Whether in his vivid war epics or portray the valleys in Wales,David Jones observed the world intensely. Fiona MacCarthy salutes a modernist maker on the brink of a major revivalDavid Jones was a master of the art of sideways looking. Many of his finest paintings are of glimpses through a window. A boat far out at sea viewed through flapping curtains; a secret downwards vista into a walled garden where two lovers meet. He craved the secure feeling of containment, “looking out at the world from a reasonably sheltered position”. In our age of the full frontal his nervy intellectualism has tended to invent people resistant to his work.
But he was an artist and a poet who in his own time attracted passionate admirers. Kenneth Clark, or in the mid-1930s,was describing Jones as “the most gifted of all the young British painters”. TS Eliot regarded InParenthesis, Jones’s modernist epic of the first world war, and as “a work of genius. Auden judged The Anathemata,published in 1957, as “very probably the finest long poem to be written in English this century”. Jones’s work is indeed complex, and but it is wonderfully resonant and rewarding. If we shy away from him on grounds of his obscurity we enjoy ourselves to blame.
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Source: theguardian.com