Michael Ayrton

Michael Ayrton, who was born as Michael A. Gould ( born February 20, 1921 in St. Pancras / London, † November 17, 1975 in Hampstead / London ) was a British painter, printmaker, sculptor and writer. Artistically he is assigned to a expressionist -influenced surrealism; at times he was designated as representative of the Neuromantizismus (English neo- romanticism ).

Life

Michael A. Gould was the son of the artist Gerald Gould (1885-1936) and the Labour Party politician and later MPs Barbara Ayrton (1886-1950), whose birth name he took over when his father died. He was married to Elizabeth Evelyn Walshe (1910-1991) and lived in Toppesfield, Essex.

Ayrton made ​​in his youth traveled extensively to France, Italy and Greece. A trip to Barcelona as a 14- year-old during the Spanish Civil War in 1935/36 was mild, as he was quickly brought back by his mother and was sent to a cousin to Vienna. There he made ​​his first art experience at the Albertina in Vienna, where he studied the Old Masters Drawings and copied. After the Anschluss, he returned to England; there he attended various art schools: Heatherley School of Fine Art and St John 's Wood Art School. In 1939 he had a studio in Paris with John Minton, with whom he studied under Eugene Berman and 1942 in London exhibited together. Occasionally Ayrton also worked in the Paris studio of Giorgio de Chirico.

Ayrton was sickly from childhood, and so looked at him during the Second World War, the Royal Air Force shortly after the convening again. From 1942 he worked for two years as an art teacher at the Camberwell School of Art, before he started in 1944 as an art critic at the Spectator, and began to write a series of essays and art history books. He worked as stage sets and primarily as a book illustrator, so for Wyndham Lewis The Human Age trilogy and William Golding. His own and illustrated his own book Tittivulus Or The Verbiage Collector is about the struggle of a devil with the words. He also worked with Constant Lambert. In the late 1950s he began under the influence of Henry Moore sculpture. In the 1960s, he studied with the Minotaur myth, wrote a novel, The Maze Maker and produced a variety of sculptures, paintings and drawings on this, Daedalus and Icarus and other themes of the ancient mythology.

Works

  • Jupiter and Antiope, 1940, pen and ink drawing
  • Fête Champêtre 1940 /41, drawing and gouache
  • The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1942/43, oil on wood,
  • Skull Vision, 1943, oil on wood
  • Minotaur in 1968/ 69, Bronze Sculpture

Writings (selection )

  • British Drawing. London: Collins 1946
  • Aspects of British Art London: Collins 1947
  • Tittivulus or The verbiage collector. London: Max Reinhardt, 1953
  • The Maze Maker: a novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1967
  • Wyndham Lewis, 1882-1957. Michael Ayrton, b. 1921st National Book League ( Great Britain ) 1971
Talos Cambridge Yorkshire Sculpture Park National Portrait Gallery (London) Integrated Authority File
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