ART
Set ways
PAUL GRINKE
The Victoria and Albert Museum have given four of their print and drawing galleries to an exhibition of Claud Lovat Fraser's graphic work which will run until Christmas. It doesn't exactly have the magnetism of the moon dust recently on view over the road but it is a timely revival of a delightful and not insignificant artist-designer.
Lovat Fraser has always been consigned to that peculiarly English limbo of artists who worked on a very limited front with great delicacy, considerable talent and no particular desire to set the world on fire. Like Rex Whistler he was engrossed in book illustration and moved in the world of private presses, poetry publishing and theatre design and like Whistler, and Beardsley before him, he died young at the height of his career. In 1923. two years after his death, his friends John Drinkwater and Albert Rutherston produced a beautifully printed and lavishly illustrated memoir of the artist and his work which set the seal on his reputation and allowed him to be forgotten until today.
Lovat Fraser's first love was the theatre. and if he is to be remembered as anything but a very charming illustrator with a flair for design and an imaginative use of pure colour it will be for his costume designs and stage sets. His close friendship with Gordon Craig brought him into the front line of the theatrical revolution and also influenced his own graphic work to a large extent. Stylistically Lovat Fraser drew heavily on the poster and chapbook tradition of Joseph Crawhall and the Beggarstaff Brothers, with their bold areas of black shadow, and took from the great designers for the Russian Ballet the use of pure exotic colours.
The magical flavour of his sets and the extraordinary inventiveness of his costumes were all his own and caused a considerable stir in theattical circles. According to Mrs Grace Lovat Fraser's excellent memoir of her late husband. which is published simultaneously with the exhibition, his designs for As You Like It at- Stratford in 1919 brought the town out in arms and words like 'Futuristic' were muttered by irascible theatregoers. His most memorable designs, though, were for Sir Nigel Play- fair's.famous revival of The Beggar's Opere at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. in 1920. The medley of high-lift and roguery in Gay's ballad-opera gave Lovat Fraser a marvellous opportunity to exercise his visual imagery and the production was an enormous success.
Although obsessed with the theatre he had many other artistic irons in the fire includ. ing, surprisingly, a number of designs for printed textiles and pattern papers which showed an awareness of the new develop- ments in European painting that never in- truded on his other graphic work. With Ralph Hodgson, the poet, he also set up a press called 'At the Sign of Flying Fame' which produced ballad-sheets embellished with coloured woodcuts and was taken °vet by Harold Monro of the Poetry Booksho when Fraser became too involved with hik theatre commissions. Most indicative of the care and attention he gave to the smallest task were his designs for toys which were almost anitiated versions of his chapbook illustrations and give an insight into what was obviously a very endearing personality.
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