Tempera painting, 'Composition: Cones and Spirals', Edward Wadsworth, 1929

An abstract arrangement of shells, spiral wood shavings and sawn-up wooden cones, seemingly suspended against a background of variously coloured planes.

Provenance: Sir Michael Sadler; Leger Galleries; Kaplan Gallery; purchased, 1960

Historical significance: Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949) attended the Slade School of Art between 1909 and 1912. He became a leading member of the short-lived but radical Vorticist group, founded in 1914 by Percy Wyndham Lewis, which aimed to be a English equivalent to contemporary European developments in art - Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism. During this period Wadsworth's work was uncompromisingly abstract, composed of hard-edged diagonal shapes derived from mechanised forms. However, Vorticism did not survive the First World War, and thereafter most of the members, including Wadsworth, pursued more representational modes of expression.

During the 1920s Wadsworth's style developed towards a more straightforward realism. Maritime themes became important, first in representational views, and increasingly forming the vocabulary which Wadsworth came to use in his surreal still life compositions incorporating shells and other objects (although Wadsworth himself did not identify himself as a Surrealist).

Composition: Cones and Spirals of 1929 is an abstract arrangement of shells, spiral wood shavings and sawn-up wooden cones, seemingly suspended against a background of variously coloured planes. It is a transitional painting in Wadsworth's oeuvre, heralding a series of uncompromisingly abstract works. While it uses the shells and other forms found in the enigmatic still-life paintings Wadsworth began making in 1926, it removes their usual background contexts of sea, jetty or table top. Without these naturalistic co-ordinates, the result is a more purely abstract composition - although the blue of the background could be taken to represent the sky. The objects in the painting are explorations of shapes; the spirals and cones of the shells are echoed by equivalent forms. The painting implies the idea of nature versus machine: natural shells are juxtaposed with machine-made objects - more specifically, those that can only be made with a sharp blade.

Wadsworth was a technical perfectionist with a profound interest in painting technique. From the early 1920s he mostly worked in the medium of tempera, a paint made by binding pigments with egg yolk in approximately equal quantities. Tempera was widely used in Europe until the 15th century, when it was superceded by oil paints. The medium was revived in the late 19th and early 20th century by a group of artists including Joseph Southall, William Holman Hunt, Walter Crane and John Dickson Batten, and by the 1920s it was associated with a conservative, medieval aesthetic of the Arts and Crafts movement. However, as Jonathan Black has pointed out, Wadsworth was not the only avant-garde painter working in tempera in the 1920s; Christopher Nevinson, Otto Dix, George Grosz and Giorgio de Chirico also worked in the medium (Jonathan Black, Edward Wadsworth: Form, Feeling and Calculation. The Complete Paintings and Drawings, London, 2005, p.45).

Technically, tempera is a highly demanding medium which allows no margin for error. Unlike oil paints, which can be manipulated on the canvas, tempera paint dries quickly and so the paint has to be applied with light, rapid strokes and built up in thin layers, one drying before the next is applied. The advantages of the medium are its luminous colour and the semi-matt sheen of its surface. Wadsworth himself valued its rigorous, uncompromising character, writing to another tempera painter, Maxwell Armfield that 'Painting that is "worth" anything at all is that in which the spirit is animated by an intellectual, or structural, flavour rather than by Romanticism (false mystery) or facile emotionalism. The tempera medium tends to encourage this state of affairs.' (Quoted in Black, p.46.) The medium contributes a startling clarity to Wadsworth's otherwise strange and ambigous still life and abstract paintings.

This painting belonged to Sir Michael Sadler (1861-1943), Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds 1911-1923, an important patron of avant-garde artists including Wadsworth, Mark Gertler, Wyndham Lewis, John and Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Ben Nicholson.

CIRC.183-1960