Arthur Jackson

Marlborough Fine Art, London
John Leslie Martin

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Art in Britain 1930-40: centred around Axis, Circle, Unit One, March – April 1965, no.62 (possibly)

The board is entirely sound and the paint surface appears to be in excellent original condition, stable throughout. Inspection under UV light reveals some light retouching all around the extreme outer edges of the board - presumably where the work was previously housed in a frame that rubbed the paint surface. Attractively presented 'floated' behind glass in a simple white wooden box frame in very good condition, other than some very minor scuffs and dirty marks. Ready to hang.
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Arthur Jackson is one of the least well known of the English modernist artists, due in great part to his short career as a painter. A cousin of Barbara Hepworth, he used the name Jackson (his middle name) to keep a certain distance between them in the public eye.

Trained at St. Martin’s School of Art, he studied with Ben Nicholson in the early 1930s and was elected to the 7 & 5 Society in 1934. An accomplished photographer, he travelled in Europe and became friendly with a number of the leading figures of the abstract movement, particularly Jean Helion and Hans Erni. Having begun studying architecture in 1938, he gave up painting in 1939 and, after war service in the Middle East, worked exclusively as an architect.

Jackson’s style, whilst having a clear relation to Nicholson in his earliest works, seems to retain a more anthropomorphic element than that of the older man, and by the end of his short career, it has closer affinities with the more mainstream European modernist style. The present work, with its carefully balanced simple floating forms, indeed perhaps has a closer relation in one of the major figures of the continental movement, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian former Bauhaus teacher who arrived in London in 1935 and was a Hampstead neighbour of Jackson. Moholy-Nagy had long experimented with a variety of media, but in the late 1930s had begun to produce paintings that incorporated plexiglass and thus allowed areas of colour to physically float above the ground. The purity of paintings such as the present work also have a link to the contemporary experiments in textile design being produced by Alastair Morton for the Edinburgh Weavers Co. which aimed to transfer the modernist design ethos to fabrics and carpets.

However, regardless of the route by which Jackson came to such a manner, it is in paintings such as Painting 1937 that we see the lost potential for English modernist painting when his allegiances transferred to architecture.