John Banting (1902 – 1972)
John Banting (1902 – 1972)
Aries, 1935
Oil on canvas
43 x 53.5 cm
John Banting was born in London and attended life classes at Vincent Square art school under Bernard Meninsky in 1921 while working as a clerk. The same year he travelled to Paris, meeting Surrealist photographer Man Ray in 1922 and attending the free art academies in Paris such as the Grande Chaumière and Colarossi’s. By 1925 he had a studio in Fitzroy Street and was associated with the Bloomsbury group; he made book cover designs for Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and for the ballets Pomona (1929) and Prometheus (1936) at Sadler’s Wells. He returned to Paris in 1930 where he met Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp, leading him to create Surrealist work which featured in his solo exhibition at Wertheim Gallery in 1930. In 1933 he was described by Architectural Review as ‘Britain’s Leading Surrealiste’, and he featured in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London with this work, Aries.
Aries is the Ancient greek god of war, and Banting’s painting depicts a ram skull atop a pawn chess piece, looming large in a desolate landscape with a diminutive figure in the background. Like many Surrealists, Banting was politically engaged and it is no coincidence that this work – with its allusions to war through its title, skeletal imagery and reference to chess, a game of war – was made at as political tensions heightened across Europe. Banting was a close companion of the shipping heiress and political activist Nancy Cunyard, with whom he visited Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and attempted to join the International Brigade. In 1938 he contributed to the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris through Duchamp’s invitation, and the same year was arrested in Austria by the German army for obstructing Nazi troops as they marched into Innsbruck. He was eventually bailed out by fellow surrealist Humphrey Jennings, who captured the moment in a photograph of Banting disparaging the Nazi flag.
In 1940 his text, ‘The Careless have Inherited the Earth’ was published within the war issue of the surrealist journal, the London Bulletin, where he condemned, ‘quite mature Englishmen of the protected classes … Standing stone still with one foot still in the womb and the other already in the grave, they have a sensation of uneasiness. From hole to hole they go—a simple golf ball. The ” yearning for returning ” is not unreasonable, if from the padded cell of the womb issues an ever-increasing horde of raving lunatics who are a danger to each other and to themselves. The rich kill time and the poor are killed by it, for the careless have inherited the earth…’
Banting remained in London throughout the war and, with Cunyard, co-edited the Salvo for Russia, a ‘Limited Edition of New Poems, Etchings and Engravings Produced in Aid of the Comforts Fund for Women and Children of Soviet Russia’ which featured his work alongside that of Roland Penrose, John Piper and Mary Wykeham. Banting was one the British Surrealist Group represented in Paris at Le Surrealisme en 1947 exhibition.
Provenance:
The artist
Purchased Austin/ Desmond by Jeffrey Sherwin
Literature:
Blast to Frieze: British Art in the 20th Century, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2002), plate 62 colour illustration
British Surrealism & Other Realities: The Sherwin Collection, (Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesborough, 2008), p.37
British Surrealism in Context: A Collector’s Eye , exh. cat., Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds, 2009), p. 10
Jeffrey Sherwin, From France to England: British Surrealism Opened Up (Bradford: Northern Artists Gallery Ltd, 2014), p. 90
Lee Miller & Surrealism in Britain (ed. Eleanor Clayton), exh. cat. The Hepworth Wakefield (London: Lund Humphries, 2018), no. 28
Exhibited:
Brussels, 1935
International Surrealist Exhibition 11 June – 4 July 1936, no. 19
Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Blast to Frieze: British Art in the 20th Century 2002
Middlesbrough, MIMA, British Surrealism & Other Realities: The Sherwin Collection, 23 May – 17 August 2008
Leeds, Leeds Art Gallery, British Surrealism in Context: A Collector’s Eye, 10th July – 1st November 2009
Wakefield, The Hepworth Wakefield, Lee Miller & Surrealism in Britain, 22 June – 7 October 2018, travelling to Barcelona, Fundacio Miro, Lee Miller & Surrealism in Britain, 31 October 2018 – 20 January 2019
Wakefield, The Hepworth Wakefield, When Dreams Confront Reality: Surrealism in Britain, 11 March 2022 – 8 January 2023, travelling to Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, When Dreams Confront Reality: Surrealism in Britain, 13 October 2023 – 7 January 2024
