Books about colour woodcut or linocut artists are becoming something of a cottage industry this year. Leonard Beaumont, Sidney Lee and Eric Slater are now joined by Walter Phillips from Pomegranate Press in Portland, Oregon. It is more of an appreciation than a scholarly work, with contributions from two of Phillips descendants, and a longer piece by the Cornell Arts & Crafts scholar, Nancy E Green. She goes over the life, adding details I had not come across before, and looking at his work as an artist making colour woodcuts (139 of them), watercolours, wood-engravings and etchings.
Yes, he was as prolific as he was determined. He also did not start making colour woodcut until about 1916, so the number he made is remarkable, especially given the high standards he set himself. The book itself is mildly disappointing. There are a lot of images, all in colour, but somehow not quite right. The selection lacks the impact of Phillips at his best. He was a rather self-contained man, making a lot of striking but self-contained images. (The ones you see here and not necessarily in the book, although The Chinese Coat is). He used his children frequently as models (and also presumably his wife, Gladys) but the book doesn't say who his subjects are. Nor does Nancy Green talk about Phillip's country in Manitoba (along Red River), and then later Alert Bay in British Columbia.
More dubious is Green's failure to discuss Phillip's claim that he discovered colour woodcut all by himself. No doubt, it would be difficult to call what he said into question with the family contributing, and it is just possible to believe, I suppose, that he didn't know the work of the Japanese ukiyo-e masters, but any suggestion that a man so outwardly conventional had been so innovative is far-fetched. For all his neat appearance, and lack of obvious success, he liked to present himself as a pioneer. But if he read one copy of The Studio, as he said he had in 1919, then he surely must have read others, where he would have seen colour woodcuts on a regular basis. It's all rather rum, but almost impossible to disprove.
There are also mistakes in the book, which could easily have been avoided. Getting gallery names in London wrong is the kind of thing a scholar shouldn't do, but that Nancy Green has made a core subject. She also misreads documents, placing Urushibara's studio in Chelsea. (He lived in Notting Hill and Bayswater). It is not as if the ground hasn't been covered before. A biography appeared during Phillip's lifetime, which is the main source for a lot of what we know about his life, and there were also books about him in 1978 and 1981. But this is the first to be made widely available by a publisher and is a must for your bookcase.
