Launching the David Jones Revival

The October issue of Apollo magazine wonders why the Welch poet and painter David Jones hasn't been given his fair share of attention. With two forthcoming exhibitions of Jones's visual work, Matthew Sperling thinks the time is ripe for a revival. From Apollo:

Time is ripe for a David Jones revival. The Anglo-Welsh painter and poet, who lived from 1895–1974, is the subject of two simultaneous exhibitions opening in Sussex this autumn. ‘David Jones: Vision and Memory’ at Pallant House Gallery (24 October–21 February 2016) and ‘The Animals of David Jones’ at the Ditchling Museum (24 October–6 March 2016) represent the largest showing of Jones’s work since a Tate retrospective in 1981, and are accompanied by a major new monograph on his work written by Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills and published by Lund Humphries. The Welsh National Opera meanwhile has commissioned an adaptation of Jones’s long poem of the Great War, In Parenthesis (1937), composed by Iain Bell, which will premiere in Summer 2016.

These ventures should bring overdue attention to an artist whom Kenneth Clark once called ‘absolutely unique – a remarkable genius’. Jones’s uniqueness was well summed up by his friend and mentor Eric Gill in his Last Essays (1942): ‘his work […] is a combination of two enthusiasms, that of the man who is enamoured of the spiritual world and at the same time as much enamoured of the material body in which he must clothe his vision.’ For Gill, Jones was a visionary artist, with a unified concern across all his chosen forms for ‘the universal thing showing through the particular thing’.

For much of Jones’s creative life, however, his vision of ‘universal’ things put him out of step with his modernist contemporaries. Emerging in the era in which the Post-Impressionist doctrine of ‘significant form’, in Clive Bell’s influential phrase, held sway over many critics, Jones’s sense of form was not so much significant as sacramental. Jones himself drew the comparison between his understanding of Post-Impressionist theory and the sacrament of the Eucharist: ‘the insistence that painting must be a thing and not the impression of something has affinity with what the Church said of the mass, that what was oblated under the species of bread and wine at the supper was the same thing as what was bloodily immolated on Calvary.’ And Jones’s intense Christianity was not the only thing that set him apart from his peers. While modernist art was supposed to be free of the illustrative and the literary, Jones’s visual works, like his writings, were often densely literary and allusive.

Surf over to Apollo to read more about Jones's life and poetry and visual work. Our faithful readers will remember we featured a post on Jones in November 2013 to coincide with the publication of Tom Sleigh's in-depth essay, "To Be Incarnational," in Poetry. Revisit the post and revive!