Jocelyn Chewett, Canadian Sculptor (1906-1979)

Leonardo

Jocelyn Chewett, Canadian Sculptor (1906-1979)Author(s): Stephen GilbertSource: Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter, 1983), pp. 56-59Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1575048 .

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Leonardo, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 56-59, 1983 Printed in Great Britain

0024-094X/83/010056-04$03.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd.

JOCELYN CHEWETT, CANADIAN SCULPTOR (1906-1979)

Stephen Gilbert*

Jocelyn Chewett was fortunate in her early life and education. Both were unusual, and, I think, helped her to develop her understanding and adjustment to other people, and finally to express herself in her work as fully and precisely as possible. Her mother had a lasting influence upon her, both while she lived, and after. I shall explain briefly what I know of this first part of Jocelyn Chewett's life, as it seems to have a bearing on her development as an artist.

Her mother was the youngest of five children, and was born in Western Central England, near Ludlow, in 1884. She came from an English county family, in a closed and conventional society, which, during her adolescence, was beginning to lose its meaning. Many of the younger generation wished for a different sort of life, and some thought of Canada. One of the sons from this family emigrated to Vancouver Island. He constructed a log house in the forest, cleared the land round it, and lived the life in the woods in which Thoreau, who had helped to influence his thoughts, believed. Jocelyn Chewett's mother wished to join him, and was able to do so when she came of age. While there she met her future husband, a Canadian, who had come from the East Coast.

Jocelyn Chewett was born in the east of Canada, on a farm, beside the Hudson River, where she remained till she was eight years old. It was in the country, but near to Toronto. She remembered well the severe winters, and sudden spring, with carpets of patica flowers.

In 1913, the Chewett family, with their three daughters, crossed the Atlantic, on a visit to England. The farm at Weston, near Toronto, was temporarily managed by friends. However, the outbreak of war in 1914 forced the family to remain in England. Jocelyn's father died in the course of this war, and her mother in 1924.

While in England, the parents of Jocelyn Chewett continued to live simply, as they had first done in Canada. The family joined a self-supporting community in Berkshire, called the School of Silence, of neo-platonic tendency, which included farming, and where a certain time each day was passed in meditation. The children participated, and also helped with the crops. Jocelyn Chewett always kept this habit of reflection, in particular before the work of another artist.

Jocelyn Chewett and her sisters were brought by their mother to see exhibitions in London, such as those of William Morris or Wyndham Lewis; or to visit the National Gallery. She tried to understand how pictures were composed, and spent more time than the rest of the family on this.

She completed her general studies up to matriculation and, in 1929, went to see Henry Tonks, and was accepted by him as a student at the Slade School. At this time, having lost both parents, she lived in London with one of her sisters, and the next year with a friend she met at the Slade, Ithel Colquhoun, who is now known as an English surrealist. At the Slade School Jocelyn Chewett soon decided to concentrate on sculpture.

*Sculptor, 13 Rue Rambuteau, 75004 Paris, France.

At this point I shall finish speaking of the influences antecedent to her life as an artist. They undoubtedly aided her to develop a part of herself with which she was born, which was a complete acceptance of human nature. These qualities are manifest in her creative work.

Gerard, professor of Sculpture at the Slade School, expected the students to reduce the human form to a schema made from multiple measurements, in a precise structure of wire and wood. The work was completed by gradually building up the form with small pellets of clay. This rather laborious process of modelling suited Jocelyn Chewett, and enabled her at once to feel that she could simplify radically, and yet keep the maximum sensibility. Her first sculptures as a student were made in this way from the life model. She worked for two years with Gerard, and also drew from the model under Henry Tonks, and made a few paintings, for one of which she received an award. She was regarded highly at the Slade School, where she remained from 1927 to 1930. In 1930 she formed a friendship with Stephen Gilbert, at that time a painting student, who came to the Slade in 1929. However, she left alone for Paris in 1931, and resided in France from that date.

When she came to Paris she was uncertain with whom she should continue her studies. She visited Lipchitz, Brancusi, and finally Zadkine. She decided to work in Zadkine's atelier. He already had two students, whereas Brancusi simply said she could work in his atelier, but that he was not a professor. Later on Brancusi asked her why she had not come back.

With Zadkine she started a new technique, stone and wood carving-'taille directe'-which was beginning to be used by sculptors, after a long period of disfavour. She found an atelier at Montparnasse, in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, very close to the rue d'Assas, where Zadkine worked. He took her to buy an excellent range of chisels for stone and wood at a very low cost, which she used all her life.

Jocelyn Chewett worked with Zadkine for over two years. While learning to carve stone and wood, she inevitably used the cubistic mannerisms of her professor. Her production of this period, and some time after, good as it is, appears as an abstracted stylisation of the human form, close to the work of Zadkine.

In 1935 she married Stephen Gilbert, and lived for two years in London, where she gave birth to a son. Her output became somewhat less, though in 1937 she executed a commission of two stone figures for the entrance to a park at Kettering. She was not very satisfied with this work, not having a free hand.

She came back to Paris with her husband and son in 1938, and stayed in France till the outbreak of World War II. The family travelled in the South of France and the Alps, and stayed for some months at Saint Gervais, and at Menton. When the war started in 1939-her husband being exempted from military service-they travelled to Dublin, and remained there till the war ended. Jocelyn Chewett did stone carving while in Ireland, still with traces of cubistic influences (Fig. 1). She knew Evie Hone well, and exhibited frequently in groups in Dublin. She had a second child. She made many friends there, and considered it a happy period of her life.

In 1946 Jocelyn Chewett, with her family, returned to Paris,

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Jocelyn Chewett: Canadian Sculptor

Fig. 2. Untitled, limestone, 59x 16.5x 12.5 cm, 1950. (Sainsbury VisualArt Centre, Norwich, England) (Photo: Francois Walch, Paris).

Fig. 1. 'The Hanged Man', granite, 65.5x 17.5x 12 cm, 1942. (Sainsbury Visual Art Centre, Norwich, England) (Photo: Yves Hervochon, Paris).

to find the conditions of life very much changed. There were restrictions in food, and lodging was very difficult to find. She and her family were obliged to live for five years in one room, in a converted monastery, run as a boarding house, in the rue St. Jacques, la Scola Cantorum. However, for artists, the slate had been wiped clean, and it was a time of expectancy and hope. She became acquainted with many artists in Paris who were thinking in terms of the new abstract movement. She was 40 years old, and prepared.

The Scola Cantorum pension shared, with the school of music beside it, a very large garden, in a corner of which, from 1948, Joceyln Chewett was able to carve her stones. From 1948 to 1951 she exhibited her sculptures in the Salon des Surindependents. In 1952 she showed one of her major pieces at the 6e. Salon de la Jeune Sculpture, Musee Rodin (Fig. 2), a double abstract column, which she called her key pattern. A number of artists and critics remarked about this piece, including Denys Chevalier, Michael Seuphor, Etienne Martin, Herta Wescher, R. Gindertael, and others. The column she exhibited in this salon in 1954 (Fig. 3) with the same sensitive and sibylline

treatment of the carved surfaces, was, in general aspect, even more austere and simplified. This abstract carving, in no sense an abstraction, but based on an abstract idea, was a completely original conception, for which she was partly recognised in the revues and compte-rendus of the time. Thus she concurred in the development of a free unmotivated abstract art. She was among the first to break through to this new art-form, but few others used it with such purity of intention. It expressed exactly her natural self, of which I spoke earlier. It contained her qualities of human acceptance, and at the same time of plastic creation in its most pure state.

She continued on within the limits of this expression. She finally had a reasonable atelier of her own to work in, in 1964. By then she could not make very big carvings. However, the size is not always important. Here she worked for 15 years, and left unfinished a piece she was working on a few weeks before she died.

One can place the work of Jocelyn Chewett [1], between 1950 and 1979, in three main phases: Her first purist phase (Figs. 2-5), exercises on the triangle [1], and the final phase, in which she incorporated the sphere (Fig. 6). She worked with great precision from pre-established measures. To my knowledge, she never discarded a piece, but persisted till she arrived at the result she had first envisaged, rarely making modifications. She searched for the maximum tactile expression in surface treatment. She also made very small rough models in plasticine, to help her envisage the relationship of the forms.

She showed her sculpture frequently in Paris salons, and cultural centres. In 1972 she had a small exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, which passed un-

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Stephen Gilbert

Fig. 3. Untitled, limestone, 72x 14.5x 15.5 cm, 1951. (Sainsbury VisualArt Fig. 5. Untitled, bronze, height 54.5cm, 1972. (Sainsbury Visual Art Centre, Norwich, England) (Photo: Francois Walch, Paris). Centre, Norwich, England) (Photo: Francois Walch, Paris).

Fig. 4. Untitled, limestone, 27.5 x 18.5x 14 cm, 1962. (Sainsbury Visual Art Centre, Norwich, England) (Photo: Francois Walch, Paris).

Fig. 6. Untitled, iroko, 37x 18x 18 cm, 1978. (Sainsbury VisualArt Centre, Norwich, England) (Photo: Francois Walch, Paris).

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Jocelyn Chewett: Canadian Sculptor

noticed. However, at this period, in 1969, and again in 1973, she was invited to show at the Biennale di Carrara. On these two occasions her sculpture was exhibited under the best possible conditions, at the Accademia.

Jocelyn Chewett's first abstract works in 1950 were made when the majority of the abstract artists in Paris were still of the formal school. Free abstraction was, however, gathering way, and would in a few years take over the direction of the Realites Nouvelles. Her work had affinities with the Suprematist school, and also with De Stijl, but anticipated free abstraction in reducing down the stone or wood to forms with sensitive adjustments on the plane surface composing them. For her there was not a brusque change of attitude, but a delicate state of transition from one line of thought to another. This was due to the technique of carving, which had not been used by the previous formal schools of abstraction, and by means of which she was able to take her place in the new school, while retaining many of the qualities of the old.

Her life as an artist in Paris was hard and difficult, but she did not lose her courage. When she at last got an atelier of her own in the Impasse du Rouet, she was 60 years of age. Her husband, the same she married in 1935, also worked there, it being a colony of artists, some well known and others less so, the best known being Vantongerloo, an artist with whom she had affinities,

both in work and attitude. He was celebrated throughout the world as an artist-hermit, but was, in fact, a false hermit, living simply in his studio, and gossiping at the pump with anyone who came. He had a sympathy for her, and she felt he understood what she was doing. She knew him before coming to work here, and was glad to be near an artist with whom she had something in common. Her sculpture had the architectonic qualities of his earlier work. (He had for some time since been working with transparent plastic materials and points of colour.) Jocelyn Chewett did not depart often from her own domain, but I remember once at the Scola Cantorum, after a visit to Denmark, she made, from cut-out silver paper, a small fragile column representing smoke from a cigarette. Asger Jorn happened to come, and was enchanted with this spontaneous effort of hers, which was in line with the Cobra conception of art. For her it was simply a deviation.

REFERENCES

1. A. Grieve and S. Gilbert, Jocelyn Chewett, sculpteur, son oeuvre abstraite, 1949-1979, exh. catalogue. (Paris: Canadian Cultural Centre, 1981). Collection: Norwich Centre for The Visual Arts, England.

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Jocelyn Chewett, Canadian Sculptor (1906-1979)