Anthony Gross Click here to see a selection of works by Anthony Gross
from the website of the Imperial War Museum, London
Quotes about Anthony Gross CBE RA
‘Gross is garrulous. He has a hundred little remarks to make and, like so many good talkers, he makes them effectively and sometimes, as though by accident, unforgettable. In fact, his drawings resemble nothing so much as first-rate descriptive letters from abroad, written by a man bubbling with excitement at his experiences. They are discursive, full of little underlinings and parentheses. A sudden emphasis on a detail arrests your attention: a charming irrelevance lights up the scene: an afterthought gives it a new twist. They are elusive, even disjointed, yet they have a vividness and a unity that only comes when a man really has something to say.’
Eric Newton reviewing Gross’s exhibition India in Action in The Sunday Times 1943.
(This was a one-man exhibition of Gross’s work from India which took place at the National Gallery in 1943. It then toured Australia and North America)
‘It is clear beyond dispute that Gross was a classic example both of the painter-etcher and of the Anglo-French artist. Equally at home, in both cases, with each half of the role, in each case he continuously interpreted the one culture to the other. His work unites an English love of human colour and of the particular with the sensuousness of a French response to the artist’s materials and to the pleasures of living. An extraordinarily lively observer, he made infectious through his work his joy in the round of activities of everyday life, in both town and country. At the same time, while not attempting to map the precise minutiae of observed appearance, he evoked the reality of the landscape, its cultivation and plants, its rocks and water, with a more telling essential accuracy than most botanical or topographical artists. Whether treating human life or wider nature, he combined in each work a sense of affirmative immediate response and one of an age-long continuity.’
Richard Morpet (Keeper of the Modern Collection at The Tate Gallery, London)
As published in ‘Anthony Gross’
Edited by Mary and Peter Gross and published by Scolar Press, 1992 |
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