On Tuesday, a fascinating auction, the second of its kind, put together at Bonhams by Rupert Worrall and Tanya Grigoroglou, turned the spotlight on “The Grosvenor School and Avant-Garde British Printmaking.”
The sale opened with an artist whose willingness to experiment in almost every register of the artistic spectrum underlines how little inclination toward modernity mainstream printmakers had when they used traditional techniques, from wood-block to etching.
The case of the talented Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson is particularly revealing because of the friendship he struck with Filippo Marinetti, the founding father of Futurism. Nevinson’s discovery of the Italian artistic movement at its London exhibition in March 1912 might have set him on the path of true modernity. But it did not.
With prodigious versatility, or perhaps a lack of
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/arts/20iht-melikian20.html?pagewanted=all