John Armstrong

(British, 1893-1973)

Composition (The Musical Machine) 53.6 x 34 cm. (21 1/8 x 13 3/8 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired by the grandfather of the present owner prior to 1980
Thence by descent
Private Collection, U.K.

Hitherto unrecorded, Composition – The Musical Machine is the climax of a modern and highly individual analysis commenced in Armstrong's first show in 1928 at The Leicester Galleries – a dual exhibition with work by Matisse. Immediate critical and commercial success propelled Armstrong to the front rank of "modernist" British artists of the time. Armstrong's work combined fashionable themes of colour, music, adventure, exoticism and dreams with a very personal synthesis of contemporary and historical influences. The present work is an exciting addition to Armstrong's canon, one of a rare but significant number of geometrical compositions the artist executed from 1927-1929.

Largely self-taught and untouched by any major art school or grouping of fellow artists, Armstrong's invention is only obliquely indebted to Vorticism or Cubism. His 1920s creations originate from very personal passions; the Classics, Italian masters, and architecture, made modern through the vitality of expression of performing arts such as ballet. The critic Anthony Bertram wrote in "The Studio" of his 1928 show: "Mr. Armstrong is triumphantly original. His work is so clearly marked off from that of every other painter as to justify us in hailing him a master, by which I mean to imply nothing more exaggerated than that he stands on his own feet, he creates a world as distinctly his as those of Watteau, Fra Angelico, or Giorgione were distinctly theirs, and like theirs Mr. Armstrong's is a world of fantasy".

Structures of parallel and intersecting planes progress in these early works from being architectural surrounds (The Blue Bath, formerly coll. Edgar Astaire, and The Somnabulist, formerly coll. Sir Stephen and Lady Winifred Tumim) to the entirely constructivist (The Bird, formerly coll. Peyton Skipwith); the present work being the culminating expression of this theme. Constructivism had barely touched British easel painting of the period and perhaps this, in combination with the dream-like visions, catalyzed the acclamation of Armstrong in London as a leading modernist.

Armstrong was a devoted enthusiast of ballet, especially the Ballets Russes, and as an emergent designer he will have been aware of Antoine Pevsner's radical costumes for 'La Chatte' of 1926-7. The use of Constructivist principle to elaborate optical movement and rhythmic form will have resonated with him, and he is unique in developing this concept in British painting.

Composition – The Musical Machine is most definitely not a work of flat cubism or abstraction. Rather as with Naum Gabo's Constructed Head, no 2' (coll. Tate), Armstrong employs "the rhythmic organization of space through the disposition and interlocking of precisely defined planes to produce an image of dynamic force"(Herbert Read, "Modern Sculpture", 1964, p.96, writing of the sculpture of Naum Gabo), with such success that the music he portrays is almost audible. It is no coincidence that in The Spectator's review of Armstrong's 1929 Leicester Galleries exhibition, which included a later, larger version of this composition (The Musical Machine 1928, untraced, Armstrong catalogue raisonee no. 51, ill.), G.G. wrote "In all his work Mr Armstrong lays such stress on the third dimension that it would be interesting to see him turn his hand to sculpture."

We are grateful to Jonathan Gibbs for compiling this catalogue entry.