At Leon Underwood's School of Painting and Sculpture during the mid-ig2os, Gertrude Hermes gravitated towards wood engraving and carving, and worked alongside Henry Moore, Blair Hughes Stanton (her husband for five years) and Eileen Agar.
From 1924 to the 1930s most of Hermes's work was as a wood engraver. She participated in the revival of this art form in Britain between the wars as one of a group of artists who founded the English Wood Engraving Society in 1925. Hermes and a number of her contemporaries saw in it the opportunity of combining the discipline of design and the challenging restrictions of working with wood and ink, with the freedom and imaginative inventiveness of artistic expression. Writing in the Studio in 1930, the critic Maximilien Vox described how English wood engraving was now of 'the highest rank'. His article was illustrated with work by Hermes, and included a number of women artists considered to be at the forefront of new developments in the medium.
Many of Hermes's wood engravings were made as book illustrations, and she produced designs for the Penguin Illustrated Classics, although she preferred to refer to her work in this field as 'decorations'. Hermes often drew upon the natural world for her subject matter, particularly plants and animals. She illustrated T.S. Eliot's Animula (London 1929), Izaak Walton's The Complete Angler (London 1939) and Gilbert White's The Natural History of Seldom (unpublished), among other titles. She shared her predilection for nature with other engravers of the period, such as Agnes Parker Miller, who was one of her fellow exhibitors at an important early exhibition at St George's Gallery in 1928. But she also engaged with the modern world. In Through the Windscreen, a wood engraving of 1926 (Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne), the headlamps of a car illuminate a country road at night, picking out trees and telegraph poles. And her art could also represent violence with vigor. In High Explosive of c.ig26, made to illustrate a privately printed edition of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the contrast of hard geometric lines and billowing curves forcefully evoke an explosion ripping a train apart.
Hermes's sculptures also drew upon her love of nature. She made carvings in wood and stone, and works in bronze, creating horses, rabbits and other animals, and insects such as Moth of 1926, which was included in the exhibition British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981. Hermes was among a number of sculptors working in the 1920s who followed a method close to abstraction, developed from animal forms. Some of her smaller animal pieces also had functions, as doorknockers, letterboxes, hand bells, weather vanes and car mascots. Hermes also became an acclaimed portrait sculptor. She made over fifty such works including portraits of writers, musicians, politicians and children. Among them are sculptures of the poet Kathleen Raine (1954, Tate), and the painter Prunella Clough (1962} with one arm extended as if she were about to start work.
Hermes did not restrict her practice to fine art and illustration. In 1938 she was admitted to the National Register of Industrial Designers. The architectural features she created included a mosaic floor and carved stone fountain for the foyer of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1925 she collaborated with Blair Hughes-Stanton on a mural for the British Pavilion at the World Fair in Paris, and. twelve years later, she designed a thirty-foot sculptured glass window for the International Exhibition of Arts and Industry held there. She made three glass panels for the British Pavilion of the World Fair in New York in 1939. Hermes's work as an engraver had been selected for the Venice Biennale in 1940, but the advent of war meant that it was never sent. Dun: . lie moved to Canada, where . ; as a precision draughtsman shipbuilders, and to New York producing commissions as a designer and engraver, and painting six panels for the British Booth of the Women's Exhibition at Grand Central Palace. Hermes also taught at a number of British art schools.
A regular contributor to group exhibitions including the London Group, the Royal Academy, and the Women's International Art Club. Hermes also had a number of solo shows. Retrospectives were held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1967 and at the Royal Academy in 1981. Elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1963, Hermes was aware that she was the first woman engraver whose work had been recognized in this way. And is reported to have remarked, 'Shame on them.'
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