Between 1917 and 1923, Julian Trevelyan produced a map and an illustrated guide to Hurtenham, an industrial town on the Tees between Stockton and Darlington. You’ll search in vain for the place in an atlas today, as the entire town, with its warren of streets, railways, parks, public buildings and monuments to local luminaries, was the figment of a pre-teen imagination. But the wit and ingenuity of its conception — and its bird’s-eye views of an abstracted world — set the creative pattern for what was to follow.
Born into a family of writers and intellectuals, Trevelyan was not destined for an artistic career. When he dropped out of an English degree at Cambridge in 1931 to study art in Paris, his uncle G.M. Trevelyan expressed the hope that he was not ‘going to meet one of those Matisses or Picassos’ — which of course was just what his nephew had in mind. But during his four years of haphazard self-education in a Montparnasse studio adjoining Alexander Calder’s, the artist who had the most lasting influence on him was in fact an Englishman. It was while assisting the experimental printmaker Stanley William Hayter in his legendary Atelier 17 that Trevelyan rubbed shoulders with Masson, Ernst, Miró — and occasionally Picasso — and that, along with hands-on experience of developments at the cutting-edge of etching, Surrealism rubbed off on Trevelyan.
To mark the launch of Julian Trevelyan: Picture Language, a new book on the artist by his son Philip (published by Lund Humphries), the Bohun Gallery in Henley has put together an exhibition of some 30 works from all periods of his career, starting with a Picassoesque ‘Figure (after Piero della Francesca)’ painted in Paris in 1933 that would have confirmed his uncle’s worst fears.
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