JULIAN TREVELYAN R.A. (1910-1988)

A PLACE AND A STATE

These important drawings were made in the Winter of 1944, just after Trevelyan had left the army, where he served as a Camouflage Office. Possibly inspired by the writing of Anna Kavan (1901-1968), they were intended to be published by Poetry London alongside a text by Kathleen Raine CBE (1908-2003). However, it was not until thirty years later that the project came to fruition with the eventual publication of the drawings by the Enitharmon Press in 1974 and with a new text by Raine.

In her introduction to the 1974 edition Raine wrote …

‘The mood expressed [in the drawings] was one of rediscovered freedom, not yet fully entered upon and still overshadowed by tragic memories of the war and a confused foreboding that we were not going to take up our private lives again (as during the war years we had more or less taken for granted) as we had left them. Yet our world of 1944 was still like an echo, in a minor key, of the world of 1939; the new strident themes of the post-war era had not yet been announced …’.

‘In the drawings of A Place, A State there is still the sense of phantasmagoria which war cast over our blacked-out cities, making familiar places seem strange, and strange sights and scenes familiar. Julian had worked as a painter in Bolton as a member of Tom Harrisson’s Mass-Observation group; and in London with Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, for whom Mass-Observation was precariously poised between left-wing politics and an almost visionary search for the oracular self-revelations of the collective mind, the collective living purpose of the crowd. Surrealism too was a potent influence—the first movement in the arts inspired by the recognition of an unconscious mind. Julian had—like Humphrey Jennings, our film-director and spokesman, like Cecil Collins our visionary—exhibited in the Surrealist exhibition in England in 1936, and had earlier lived and worked in Paris where he had known several of the members of that group’.

‘Of that moment in England, that way of thinking and feeling, this series of drawings, and David Gascoyne’s poem Night Thoughts (for which Julian Trevelyan made the cover-design) are the most perfect expressions known to me. The series is unlike Julian’s earlier working-class landscapes; unlike his later work, in which he again returns to a vision of the external world. They are also in themselves complete, coherent and express perfectly a single experience’.

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