JOHN BANTING, (1902-1972)

Fish portrait

Fish portrait; with four other works
mixed media on paper
21 x 13.3 cm (8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in). (and similar)
In four frames, one double-sided (4)

We are grateful to Dr. Silvano Levy for compiling this catalogue entry.

John Banting became part of the Bloomsbury set in 1925 and made designs for Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. His leftist political leanings led him to form a relationship with Nancy Cunard whose politics he adopted. With Cunard, Banting made a stand against racial prejudice and the two went to Spain during the Civil War for three months to witness the devastation wreaked by the Nationalists. Banting was drawn towards Surrealism and was invited by Marcel Duchamp to contribute to the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, in Paris in 1938.

The works offered here reveal the two facets of Banting's work. On the one hand he demonstrates a playful take on the minutiae of the natural world – the analogy between the patterns formed by the scales of fish and the marbling of book endpapers, the faces that can be imagined in the forms of a seashell. On the other hand, he portrays Nature as imbued with potential aggression and malevolence. Skulls, for him, lay bare the violent natural weaponry that lies just below the seemingly innocuous facades of both animals and humans. The confrontation in one of the works here is between a humanoid and an ovine. Each bears its threatening sharp teeth at the other. Banting saw Fascism and National Socialism as similarly intrinsically belligerent.