Isabel Rawsthorne - Career

Career

I am beginning to understand what pushes me into painting – the love of seeing and the fact as the chosen subject grows in beauty, so it becomes more elusive.

Isabel's work was dominated by the body, she painted figures and animals. Her father supplied exotic creatures to British zoos and as a child she took to drawing these and other wildlife. Later she became interested in natural history and new ideas in Anthropology, Ecology and Ethology, such as those of her friends Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille.These inform the skeletal bird, fish and bat figures of her 1949 Hanover Gallery show, the haunting ape series, and her last, large Migration pictures.

Isabel's two years with Epstein and their mutual enthusiasm for Rodin developed her ideas about vitalism and movement, but she never became part of British Neo-Romanticism. In Paris she continuing her studies of the nude at the free and easy Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She associated with Giacometti, Tristan Tzara and the Surrealist circle but was committed to a figurative form of modern art. She called it ‘Quintessentialism’ She maintained connections to an alternative circle of representational artists: Francis Gruber and Peter Rose-Pulham, as well as Balthus and Derain. Her outlook was anti-idealist, intellectual and, like Giacometti, she saw painting from the real world as a challenge that could never be fully met.

During the 1940s Isabel adapted animal, archaic and pre-historic imagery into motifs of birth, sexuality and death. She did not share the fashionable interest in the formal properties of Oceanic or Archaic art. Instead, she investigated the uncanny ‘presence’ achieved by ancient figures, especially Egyptian sculpture. She also studied this quality in Early Renaissance paintings, and in the evidence of the body itself, X-rays, skeletons, figures and animals she found in the countryside or drew in London Zoo.

In the 1950s and 60s Isabel's explorations of the embattled origins of art and life were adapted into designs for the ballet and opera, most scandalously a topless Minoan Tiresias (created for the Festival of Britain) at Covent Garden, the last work of her husband Constant Lambert. She continued her studies of the body, in motion this time, in the practice rooms of the Royal Ballet. Over the next twenty years she painted images of Fonteyn, Rudolph Nureyev, Antoinette Sibley and other dancers that developed a vivacious new language of movement. In 1961 she worked from the figure and landscape in Nigeria shortly after its Independence, at the Zaria Art School with the artist Clifford Frith (grandson of William Powell Frith).

Isabel explored the ambiguities of appearance through the theme of the double – reflections, such as those seen in the practice room mirrors, for instance. During the late 1960s and 70s, the deaths of Giacometti and Rawsthorne prompted her to refine these ideas in a set of ethereal double portraits juxtaposing living, dead and sculpted likenesses. These works returned to the matière relief effects of the early 1950s and exchanged ideas with Bacon and the sculptor Roy Noakes. Some of these new works and a selection of her innovative dancers were presented to the public at the Marlborough Gallery in 1968.

From the 1950s onwards Isabel developed a series of paintings based on the Essex countryside. Existential rather than pastoral, they responded to environmentalist publications such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The last of these, Migrations, embed bird and animal motifs in timeless settings. The extraordinary brushwork and relief effects developed over a life-time of drawing in close association with sculptors, was combined with a new potency of colour and epic scale. Swathes of yellow evoke the deserts of pre-history and post-history, as well as the very immediate issue of the fields of oil seed rape that were appearing in the 1970s.

In later life, widely read biographies of Giacometti and Bacon brought Isabel fame as a model and muse, but unfortunately had the effect of obscuring her main profession. By the 1980s she was better known as a once beautiful siren, or the bon viveur that Bacon partied with and painted as ‘Isabel Rawsthorne’. Since her death, however, serious scholarship has ensued and several paintings have entered public collections. A retrospective was held in 1997 and a list of exhibitions up to 2010 can be found below.