Nicolete Gray's Subtle Contribution to Abstraction
Dec 24, 2018
Nicolete Gray was not an artist; she was an expert in typography. And yet her understanding of the semantics of visual languages led her to make a distinctive contribution to the history of abstract art. Born in 1911, Gray was raised in a household where it was common for her to meet writers, artists, musicians and historians. Her father, the English poet and art scholar Robert Laurence Binyon, was especially knowledgable about 19th Century art and writing, an appreciation which he imparted onto his daughter. Gray rejoiced in the philosophies of the Pre-Raphaelites; she saw in their ideas beauty and grandiosity — a striving for the best that humans can do. She also appreciated the flowery, exotic look of Victorian text. However, by the 1930s when Gray was beginning her career, the excesses of Romantic aesthetics were far out of fashion. Simplicity was the trend. But rather than succumbing to public tastes, Gray opted to share her enthusiasm and try to turn public tastes to her side. In 1938, she wrote what still to this day is considered the definitive text on Victorian typefaces: Nineteenth Century Ornamented Types and Title Pages (Faber & Faber Limited, London). She celebrated the aesthetic fundamentals of the writing, and pointed out, “Lettering has a formality and an importance over and above bare legibility.” This was a shocking point of view for the time. It suggested that written language — something that had always been taken for granted as purely utilitarian — possessed separate formal qualities that could be appreciated according to their esoteric, abstract potential. The book did its job, and changed public opinion, inspiring Gray to continue researching and teaching the subject of typography her entire life. When she died in 1997, she left behind a remarkable legacy grounded in the simultaneous appreciation of grandiosity and simplicity, and a belief that realism and abstraction are only two ways of looking at the same field of human culture.
Abstract and Concrete
Two years before publishing her book on 19th Century typefaces, Gray made a splash in the fine art world by curating what is widely believed to be the first gallery exhibition of abstract art in England. She was friends with many of the abstract artists working in Britain at the time, and was aware of the bias the English public had against Modernist, and in particular abstract art. She called her exhibition “Abstract and Concrete,” referencing the idea that abstraction is a something that can be understood and discussed in formal terms anyone can understand. Included in the show were artists living and working in England at the time, including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Naum Gabo, and J.C. Stephenson, as well as artists from outside of Britain, such as Hans Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Calder, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Alberto Giacometti, and Joan Miró.
In the catalogue for “Abstract and Concrete,” Gray called her curation a “concise representation of the contemporary practice of abstract painting, sculpture and construction.” When the show opened in in a gallery in Oxford in 1936, the fine art establishment snubbed it. One critic even called it “a jolly leg pull.” Nonetheless, reaction from the general public was better than expected. Gray traveled the exhibition to galleries in Liverpool and Cambridge. The momentum was so overwhelming that finally a London gallery agreed to host the show. Financially, however, “Abstract and Concrete” was not much of a success — the people who liked it were not part of the wealthy collecting class. Incredibly, Mondrian offered the three paintings he had in the show for only £50. Gray bought one of them. But economics aside, the impact of the exhibition on public imagination was profound. For the first time, British audiences embraced the beauty, universality, and potential of Modernist Abstract art.
A Tale of Two Dantes
A decade after almost single-handedly convincing British audiences to accept the legitimacy of abstract art, Gray took what some people considered a 180-degree turn by publishing a book titled “Rossetti, Dante and Ourselves” (Faber & Faber Limited, London, 1947). The book was a sympathetic study of the work and ideas of the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882), and the 13th Century Italian poet, Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321). It embraced mysticism and romanticism in the arts, and held the two Dantes up as still being entirely relevant to modern people. The book was as influential on the opinions of the British public as the “Abstract and Concrete” exhibition had been. Yet from one perspective it is had to imagine how the same person could have been responsible for both. In that contradiction, however, hides genius. Gray did not consider realism as necessarily separate from abstraction. She felt that their methods and purposes should be taken together.
This opinion was informed directly by the studies Gray made on type. She traveled the world looking at the ways type is used in everyday life. She saw that the formal visual qualities of words can change the way people react to architecture, marketing materials, and news. There are hidden messages in the abstract aspects of words and letters. Even if a word or letter cannot be “read” by a viewer, that viewer might still be visually literate enough to understand something about what the symbols mean based on their appearance and context. This same point of view is the root of the contribution Gray made to abstraction — it captures the essence of how we understand the differences between realistic and abstract art. Even when we can “read” a figurative painting, more often than not it is the abstract qualities of the work — its colors, or its compositional harmonies and dissonances — that convey the feelings we perceive from the work. At the same time, an abstract artwork may not be legible from a narrative standpoint, but to someone literate in the esoteric aspects of visual languages there is still much to be understood.
Featured image: Nicolette Gray - Lettering As Drawing (Book cover).
Photo used for illustrative purposes only
By Phillip Barcio
