historian and glass engraver, works chiefly at the other end of the telescope, on three-inch glass cylinders in the form of goblets, or on slightly larger bowls. These are worked with diamond and steel points so that the light seems to grow out of the glass itself, from diffused stippling or sharp accents and silhouettes. They are not for drinking from, or arrang- ing flowers in. They need to be carefully displayed against a dark background, and can be rotated to show designs which exploit the three-dimensionality of the curved surface. All these attributes of engraved glass have been developed by Whistler in his almost single-handed reviv- al of the craft. His visionary subject matter and his technical skill are matched in a manner rare among artists in any medium.

The exhibition at Kenwood is his first in London for nearly ten years and takes us back to Whistler's beginnings. He was inevitably influenced by Rex's Neo- Georgianism, and found encouragement from Ursula Ridley, daughter of Sir Edwin Lutyens. The world of country houses opened to him in his early years, and the exquisite casket and triptych commissioned by and for the Queen Mother could have been signposts towards a charming and stultifying dead end. Whistler the poet came to the rescue, and for some years he has diverted straightforward country-house portraiture to his son Simon and developed a symbolic and literary style in the typically English tradition of Blake, Palmer, F.L. Griggs and David Jones, all masters of black and white media. Laurence Whistler belongs, in fact, to the Neo-Romantic move- ment of the 1940s which saw Blake and Palmer as its chief antecedents. 'High Noon', 1968, recalls Graham Sutherland's Pembrokeshire lane in the Tate Gallery, although it is a more literal rendering. A closer comparison can be made with the wood engraver Reynolds Stone who put his strong love of English country into a few square inches of boxwood.

'An allegory of the uniqueness of experi- ence' is how Whistler describes the en- graved goblet 'Exact Time, Appointed Place'. The bonnet of a 1930s Bentley stretches out towards a concurrence of human and natural phenomena. The de- scription, although not the imagery, would extend to cover all the subjects, from a bowl showing the first moon landing to the most private dream worlds. Contrary to superficial impressions, Whistler is not a simple pastoralist. Like any good crafts- man, he has enjoyed the challenge of some quite outrageously incongruous commis- sions, like a goblet commemorating the first gas-turbine car or a decanter for the retiring director featuring the company's heat-resisting brick products. These are not in the present exhibition, which has a theme of affirmation of life, albeit a contemplative and solitary life. The de- spairing visions which appeared in his work of the late Sixties of beleaguered outposts of rural and ancient peace above the roar of megalopolis have given way to celebra- tions of the chalk country of Wiltshire or the sparkle of sun in the distant window of a Georgian house.

There is still an awareness, however, of the contrary forces of darkness. A com- memorative pane to the composer George Butterworth, killed at the Battle of the Somme, offers a despairing vision of Lutyens's great Theipval Memorial in trompe l'oeuil fragments of glass. At the centre of Whistler's imagery is a belief in the redeeming power of art, so that the Gerald Finzi memorial bowl recalls words, music and images associated with another composer who died before his work was finished. The theme is stated in a general way in 'Way Out', showing 'a domed prison cell with the graffiti of those who

have spent time in it'. The artists and poets have escaped towards the light, leaving their initials by the door, while on the opposite side 'certain suicides from Judas onwards' show the way down into dark- ness.

One of the most powerful of the recent allegories is a bowl commissioned by the donor of a small garden at St Catherine's College, Oxford meant to 'enliven a small austere courtyard intended by the architect to remain austere'. From an all too familiar dark enclosure of brick rises the spiked wheel of the saint's martyrdom, a symbol of all martyrs to the tyranny of architectu- ral arrogance. In the sky above an irrep- ressible cloud of flowers breaks out in unashamed Regency colour-plate style.

Although Laurence Whistler has been engraving glass for 50 years, he has never

felt the need to be modern or 'of his own time'. The result is that his work becomes fresher and younger with time. His three children who share the exhibition show developments from the paternal tradition which will be interesting to watch in the future. One attractive aspect of Laurence Whistler's unconcern with Modernism is. that his work is clearly understandable, even if the subjects are complex. Nor is he afraid of giving helpful explanations in the catalogue, or in the new book of his work, Signs and Symbols on Glass (Cupid Press £24). This desire to avoid obscurity means that he has remained popular in the ,coun- try house world where he began his artistic career, but also that he is a most appropri- ate artist for the GLC to exhibit (for the second time) to a wider public, although one would not expect to find many connec- tions between County Hall and the county set.