Leon Underwood

Underwood was born in the west London suburb of Shepherds Bush. He was the eldest of the three sons of George Underwood, a fine art dealer and he attended Hampden Gurney School.[5][6] From 1907 to 1910 he attended the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London before studying at the Royal College of Art for three years.[7] While still a student in 1911, Underwood was commissioned to paint a mural for the Peace Palace in The Hague.[8] In 1913 he visited Russia to study the depiction of horses in traditional Russian art.[9]

Erecting a Camouflage Tree (1919)

In the First World War, Underwood enlisted in the Royal Horse Artillery before transferring to a field battery unit and then serving as a Captain in the Camouflage Section of the Royal Engineers.[7][5] He worked with Solomon Joseph Solomon as a camoufleur, creating battlefield observation posts disguised as trees.[9][10] Underwood's duties on the Western Front included going into No man's land to make detailed drawings of trees which were later replaced with metal replicas used by military observers.[11] He sketched and painted scenes of this work, notably in his 1919 oil painting Erecting a Camouflage Tree, which was intended for the, never built, British national Hall of Remembrance and was in turn purchased by the Imperial War Museum.[10][12]

After the war Underwood attended the Slade School of Art for a year's refresher course and in 1920 received the British Prix de Rome but chose not to go to Italy, instead using the grant to travel elsewhere later in the decade.[7] In his Hammersmith studio he set up a private art school, the Brook Green School, which he ran, intermittently, until 1938.[4] At Brook Green, Underwood initially, concentrated on teaching printmaking with woodcutting but also began making sculptures.[7][13] In 1925, with some of his past pupils, Underwood created the English Wood-Engraving Society to promote the art form.[13] Later in his career, between 1935 and 1945 Underwood created a significant number of colour linocuts.[13]

In 1922 Underwood had his first solo exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in London.[7] An exhibition of his sculptures was held in 1924.[5] He also taught a life drawing class at the Royal College of Art from 1920 until 1923 when he resigned and travelled to Paris and Iceland.[7] In 1925 he became the first contemporary artist to spend time examining the cave paintings at Altamira in Spain.[14] Underwood spent 1926 in the United States where he published an illustrated book of verse, Animalia, illustrated some volumes by others and also painted and made engravings.[3][15] In Greenwich Village he opened a life-drawing school.[16] In 1927 he went to Mexico, spending five months travelling and studying Aztec and Mayan art forms.[3][13]

After returning to England in late 1928 Underwood made a number of paintings on Mexican themes and also created several surrealist paintings, six of which were shown at the first, and only, exhibition of The Neo Society held at the Godfrey Phillips Gallery in London in May 1930.[17] Underwood co-founded a graphical quarterly magazine, The Island, in 1931 which, despite contributions from Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, CRW Nevinson and Mahatma Gandhi, was only published for four issues.[3][7][9][13][14] In 1934 he published an artistic manifesto, Art for Heaven's Sake: Notes on a Philosophy of Art.[18] Underwood was always convinced that subject matter formed a fundamental role behind the power of both his own and primitive art, and had no belief in subject-less or purely abstract form in his own work.

In 1938, Underwood closed the Brook Green School.[4] During the School's existence, its students had included Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Gertrude Hermes, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Raymond Coxon and Roland Vivian Pitchforth.[9][17][19] Moore later spoke of his indebtedness to Underwood's teaching.[1][9]

From 1939 to 1942, during World War Two, Underwood worked at the civil defence camouflage centre at Leamington Spa.[7][5] In 1944, having long collected and studied non-Western art, he undertook a lecture tour, sponsored by the British Council, of west Africa and on his return to Britain wrote three books on aspects of African art.[3][9][19][18] These included a study of the Ife and Benin heads, Bronzes of West Africa which showed a pioneering appreciation of their artistic significance and his understanding of their relationship to the culture and technology from which they originated.[9] Underwood had begun collecting African art in 1919 and, after his 1944 tour, had acquired over 550 pieces including several significant works by Yoruba artists, including sculptures by Olowe of Ise.[9] Some of these works Underwood later sold to the British Museum while others were eventually acquired by National Museum of African Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States.[9][13] His access to the cave paintings of Altamira in Spain ignited his "New Philosophy" with regard to this interrelationship of the expressiveness and technology of primitive art.[1]

Throughout the 1950s, Underwood concentrated on his sculpture and on promoting his theories and philosophy of art.[7] In 1961 Underwood was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Sculptors and further recognition followed in 1969 when the first full-scale retrospective of his work was held at The Minories in Colchester.[3][7] The art historian John Rothenstein wrote in the introduction to that exhibition that Underwood was "..the most versatile artist at work in Britain today..".[20] However it was to be over forty years before the next major retrospective of his work was held, in 2015 at the Pallant House Gallery.[14][9] This lack of attention has been attributed to the range and versatility of Underwood's output which, across the various media he worked in, lacked a common recognisable style that was easy to promote and also to his, sometimes, complex and esoteric philosophies and theories on art.[21]

Underwood was married to Mary Coleman. They first met in 1911 at the Royal College of Art, married in 1917 and their first child was born in 1919.[22] They had two sons, Garth (a zoologist)[23] and John, and one daughter, Jean.