WILLIAM JOHNSTONE O.B.E. (SCOTTISH 1897-1981)
AFTER BOMB DAMAGE
Signed, inscribed and dated 1929-1969 verso, oil on canvas
136cm x 244cm (53.5in x 96in)
Lyon and Turnbull are pleased to offer After Bomb Damage (1929-69) by William Johnstone, one of the most monumental oils by the artist to appear on the market for some time. Johnstone was known to re-visit and re-work his oils overs years, or even decades, as is the case here. As Dr Beth Williamson notes, the scale, initial dates, darkness and subject of this painting sits well with other paintings by Johnstone such as A Point in Time and Golgotha, Johnstone’s most noted masterworks. Indeed, it seems positioned somewhere between these two in terms of palette and tone with hints of the blues of A Point in Time and the geometric shapes of Golgotha. Williamson highlights the important role of Johnstone’s fascination with the concept of time, postulating that this fed into his methodology of re-visiting and making additions to artworks across several years. It is known he explored different perspectives of how we understand time such as J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment in Time (1927) and Percy Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man (1927).1929, the date this painting was begun, was of course the year of the Wall Street Crash. The economic collapse put paid to Johnstone’s ambitions to settle in America, forcing he and his first wife Flora’s return to Scotland initially, and latterly London. It has also been said to mark a period which saw him begin to turn away from his art practice in disillusionment. Johnstone was a staunch individualist, opposed to conforming to the dictates of his dealers. An ideologue and an innovator, he discovered instead a passion for teaching, holding the position of Principal at the Camberwell School of Art and Design between 1938 and 1945 and later at the Central School of Arts and Crafts until the 1960s.Dr Williamson notes that both A Point in Time and Golgotha are anti-war paintings, and the title of this work would seem to place it within the same body of work. Johnstone’s art is in essence deeply psychological, and in his painting one can perhaps perceive the reverberating impact of World War 1. Though Johnstone was fortunate not to see active service, the residual trauma that affected the nation and the seismic break in the order of things left a deep mark on the artist. 1929 accelerated a crumbling in the sense of order; the looming spectre of further global unrest beginning to take form. When Johnstone returned to this painting latterly in the 60s, he would also have seen plenty of the titular bomb damage first hand. Johnstone held the post of Principal at the Camberwell School of Art and Design between 1938 and 1946.  During WWII the Junior School was evacuated (1941-42), first to Chipstead and later to Northampton with other students from the school, although Printing continued. Johnstone reopened the school in the autumn of 1943, and there are student accounts of it as badly bombed, poorly lit and cold. We are grateful to the kind assistance of Dr Beth Williamson in cataloging this lot. Her cultural biography of William Johnstone is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.