Eric Gill and the Contemporary

Extract

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1950s Eric Gill was a minor cult figure among Catholics whom I knew. As an apologist, a social, political and aesthetic theoretician rather than anything else. Gill’s lettering in stone was something I had learnt to admire at Ampleforth where Dom Patrick Barry was at that time active in calligraphy and lettering in stone himself. I liked Father Patrick’s work a lot and he introduced me to Gill’s. There was a certain general keenness about Gill at Ampleforth then but I only got to his Letters and Autobiography as an undergraduate. In those days Gill and Maritain and St Thomas and Belloc and Chesterton were good company. In a dilettante, amateur way I enjoyed myself among them. As far as Gill was concerned I was particularly pleased with him and myself for discovering him in his First Nudes and 25 Nudes. I had liked Gill’s apologia in his Autobiography for sensuality in giving proper appreciation to God for His ways in His creation, and I liked his nudes. For all their occasional clumsiness and maladroitness of balance and proportion, I still do. I find it particularly a matter of regret that Gill’s deliberate erotic work is still under so much prurient lock and key at the Victoria and Albert and the British museums. When will the English grow up?

Gill’s more steamy and obsessive side, his sexy nudes and ex- ultance in sensual experience and joys, appealed more to me than to some of my Catholic friends, and than much of his polemic argumentativeness. Some of the more arty side of my family were enthusiasts for Gill’s way of life via personal acquaintanceship with David Jones and I found that rather tedious. Gill began to smack of affectation and moral-art snobbery at about the time I stopped being an undergraduate and went into National Service.