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Ceri Richards (1903 - 1971)
Born in 1903; he was a draughtsman of exceptional talent. His paintings display tremendous energy and an original and authentic dialogue with the major figures of European modernism: Kandinsky, Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. Richards took an intelligent approach to the visual arts and music: some of his finest works combine his interest in both. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he did many paintings on the subject of their interaction in life, inspired stylistically by Matisse's decorative flatness. Ceri Richards is acknowledged as Wales' most important artist of the mid-twentieth century. Born at Dunvant, near Swansea, in 1903, he studied first at Swansea Art School, and then at the Royal College of Art, London. A contemporary of, and frequent co-exhibitor with Henry Moore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland, Ceri Richards' work has represented Britain in many international touring shows. In 1962, he became one of the very few British prizewinners at the Venice Biennale, when he was awarded the prestigious Einaudi Prize. An accomplished pianist, his work often took a musical theme, notably his series based on Debussy's music, as well as his Beethoven Suite. In Wales, he is, perhaps, best known for his paintings and drawings based on Dylan Thomas's poetry.
In the 1930s Richards made a number of relief constructions and paintings that constitute a major contribution to symbolic Surrealism and rank with the best European art of the period. A great deal of his work in the 1940s continued to give a surrealist inflection to an apocalyptic imagery that identified the cataclysm of the war with the cyclic drama of nature. In art and poetry - in Rubens' Rape of the Sabines and Delacroix's Lion Hunt, in the poetry of Dylan Thomas - he found mythic allegories of sex and violence, procreation and destruction that constituted a complex and utterly original poetic response to the events of the time. In the late '40s and early '50s, in paintings and drawings of music room interiors, of London costermongers and, for the 1951 Festival, of Trafalgar Square, Richards developed an intensely lyrical vision of the everyday world in which brilliant colour, refracted light and an exuberant visual music are components of domestic or urban joy. In the late 1950s and early '60s he made a series of great semi-abstract seascapes on the theme of La Cathedrale Engloutie, which match the lyricism and sombre sonorities of Debussy's prelude. Later he made a number of paintings, lighter in mood and more graphic in treatment, of other themes - Clair de Lune, Jardins sous la pluie, drawn from Debussy.
Richards, himself a gifted musician, was unusually responsive as an artist to music and poetry. His extraordinary versatility enabled him to shift styles and to treat his subjects and themes with a dazzling virtuosity. Few artists of his time have encompassed such oppositions of subject and mood. But for all its diversity of imagery and its variations of mood there is underlying coherence to all Richards's work. It is to be found in the constant recurrence of visual motifs and symbols, always associated with the mythic cycles of nature and of human life, or with the other great theme of his life's work, the central necessity of art to human existence: these figures include the human form, the arabesque, rock formations and plant forms, sun, moon and roundel, seed-pod, leaf and flower, and musical instruments, especially the piano. It is to be found, too, in a constant inventive brilliance of technique and execution, a characteristic clarity and certainty of image that derives above all from a graphic gift that matches those of the great predecessors, Delacroix, Matisse and Picasso, to whom he paid the closest creative attention.
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