Review: Thomas Bewick Tale-Pieces at Ikon Gallery

With the democratic impulse of distributing information previously ‘confined to the “libraries of the wealthy”, Thomas Bewick used the power of the printing press to produce three illustrated volumes on natural history.  Over two hundred years on, 150 of these engravings are being displayed at the Ikon Gallery, and there are parallels to be made between the motivations behind their original publication, and their exhibiting now.

Bewick’s work is rarely seen in a modern art gallery.  Ikon, pulling his eighteenth-century illustrations from the archives, staking a claim for his re-assessment for the imagined, great timeline of Art History, recalls Bewick’s opening of natural history to the working classes: it grants his work a new audience, a new context.  Its transition to the gallery as a little-known yet fully formed life’s work, makes it something of a novelty.  Magnifying glasses are handed out and the spectator is encouraged to explore surface (though the implication is History).

Each of the seventy, uniform, A4 framed sheets, hung in horizontal sequence throughout the gallery, features two images.  Typically, one larger image floats in the top half of the page, the edges of the engraving dissipating cloudlike into the white.  Below, there is a smaller image: perhaps a detail from the scene depicted above, an ornamental leaf or feather, or something more disjointed.

Bewick’s image archive could be narrowed to one major category of ‘rural life’.  Time passes.  The miniatures pull the spectator to the wall for closer inspection.  (It was remarkable, walking into the exhibition, to see so many people hugging the perimeter of the space, the gallery’s centre-floor wide open.)  In one engraving, a would-be landscape is obliterated by a thumbprint, which gives some indication of the scale.  The thumbprint reveals itself as artifice, an absurdist self-sabotage, as meticulously crafted by Bewick as every other line and marking.

There are children playing, men and horses, pre-industrial social scenes.  A team of local men construct a monumental statue.  However, it is a statue made of snow.  A grand scale snowman.  This can be taken as a commentary from Bewick on ‘the Artist’, a title he hesitated to adopt: man commits energy, skill and spirit into producing a work, even though it is made under the condition that it will melt away.  Bewick’s vignettes are not monumental, but understated, funny, delicate and touching.

Beyond the role of the artist or the drunk, Tale-Pieces is a series that explores the everyday and finds humor at the root of humanity: left to their own devices, people do strange things.  Bewick’s modest anti-art, his play with a precision and skill undone by its subject matter, is another of these strange human acts.  His is the snowman yet to melt.