Back in London in mid-1950, Denis Williams (1923 – 1998) continued to paint. With the assistance of his friend, artist and art critic Wyndham Lewis, he secured gallery support for his work. Consequently, before the year was out Williams was exhibiting in London once again. In December 1950, Williams exhibited at the Gimpel Fils Gallery, in Mayfair, London. On this occasion, he showed oil paintings based on ‘The Plantation’ series he had done in Guiana alongside two finished paintings he had shown here in 1949 to an unreceptive audience – Origins and Burden or Release. Additionally, he showed a quartet of related paintings done in tempera (an egg yolk base medium) and oil which he had grouped under the title Four Dimensions of Anguish. They included Hysteria, Securities, Human World, and The Subway World.
Williams’s exhibition received favourable reviews in London and was referred to across the Atlantic Ocean, although with echoes of racialised biases. His painting Human World was featured on the cover of the art section of Time Magazine, not the cover of the magazine itself as has often been repeated in the largely oral account of Guyana’s art history. Needless to say, this was a significant accomplishment for any artist, though the Time article “Newcomer from Guiana” from December 18, 1950, was tinged with racism and ethno-cultural chauvinism. In the article the writer wrote, “When [Williams] returned to England last May, he began sprawling his new ideas on huge canvases, with the jagged outlines of modern cities and the twisting vegetable forms of the tropics, using ‘that atavistic something’ of the primitive artist to illustrate such super-civilized symbols as The Mystic Marriage and Human World.” In other words, this artist from a supposed uncivilised locale was daring to deal with heady civilised notions. Thus, the clear implication was that the plight of humanity and concern for the psycho-social dislocation of a migrant population was somehow not to be expected of an artist with Williams’s skin and from the far flung “jungles of […], British Guiana”.
Nonetheless, news of Williams’s accomplishment was shared in Guiana. Philip Veira, Vice-President of the Guianese Art Group did so in a December issue of The Daily Chronicle. In his article titled ‘‘Time’ Story on BG Artist, Denis Williams Achieves Fame in England” he announced the possibility of a Williams painting being acquired by the Tate for its hallowed halls, quoted from the Time story, and offered some insight into the efforts a more youthful Williams had made to achieve the success he was then enjoying at the age of 27. Alongside Viera’s article, colleague-artist of the Art Group Hubert Moshett shared a testimonial from Lewis. The testimonial titled “Denis Among Six Most Promising Young Br. Painters,” eloquently put a finger on the perennial issues for artists in both British Guiana and later independent Guyana. Lewis feared that without the opportunity to further his studies in art and time and space to paint to amass a body of work to exhibit overseas, Williams would languish in a civil servant post in the Colony. No doubt Lewis’s testimonial was written before Williams’s return to London but was shared publicly at this later time. Lewis also indicated a willingness to provide further testimonials to aid Williams’s progress.
Preceding The Daily Chronicle features, Lewis in his December 7, 1950 review of Williams’s exhibition wrote in the magazine The Listener, “With [Human World] we emerge a little from the jungle. The central figure is again a pregnant woman, standing, by reason of her condition, for the way out, for the new regenerate mankind. On her right is a clergyman. He does not see her: he is supposed to be insensitive to all without, not part of his doctrinal dream. On the other side is an average young woman presumably immersed in being an average young woman. As if this obtuseness on either side were not enough, to the extreme left is a blind man, who is of course past caring. So in this case we see pregnancy encompassed by human obtuseness. It must be noticed that although these figures are supposed to be in a street, they are unrealistically lined up across the canvas, each displaying his or her individual symbol. All the realistic machinery is dispensed with. It is a parade of symbols”. The Listener was a BBC weekly publication that was published until 1991.
Very likely because of Lewis’s undeniable public support for Williams but certainly due to the excitement generated by the work’s presence in Time Magazine, Human World was bought by public subscription and brought to Guiana to be added to works already being acquired for a British Guiana National Art Collection. The work joined Portrait of Peter and Self-portrait with a Towel (see Eye on Art July 2 and 9) in being acquisitions for this national project.
Human World, is easily recognised as a chronicle of post-war London when West Indians and others from across the British Empire were invited by the British government to emigrate to the ‘Mother Country’ to aid in its rebuilding. Substantially bombed out and with a loss of population, Britain was without adequate workers to fuel the rebuild. Although Williams returned to London during this early wave of West Indian immigration, his motivation was to fuel his artistic career. Despite returning to Britain, his aspirations appear to have been for a career closer to home in North America (the United States or Mexico) and this sentiment was endorsed by Lewis. Thus, Williams in a sense was able to observe the experiences of fellow West Indians who were simultaneously economic migrants – seeking a better life and opportunities as they toiled in the rebuilding of Britain. Human World with its congestion of human bodies in its fore and middle ground and buildings in its background records a gloomy existence of isolation, fragmentation of self, and disillusion experienced by the West Indian newcomers. Human World can thus be seen as a beautiful forerunner of Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.
I conclude as Williams’s journey as an artist is on the verge of taking him away from figuration to embrace hard-edge mathematical abstraction and to African destinations before his return to Guyana. My intention over the last few weeks has been to introduce Williams to students of art and thus I will conclude this lengthy but worthwhile introduction next week.
Akima McPherson is a multimedia artist, art historian, and educator.
