445 | Crellin: Jonathan Black by Sarah Crellin
https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2024.33.3.06
Jonathan Black MA PhD FRSA FRHistS, 1966–2023
It was sad and shocking to learn of Jonathan Black’s sudden death from the obituary in The Times last August.1 Many who knew and worked with him shared this experience. Writing about people in the past tense is the historian’s metier, but it is melancholy to apply biographical dates to a friend and colleague. A character like Jonathan does not leave an easy trail, so in preparing this piece I have, as he would have insisted, done the archive research and talked to friends and colleagues, aiming to capture something of the man and set him and his work in context.
Jonathan read history and art history at St John’s College, Cambridge.
An undergraduate interest in wine led to employment in the trade, and for several years he was a marketing manager for the champagne house Pol Roger, until he began a PhD with David Bindman at University College London (UCL) in 1998. His thesis examined the construction of masculinities in portrayals of the WWI British Tommy by C. R. W. Nevinson, and the sculptors Eric Kennington and Charles Sargeant Jagger.2 By the time he was awarded his degree in 2003, Jonathan had already curated an exhibition of Kennington’s graphic art3 and published a monograph, The Sculpture of Eric Kennington, for the British Sculpture and Sculptors Series (BSS).4
I first met him at a conference on ‘War, Art and Medicine’ at UCL in late 2002; I had just published an essay about the First World War work of Francis Derwent Wood in this journal, and we had interests in common from then on.5 Jonathan and I were fortunate to be part of an intellectual milieu supported and encouraged by Penelope Curtis and Tim Llewellyn at the Henry Moore Institute (HMI) from the late 1990s. As Curtis reflected in 2014, they wanted the BSS to expand the historical understanding of the British sculptural context, and so advertised for titles and authors.6 Jonathan’s Kennington volume was the first of several in the series that examined the careers of soldier-sculptors and interwar figurative artists.7
The early 2000s were particularly innovative and productive for sculpture studies, with a new two-volume history of sculpture in twentieth-century Britain involving numerous authors published by the HMI in 2003,8 the revision and rewriting of sculptors’ lives for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in 2004, and the instigation of the AHRC Mapping Sculpture project 2005–07.9 It was stimulating to be in that cohort of sculpture scholars.
At the time, Jonathan described his interests as ‘visual modernism and military history’, and the work of Nevinson, Wadsworth, the Vorticists, Kennington and Gaudier Brzeska were his principal subjects,10 but a new
446 | Sculpture Journal 33.3 [2024]
element was added when he became the AHRC Research Fellow at Kingston University, working on the Dora Gordine archive and collection at Dorich House Museum between 2004 and 2006. This project generated a substantial book,11 and a major retrospective exhibition of Gordine’s work in 2009 that went on tour with Jonathan to Tallinn in 2012. In the meantime, there was another exhibition and text on Kennington, and a book on Nevinson was in the pipeline.12 Jonathan’s prolific output continued throughout the rest of his career, and he remained a Senior Research Fellow at Kingston. Writing about the house and collection of a Kingston University benefactor followed,13 in parallel with his next major sculpture research project on Ivor Roberts-Jones.14
It was around this time that Jonathan’s studies expanded into the broader field of art and its place in the history of Britain during and between the two world wars. In 2017 he curated and wrote the catalogues for exhibitions on the art of Sir Oswald Birley,15 and the British army in Italy in the First World War.16 His exhibition Alfred Munnings, War Artist, 1918, at the National Army Museum in 2019, was discussed during an ‘evening of talks and wine’ between Jonathan and Brough Scott, the racing commentator and co-author of the accompanying book.17 Writing the majority of the book and catalogue raisonné of the work of Ivor Roberts-Jones (1913–96) must have suited Jonathan well. His fascination with the political, military and socially powerful figures who shaped and were shaped by the turbulent history of the twentieth century is amply demonstrated in the meticulous biographical details of Roberts-Jones’s eminent sitters and subjects for monuments.
None was more famous than Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), whose statue in Parliament Square was unveiled in 1973. It seems fitting that Churchill, whose life and career spanned and united so many of Jonathan’s interests, and whose image was captured in so many forms – from grand manner portraits to scurrilous cartoons – was the subject of his last major publication.18 We shared an interest in Clare Sheridan, Churchill’s sculptor cousin. The book was well received and Jonathan’s reputation as a major scholar of war art was secure.19 It is poetic and pleasing that Pol Roger was Churchill’s favourite champagne.
For Jonathan, the archive was the fons et origo of his work, and real-world historical context was vital. His narrative historiography and lucid storytelling might sometimes raise questions from his audience or readers, but his clarity, human feeling, avoidance of jargon and theoretical fashion provides a broad and authoritative articulation of often neglected or unexamined material, permitting others to use his work to stimulate and propose answers to those questions. At the end of his life Jonathan was a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
He had been on the editorial advisory board of Sculpture Journal and was a trustee of the Public Statues and Sculpture Association.
A connoisseur of wine, coffee and good food, Jonathan was a charming, sociable but private man. People who admired and were fond of him, despite working and socializing with him, could still find him elusive. That was his prerogative. He would chortle (a very Jonathan verb), I think, to be described in Churchillian terms as ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’.20 Yet his work teems with human sympathy and people whose interconnections, appropriately for his scholarly passions, would make a lively interwar cocktail party.
Jonathan’s sculptural interest was, at heart, chiefly in the artists who portrayed the great political and military figures of two world wars. He empathized with the ordinary Tommy, depicted and represented by Kennington and Jagger – soldier-artists who shared the life of the poor bloody infantry and created some of the most impressive memorials of the First World War. Let us ring the passing bell for Jonathan and say we will remember him.
1. All publications lised in the notes are by Jonathan Black unless otherwise attributed. Obituary, The Times, 23 August 2023. Jonathan Black was born on 3 December 1966 and died of a heart attack on 14 April 2023.
2. ‘“Neither beasts, nor gods, but men.” Constructions of Masculinity and the Image of the Ordinary British Soldier or ‘Tommy’ in the First World War Art of: C R W Nevinson (1889–1946); Eric Henri Kennington (1888–1960) and Charles Sargeant Jagger (1885–1934)’, unpub.
PhD thesis, UCL, 2003.
3. The Graphic Art of Eric Kennington (exh. cat.), College Art Collections, University College London, Strang Print Room, UCL, October–December 2001.
4. The Sculpture of Eric Kennington, Aldershot, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 2002.
5. S. Crellin, ‘Hollow men: the masks and memorials of Francis Derwent Wood 1915–1925’, Sculpture Journal, 6, 1, 2001, pp. 89–99.
6. P. Curtis, ‘Lund Humphries landmarks: British Sculptors and Sculpture Series (1991–)’, 11 November 2014, https://www.lundhumphries.com/blogs/features/54764932-lund- humphries-landmarks-british-sculptors-and-sculpture-series-1991, accessed 7 March 2024.
7. C. Moriarty, The Sculpture of Gilbert Ledward, Aldershot, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 2003; A. Compton, The Sculpture of Charles Sargeant Jagger, Aldershot, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 2004; S. Crellin, The Sculpture of Charles Wheeler, Aldershot, Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 2012.
8. P. Curtis et al. (eds), Sculpture in 20th-Century Britain, 2 vols, Leeds, Henry Moore Institute, 2003.
9. The database Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain & Ireland 1851–1951 was initiated by Ann Compton, who led the project with Alison Yarrington and others. It is hosted by Glasgow University and can be found online at sculpture.gla.ac.uk (accessed March 2024).
10. For example, Blasting the Future! Vorticism in Britain, 1910–1920, London, Philip Wilson, 2004; Form, Feeling and Calculation: The Paintings and Drawings of Edward Wadsworth, London, Philip Wilson, 2005; as well as several articles and chapters cited in J. Black and B. Martin, Dora Gordine: Sculptor, Artist, Designer, London, Philip Wilson, 2008.
11. Black and Martin, as at note 10.
12. The exhibition took place at the Royal Air Force Museum, London, in 2011. The Face of Courage: Eric Kennington, Portraiture and the Second World War, London, Philip Wilson, 2011; C.R.W Nevinson: The Complete Prints, Aldershot, Lund Humphries, 2014.
13. Black contributed substantially to a book on the home of the Kingston University art benefactor, Stanley Picker: J. Black, D. Falkner, F. Fisher, F. Lloyd, R. Preston and P. Sparke (eds), The Picker House and Collection: A Late 1960s Home for Art and Design, London, Philip Wilson, 2013.
14. J. Black and S. Ayres, Abstraction and Reality: The Sculpture of Ivor Roberts-Jones, London, Philip Wilson, 2013. Ayres was a Kingston colleague who contributed a chapter to the book.
15. Power and Beauty: The Art of Sir Oswald Birley, Philip Mould Gallery, Pall Mall, September–October 2017.
16. War in the Sunshine, Estorick Collection, London, 2017.
17. J. Black and B. Scott, Alfred Munnings: Memory, the War Horse and the Canadians in 1918, London, National Army Museum, 2019.
18. Winston Churchill in British Art, 1900 to the Present Day: The Titan with Many Faces, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
19. Jonathan was highly regarded by gallerists and museum specialists.
I am grateful to Andrew Sim of Sim Fine Art for talking to me about their friendship and collaborations. Sim prompted The Times to publish an obituary.
20. Churchill’s famous description of Russia in October 1939, reflecting the fact that he could not predict Russia’s actions following the Russo-German non-aggression pact of August 1939.
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/epdf/10.3828/sj.2024.33.3.06
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