Joash Woodrow
Photographed by John Angerson
for the Sunday Times,
December 2004

Self Portrait
Oil on board circa 1960 / 65
40.7 x 30.5cm

White Jug with Red Flowers
Oil on canvas, circa 1970/75
31.8 x 21.5cm

Allotments
Oil on board, circa 1980
73 x 61.2cm

Gilbert Looking Down
Oil on sackcloth, circa 1960/65
72 x 61cm

White Goat
Oil on sackcloth, circa 1965
87 x 74cm

White Picket Fences
Oil on board, circa 1975
125 x 124cm

Joash Woodrow Retrospective

Covering all periods of his development from the 1940's through to the 1990's.

SUMMARY

Joash Woodrow was a student at the RCA 1950 - 53 where he was considered to be one of their most promising students. Following a nervous breakdown in 1955 he returned to the family home in Leeds where he lived a very reclusive lifestyle, creating over 5,000 works in isolation. Following a house-fire in 1999 and with his health rapidly declining he was moved to sheltered accommodation in Manchester. His work came to light through a series of bizarre coincidences in 2001 and since 2003 his work has attracted international attention.

Sinde the re-discovery of Joash's work the collection has been fully catalogued and an ongoing programme of conservation is nearing completion.

A highly successful exhibition of Joash’s landscape paintings was held at Leeds City Art Gallery in 2004. Since then major retrospective exhibitions have been held at Manchester Art Gallery, the Ben Uri, London Jewish Museum of Art, the Royal College of Art, and Leeds Metropolitan University. Exhibitions of his works on paper have been held at Whitby Art Gallery, Hull University Art Gallery and Liverpool University Art Gallery

BACKGROUND DETAILS

A lifetimes collection of paintings, drawings and sculpture by Joash Woodrow came to light following a fire at his home in 1999. Until then only his close family were aware of his paintings and the work was never discussed or seen by others.

Born in Leeds, Joash was one of seven sons and two daughters. His father and mother were of Polish background, marrying in Boston, USA. On moving to Leeds his father worked as a Hebrew scholar and bookseller before finally moving into the textile trade. Several of the children became distinguished academics, with Julius employed for many years as a nuclear scientist at Harwell research laboratories and Joseph becoming a Professor of Medicine in Liverpool. Initially educated in Leeds at Lovell Road School and Cowper Street School, Joash began his artistic training at Leeds College of Art after which he served in the army as a cartographer-Egypt 1945 - 1948.

Between 1950 - 1953 Joash studied drawing and painting at the Royal College of Art, his fellow students and friends including Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake and the novelist Len Deighton. Testimonials from his RCA lecturers Ruskin Spear, Carel Weight and Robert Buhler all describe the artist as having considerable talent, maturity and individuality with a unique style; Rodrigo Moynihan stating that “His painting has a mature richness of colour and expression. He is immensely serious and hard working and, I feel, will be among the few students who will make a name for himself....”

Shortly after leaving the Royal College of Art in 1953 he returned to Leeds where with the support of his family he could fully immerse himself in his painting. For nearly 50 years Joash worked incessantly and alone, showing little interest in having his work seen by others. Following the death of his mother in 1962 and his brother Israel in 1978 his entire life became totally consumed with work, making art from anything and everything that came to hand. Every room in his house became a work space with virtually all of his furniture broken up to be re-created as pieces of sculpture. Using roof tiles, his piano, chairs, window frames, and many other household pieces of furniture and fittings Joash surrounded himself completely with his art. The paintings themselves were often executed on any basic materials that came to hand - from coal and potato sacks to cornflake packets and advertising boards. His own vast collection of art books surrounded him as he painted.

Some 720 paintings and four thousand drawings were found standing in tightly stacked piles, much of the work covered in soot from the fire, others patinated with the yellow layer of nicotine from his regular pipe smoking. Joash had more often than not stacked one painting on top of another while still wet causing them to eventually bond together or in some cases to bear the impressions of the last painting to be stacked on top. These images had obviously not been seen by the artist or anyone else for 30 years or more, his frantic workload dictating that the next painting was all important, with little time for reflection on his previous works.

In 1999 Joash’s increasingly poor health deteriorated and he was moved to sheltered accommodation in Manchester where he loived until his death in 2006.

Recent Comments

Danny Padmore. Writer and musician. Joash painted three portraits of Danny, circa 1965.

“In the quiet intimacy of our sessions together all those years ago, I felt, however instinctively, something real and meaningful. Amidst the superficiality of my own young and foolish student days, the brief meeting with Joash represented a signpost nudging me in the direction of a more honest, open and committed path.”

Commenting on Joash’s ‘Images of Leeds’ exhibition at Leeds City Art Gallery:

“…I was stunned into silence. Prosaic scenes of factories, warehouses, garden sheds and allotments were bathed in a translucent Mediterranean kind of light, magically transforming the mundane subject matter into items of rare poetic beauty. In some ways you felt inclined to believe the canvas had been lit from behind, such was the brilliance and power of Joash’s  colour.

The apparent primitive, child-like boldness of design and colour could not disguise the underlying sense of sophistication and techniques in the work. It was as if Joash had to some extent, put to one side, or perhaps relegated, his considerable learning and technique in order to free the work. The power and luminous intensity seemed to come from his‘unlearning’.”

Nicholas Usherwood       Writer, art critic, curator. Editor of Galleries magazine: previously exhibitions curator at the Royal Academy of Art and Keeper of Exhibitions at the British Museum. (June 2002)

“ ...a story which when told in full will, I believe come to be seen as marking the emergence of a previously unacknowledged and quite astonishingly powerful and creative intelligence in post – war British art.

...the overriding sensation is of the entirely distinctive and individual ‘voice’ that emerges out of each and every work.

...this is no isolated eccentric but, rather, an artist who knew exactly what he was after and, when he found it, retreated into a self – imposed and intensely painful imaginative exile in order to explore it without disturbance, a world complete and entire in itself.”

(The Times newspaper, May 19, 2003.) “It is very rare to discover a body of work that is so rich. I was knocked sideways when I first saw the paintings.”

The Globe, Canada, May 2003) “At the moment, people are trying to find art that is powerful. We have an empty, sort of ironic, art. Then you come across this, something so engaging and people are looking for that.

John  Russell Taylor. Art critic (The Times newspaper, May 19, 2003.)

“….from what we can see of the examples already released this elected isolation from the art world seems to have done him nothing but good, artistically speaking.…..landscapes in bright colours that suggest, perhaps, classic German Expressionism; and bold, voracious-looking semi – abstracts that appear to parallel in two dimensions the work Eduardo Paolozzi was doing at about the same time in three. One cannot help wondering whether, if he had stayed connected, Woodrow would have turned out half so original and unpredictable.”

Phillip Vann (July 2004)

Author of numerous catalogue essays on modern British and European painters and sculptors. Regular contributor to  ‘RA’,  ‘The Economist’, etc.

Recent books include a monograph on the artist Dora Holzhandler  and ‘Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century’.

“At the first Joash Woodrow exhibition in Harrogate in May 2002, I recall the sensation of

magical discovery that here was an artist of exceptional talent.…... the tremendous scope of his work was at once clear, and the recently-published book on the artist has helped clarify for me the many facets, and the essential nature, of his gift.

……picket-fenced allotments and industrial buildings – which seem to shimmer and vibrate with a rare and poignant poetry; painted and collaged art book pages which display a delightfully original, most cultivated wit; a few assemblages of found objects whose bare simplicity haunts and enchants.

 One thing is clear: Woodrow’s unique voice – delicate, quizzical, elusive, full of oblique humour yet somehow impressively self-assured – runs through all that he painted, made

and drew.”

Derrick Greaves ( extract form a letter to Nicholas Usherwood, January 2004). Painter and printmaker

“Many of the paintings are, of course, unquestionable triumphs and many of them hint at deep sensitivities even though one would think that the oversized brushes in such optimistic attack would seem to preclude such subtleties”

Glyn Hughes (August 2004) 

Writer, poet and playwright.  Published numerous novels and several collections of poetry.  Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize.

“When I saw them, in Leeds City Art Gallery and at 108 Fine Art, what swept me away, besides the constant excitement and dash – it never seemed to have deserted him throughout his eccentric life – was the visionary brilliance. There was something akin to Van Gogh, in that each picture gave one the sensation of having scales removed from ones eyes; of seeing for the first time (even if it occurs time after time, in picture after picture) the world in its beauty, as it truly is.

……and some of that output is likely to stand with the best of English art of the past century.

…….There was perfection without adulteration, and if he had not been so totally removed from the Art Scene, by his nature and especially his inability to face rejection, he could not have achieved it.”