Crafts
Modernism's heir
Tanya Harrod reviews the career of the great letter-carver of Coventry Cathedral In 1937 a young German boy came to study at Eric Gill's workship in Bucking- hamshire. He was asked to draw an alphabet. Gill corrected it and then set him to carving inscriptions, tutored by Gill's assistant Laurie Cribb. Over 50 years later Ralph Beyer remembers Gill with affection and still puzzles over the artistic enigma of his first teacher.
Today Beyer is one of the most senior and distinguished letter-carvers working in Britain — in the company of David Kin- dersley and John Skelton. He works alone, nowadays concentrating mainly on com- missions that please him. But of his import- ance there can be no doubt, especially after seeing his work in the company of his fellow letterers in a magnificent touring exhibition, The Spirit of the Letter (at the Crafts Council gallery, 12 Waterloo Place, SW1, until 20 May, then at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, 28 July-9 September, and later at Bradford and Norwich). Beyer's two contributions — a heart-stopping quotation from Rabindra- nath Tagore cut in Ancaster stone and a simple inscription modelled in plaster and clay and applied direct to the wall of the gallery — make one sit up. Neither exam- ple seems quite as eye-catching, quite as pretty, quite as self-evidently skilful and as highly finished as other things in the show. But both have that directness which gives all his work an essential quality. Lettering can appear decorative and it can look absolutely necessary. Beyer's work always seems the latter.
Letter-cutting is one of those crafts which was done to death by a mixture of modernism in architecture and our gather- ing timidity about meaningful lasting in- scriptions. Since the war, despite Gill's pioneering work, lettering has largely been appropriated by architects and graphic designers and by trade monumental masons. And if we look at the lettering on major buildings like the Barbican or the South Bank complex we see that architects in particular deem the craft inessential. Letters can be tacked on as an after- thought. Usually the letter-carver is only called in to execute the dismal plaques revealed when the little curtains are whisked aside and the ribbon cut: 'This building was opened by . . . .' But if Beyer is working at a craft that has largely been destroyed by the debased modernism of the post-war years he is in fact heir to modernist ideas at their finest, experienced when they were newly minted in Europe in the Twenties and early Thirties.
That Beyer has about him an aura of that authentic idealistic modernism is hardly surprising considering his background. His father was an art historian whose eclectic book Welt-Kunst today looks like a source book for contemporary art. The young Beyer grew up with Eric Mendelsohn as a family friend and was inspired by the work of Rudolph Koch, the great calligrapher and typographer, whose expressive letter forms still have an unforgettably powerful impact. When Hitler came to power the Beyer family left for Crete and Switzerland and later Beyer was sent to train with Gill on the advice of Mendelsohn. Lonely and with imperfect English, Beyer found Gill a kindly taskmaster. But he also found him puzzling. Where did he stand in relation to the modernism which Beyer had lived and breathed in his childhood? Certainly there were Gill's friendships with Mendelsohn and Maxwell Fry and his involvement with plans for a modernist Academie in the South of France. And it was in Gill's household that Beyer came to read Circle and Unit 1 and had his first encounter with the work of Henry Moore. Beyer observed and appreciated the modernism of gill sans and other Gill typefaces and the way in which they were used in a radical fashion by Rene Hague, Gill's son-in-law. But at the same time his training was only in the rounded Roman that was the Gill letter- carving workshop style. Later, working with David Kindersley, he learnt a more demanding Roman based directly on the lettering on Trajan's column. But neither letter form had much to do with modern- ism. So in a curious way Beyer's training and his ambitions were at odds.
In 1953 they came together when Beyer first saw David Jones's extraordinary painted inscriptions illustrated in the Architectural Review. He then thought back to his father Oscar Beyer's pioneering work on the Christian catacomb inscrip- tions and he formed his own idea of their executants — ordinary men and women working in poor light and in secrecy. These images must have been in his mind when he carved his first commission in collabora- tion with the architects Keith Murray and Robert Maguire for the Royal Foundation of St Katherine's in Butcher's Row and they are brought to fruition in his great Tablets of the Word in Coventry Cathedral. Indeed his study of Roman catacomb art made Beyer sympathetic to that laudable post-war desire to clarify and simplify services and make arrangements in chur- ches more accessible, taking the early church as a model.
At Coventry Beyer was inspired by those great early Christian symbols the Chi Rho and the vine, and by the informal lettering found in the catacombs. Interestingly the commission was given to him because no sculptor could be found to carve suitable reliefs. (Matisse seems to be the only convincing 20th-century relief sculptor.) It Ralph Beyer with a recent carving: the inscription is translated from a poem by Rilke. was a wise decision: lettering is both a means of communication and an abstract art which integrates gracefully with architecture.
Of course the huge Coventry commis- sion is only a part of Beyer's long career and is easily matched by his great series of inscriptions for the Paul Tillich Park in New Harmony in America. And of course like all letter-carvers Beyer has done routine work — though it is hard to think of an inscription he has carved which does not make you pause and think. And what of the future? Today it might seem that lettering's hour has come. Much post- modern architecture could accommodate carved inscriptions. But the benefits may be dubious: architecture which is pastiche and quotation will demand lettering in the same spirit. Nothing could be further from Beyer's approach, which is direct and uncompromising. So it seems likely that much of Beyer's future work will be private and will give eternal form to the beautiful texts which he selects from his wide read- ing. Oh for a lapidario to house a sequence of such carvings!
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