William Roberts, born 5 June 1895, died 20 January 1980. He was a British painter of, mainly, groups of figures and portraits. He was also a war artist in both World War I and World War II.
I was unaware of Mr Roberts' paintings, but having wandered among those available via Google Image have been duly impressed.
Roberts, always himself a most independent figure, carved a special niche from an early age. Very much a man of the people, from the simplest East London beginnings (his father was a carpenter), he remained all through his life a man who chose not to communicate with people. Yet, he provided us through his oeuvre with a broad yet spectral insight into the social characteristics of society as he saw it and of its changing nature as the 20th century wore on...........
Roberts' dramatic set-piece, entitled 'The Cinema' (1920)
The film being a silent cowboy saga, the female musical accompanist is glimpsed through curtains below the screen and the monochromatic expression of the silent movie is represented in toned sepia, as a maelstrom of feverish activity. By contrast, the audience, mainly male, is shown enthralled in sombre, darkening colours, not without cubist or even futurist influence. It is interesting to be able to see, in the same exhibition, Roberts' 'TV' (1960).
TV
Here, a similar engrossment with the screen, now contained within a living room for a family grouping is revealed, yet all is at a private scale of activity. Privacy was a permanent necessity for William Roberts himself in his career and in his closely guarded family life.
Roberts had a highly proactive start to his career, following his scholarship to the Slade at the age of 15. By the time he was 20, he had signed the Vorticist manifesto with other colleagues, together with Wyndham Lewis and the poet Ezra Pound. Did active service as a young war artist in World War I ever expand Roberts's enthusiasm for the mechanistic surge and thrust of the compelling machine age? There is no evidence of this. Indeed, a degree of revulsion now turned Roberts towards full-blown figurative art, developing human forms that were well rounded and upright, generic in a language all his own. Roberts, from his working class background (which he never foresook) was able to provide a genuine social documentation throughout his career, of ordinariness and light together, of his fellow Londoners and Eastenders. He suffered after the war, for his apparent lack of charisma, buying, too, a simple home in Camden, becoming something of a recluse - always with his wife discouraging art critics. He taught at the Central School of Art, but even with students and staff maintained a 'Trappist' lack of verbal exchange, just drawing on his students' work, and in all human contacts painfully shy and less than amiable. His work, and family, became his entirety. Yet Roberts was also an exceptional portrait painter and was persuaded to complete portraits of such luminaries of the pre-war period as TE Lawrence and JM Keynes. His self-portrait shows a cloth-capped, warily reticent, red-faced individual.
Roberts's countervailing sense of humour is apparent in many paintings, such as 'Rush Hour' (1971), one of the best depictions of the almost-disappeared and much-lamented London bus.
Rush Hour
He distrusted critics for the most part and took strenuous measures to avoid them. What speaks out from his work is a self-explanatory integrity, both visual and of technique. He had developed and mastered his personal style from a young age, maintaining and developing it all his life.
Unfortunately, his typical rejection of the entire gallery system (with the proud exception of the Royal Academy, which had perceptively elected him an RA in later life) had long-term shortcomings for his estate. A most important collection of his work, comprising some 70 paintings, numerous drawings and other documentation, still lies in the Tate Gallery cellars, inaccessible as long as the Treasury Solicitors' Department takes to decide as to the best manner of its disposal. Roberts had, typically, died intestate aged 85 in 1980. Neither his family, nor indeed the William Roberts Society, have been able to advance this situation at present.
Many of Roberts' paintings can be seen via Google Image, his subjects encompass a wide variety of everyday activities. From HERE:
Painter, William Roberts, started out as a poster designer and studied at the Slade; leaving the school in 1913 he travelled in France and Italy and fought in the trenches during WWI, the sheer horror of the experience, as with many other artists who went to fight, significantly changing the direction of his work. Roberts was one of the signatories to the first issue of BLAST, the short-lived literary magazine of the Vorticist movement in Britain.
The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring, 1915.
He developed an interest for representing and interpreting the predominantly working class elements of metropolitan London’s everyday life and events – visits to the cinema, the dance hall but treating them with dignity and humour.
Cantering to the Post
The Palms Foretell
The Wimpy Bar
The Dressmakers
The Barber's Shop
ASTROLOGY
Born on 5 June 1895 in London, UK. time of birth unknown, chart set for 12 noon.
Mentioned often in descriptions of the artist is Roberts' need for privacy - from Wikipedia, for instance:
Roberts was often described as reclusive, and he was very wary about interviewers – especially after an Observer journalist who visited him produced an article that Roberts felt was concerned more with his rather spartan lifestyle than with his work. 'What kind of art critic is this, who sets out to criticise my pictures, but criticises my gas stove and kitchen table instead?' he asked. One admirer of his work has told how she saw him getting on to a number 74 bus and 'Fascinated to gain a sighting of the octogenarian recluse, she followed him to the top deck. Aided by "the chutzpah of youthful inexperience", she respectfully asked him if she were addressing Mr William Roberts. After what felt like an interminable pause, and with his gaze defiantly averted, he replied: "I really do not know."
That reclusiveness is reflection of four personal planets in Cancer: Venus conjunct Mars and Jupiter conjunct Mercury. Cancer, a sign said to indicate, when prominent in a natal chart, a propensity for feelings of vulnerability and need for self-protection - the sign's symbol - the crab displays these tendencies. From snips quoted above: His work, and family, became his entirety. That clearly signals Cancerian!
Elementally, Roberts' chart has a preponderance of intuitive, sensitive Water, with only Sun and two outer planets in Air, and no Earth or Fire at all - unless rising sign added one of those elements to the mix.
Roberts' Gemini Sun, closely flanked by Neptune on one side and Pluto on the other, seems a tad beseiged. This, in tandem with four Cancer personal planets could well account for a Gemini Sun person turning out to be against-type, and rather unsociable - at least on the surface. Roberts' underlying affection for ordinary people, though, is evident from his paintings - his way of communicating without making himself vulnerable.
Saturn, from secretive Scorpio trines Mercury, further adding to some feeling of inner restriction or limitation. Also in Scorpio are Uranus and, quite possibly Moon, with one or both in trine to some of the Cancer planets - still more reflection of Roberts' need for privacy - a known Scorpio trait.
Uranus' links to personal planets also relates to Roberts' modernistic quasi-cubist art style, and his connection with the avant-garde Vorticists.
