Banjo-face
John Banting (Chelsea 1902 – Hastings 1972)
Category
Art / Drawings and watercolours
Date
1941
Materials
Linocut on paper mounted on cardboard
Measurements
232 x 283 mm
Order this imageCollection
2 Willow Road, London
NT 112449
Summary
Linocut on paper with mixed media, Banjo-face by John Banting (Chelsea 1902 – Hastings 1972), 1941. Formed from a mottled tan background piece, overlayed with white and brown paper, printed with an abstract geometric form with arms and circular designs. Inscribed by the artist in pencil on the reverse, 'Banjo-face / Lino cut / John Banting' and '£3 - / without frame / […]'. Within a moulded and stained birdseye maple frame, and glazed.
Full description
John Banting (1902–72) was a British surrealist painter, printmaker and designer. Born in Chelsea, while working as a clerk he studied at the Westminster School of Art under Bernard Meninsky and later at the Académie Colarossi and the Grande Chaumière in Paris. By 1925 he had established a studio in Fitzrovia, a hub for Vorticist artists such as Wyndham Lewis, who influenced his early work. Banting designed book jackets for Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which published works by Bloomsbury Group members, psychoanalytic texts, and translations of foreign, particularly Russian, literature. He joined the London Group; an artists’ society formed from the Camden Town Group and the Vorticists to challenge the Royal Academy’s dominance. By the 1930s, Banting had embraced Surrealism, exhibiting in the 1936 International Exhibition of Surrealism. At Marcel Duchamp’s invitation he contributed to the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in 1938, followed by a solo show at London’s avant-garde Storran Gallery. A close friend of the writer and political activist Nancy Cunard, Banting accompanied her to Harlem in 1932, where they engaged with the Harlem Renaissance and civil rights movements. He contributed to Cunard’s ‘Negro Anthology’ (1931-33), a book of music, poetry, historical studies, essays on racism and reports on Black culture in Caribbean and African countries, which included contributions from Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter White. In 1937 Banting and Cunard went to Spain and attempted to enlist with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, he worked as an art director at the Ministry of Information alongside Dylan Thomas. In 1942, he and Cunard published Salvo for Russia, an anthology of surrealist poems and engravings raising funds for Soviet women and children affected by the Nazi invasion. Banjo-face was one of three works by Banting displayed at 2 Willow Road as part of the Aid to Russia exhibition, 1942 (no. 7, offered at 3 guineas; with 'Guitar-face', no.6, and 'My Safety First', no. 5). The Aid to Russia Fund was an initiative set up to provide aid to Russia during the Nazi invasion and partial occupation. The present work was produced in 1941 and contains abstract and anthropomorphic elements which allude to the face and strings of a banjo. The modern banjo is closely associated with African American culture and is derived from African instruments brought to the Americans by enslaved people from West and Central Africa in the seventeenth century. It was widely played in the antebellum south and was used in minstrel performances. In the early 1900s new banjos were developed in response to popular music styles, ragtime and jazz. Musical instruments such as guitars and pianos were a recurring theme in Banting’s work, revealing the close relationship between Surrealism and music, particularly jazz which Surrealists conceived of as a form of automatic creativity, and Banting’s formative experiences in Harlem. See Piano Face/Guitar Hands (Tate Archive TGA 779/6/4); Guitarist (Tate P07007); Squeezebox, Guitarface and Birds (The Ingram Collection of Modern British and Contemporary Art, 599); One Man Band (Jerwood Collection, JC90). After the war, Banting received financial support from the Artists Benevolent Fund and lived in Rye and later Hastings, devoting himself to writing. He died in January 1972, between a solo exhibition at London’s Hamet Gallery and a retrospective at the Edward Harvane Gallery. His papers, photographs, and correspondence are held in the Tate Archive (TGA 779).
Provenance
Exhibited at the Aid to Russia exhibition, 1942 (no. 7, offered at 3 guineas) and purchased there by Ernö Goldfinger and Ursula Ruth Blackwell, also known as Mrs Ernö Goldfinger; purchased by the National Trust in 1994.
Marks and inscriptions
Bottom left.: "15/100" Bottom right.: "JB / 41" Across back.: "Banjo-face / Lino-cut / John Banting / £3 - / without frame / (frame 101)"
Makers and roles
John Banting (Chelsea 1902 – Hastings 1972), artist