Geoffrey Edward Harvey Grigson (2 March 1905 – 25 November 1985) was a British poet, writer, editor, critic, exhibition curator, anthologist and naturalist. In the 1930s he was editor of the influential magazine New Verse, and went on to produce 13 collections of his own poetry, as well as compiling numerous anthologies, among many published works on subjects including art, travel and the countryside. Grigson exhibited in the
London International Surrealist Exhibition at
New Burlington Galleries in 1936,[1] and in 1946 co-founded the
Institute of Contemporary Arts. Grigson's autobiography The Crest on the Silver was published in 1950. At various times he was involved in teaching, journalism and broadcasting. Fiercely combative, he made many literary enemies.[2]
Life and work
Grigson was born at the vicarage in
Pelynt,[3] a village near
Looe in
Cornwall. His childhood in rural Cornwall had a significant influence on his poetry and writing. As a boy, his love of objects of nature (plants, bones and stones) was sparked at the house of family friends at
Polperro who were painters and amateur naturalists. He was educated at
St John's School,
Leatherhead, and at
St Edmund Hall,
Oxford.[3]
Poet and editor
After graduating from Oxford University, Grigson took a job at the London office of the Yorkshire Post, from where he moved on to become literary editor of the Morning Post.[4] He first came to prominence in the 1930s as a poet, then as editor from 1933 to 1939 of the influential poetry magazine New Verse.[5] Among important works by many influential poets — notably
Louis MacNeice,
Stephen Spender,
Dylan Thomas,
W. H. Auden,
Paul Éluard and Grigson himself — New Verse featured
concrete poetry by the sculptor
Alberto Giacometti (translated by
David Gascoyne) and folk poetry from tribal villages of the Jagdalpür Tahsil district of
Bastar State,
Chhattisgarh, transcribed from the
Halbi language by Grigson's brother
Wilfrid Grigson. During this period, Grigson published some of his own poetry under the pseudonym Martin Boldero.[6] An anthology of poems that appeared in the first 30 issues of New Verse was published in hardback by
Faber & Faber in 1939, and re-published in 1942; the second edition states that the first "came out on the day war was declared".[7]
Grigson was a noted critic, reviewer (for the New York Review of Books in particular), and compiler of numerous poetry
anthologies. He published 13 collections of poetry, and wrote on a variety of subjects, including the English countryside,[13][14]botany, travel, and especially art –– with books on
Wyndham Lewis,
Henry Moore, and most notably,
Samuel Palmer.
Grigson's Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (1947), an aptly poetic chronicle of the artist's early life influences and experiences, which contained 68 photo illustrations, introduced to a broad audience the early works of one of England's greatest
Romantic painters. Grigson's follow-up, Samuel Palmer's Valley of Vision (1960), included a selection of the artist's own writings and an additional 48 plates. Both books featured a number of previously unpublished paintings, drawings, and sketches. They established Grigson as the foremost authority on Palmer's revered '
Shoreham Period', and helped trigger a surge of interest in Palmer's youthful, ecstatic, fantastical depictions (during a time of
post-warriots and
Industrial Revolution) of Nature's abundance, in an idyllic
Kentish countryside.[17][18][19][20]
Controversially, these books also caught the attention of famous art forger
Tom Keating, who used their illustrations as models for a series of Palmer fakes that he did in the 1960s and '70s.[20] In 1976, along with Palmer experts from the
Ashmolean,
Fitzwilliam,
Tate, and
British Museums, Grigson helped Times reporter
Geraldine Norman confirm that 13 suspect Palmers that had come on the
market over the previous decade were
forgeries.[17] At Keating's 1979 art fraud trial at the
Old Bailey, in his searing testimony on the credulity of the
Bond Streetart merchants who bought and sold some of the fake Palmers, contentious art critic
Brian Sewell referred to a personal letter in Grigson's The Visionary Years that made ridiculous a key element of the provenance they had proffered, much to the delight of
Keating's defence barrister.[21][22]
In the catalogue for a major retrospective held by the
British Museum and
The Metropolitan Museum of Art on the bicentenary of Palmer's birth (2005), Colin Harrison, curator at the
Ashmolean Museum, in his essay on the artist's rediscovery, credited Grigson's 1947 book with effectively establishing a canon of Palmer's early work.[20]
Born in 1905, Grigson was the youngest of seven sons of Canon William Shuckforth Grigson (1845–1930), a
Norfolk clergyman who had settled in
Cornwall as vicar of
Pelynt, and Mary Beatrice Boldero, herself the daughter of a clergyman. The inscription on his father's slate headstone in Pelynt Churchyard is the work of
Eric Gill, 1931.[26] Five of Grigson's six brothers died serving in the
First[27][28][29][30] and
Second World Wars,[31][32] among them
John Grigson.[33] This was one of the highest rates of mortality suffered by any British family during the conflicts of the 20th century.[34] Grigson's surviving brother,
Wilfrid Grigson, was killed in an air crash in 1948 while serving as a post-Partition official in
Pakistan.[34]
Geoffrey Grigson's first wife was Frances Franklin Galt[8] (who died in 1937 of
tuberculosis). With her, he founded the poetry magazine New Verse. They had one daughter, Caroline (who married designer
Colin Banks). With his second wife, Berta Emma Kunert, Grigson had two children, Anna and
Lionel Grigson. Following divorce from his second wife, Grigson married
Jane Grigson, née McIntire (1928–90). Their daughter is
Sophie Grigson. Among Grigson's grandchildren is the political scientist
Giacomo Benedetto.[35]
Honours and legacy
Grigson was awarded the
Duff Cooper Prize for his 1971 volume of poetry Discoveries of Bones and Stones.[36] A collection of tributes entitled Grigson at Eighty, compiled by R. M. Healey (Cambridge:
Rampant Lions Press), was published in 1985, the year of his death.[8] In 2005, to mark the centenary of Grigson's birth a conference was held at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.[2]
In 2007,
Pallant House Gallery in
Chichester presented the exhibition Poets in the Landscape: The Romantic Spirit in British Art. The exhibition explored "the creative links between poetry, the pastoral vision and British art in the work of Romantic artists of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Neo-Romantic artists of the mid-20th century", with exhibits of Grigson's anthology The Poet's Eye, featuring lithographs by
John Craxton, and copies of New Verse.[37]
In 2017, the
British Museum presented a major exhibition of British landscape paintings from the century following the death of
J. M. W. Turner. The exhibition title was "borrowed from the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson's 1949 collection of essays Places of the Mind",[38] and, in doing so, "acknowledges how every landscape drawing is a construct of the mind and imagination of its creator".[39]
Works
The Arts To-day (John Lane The Bodley Head, 1935), editor.
^Barry Miles,
London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945,
Atlantic Books, 2010, page 62. “London Calling” states that: “The ICA was founded in 1946 by the artist and critic Roland Penrose, the poet and art critic Herbert Read, (and) the Cornish poet and editor Geoffrey Grigson, and two sponsors: the art collector and benefactor Peter Watson... and Peter Gregory, the owner of Lund Humphries... Penrose, Grigson and Read were the ideas men”.
^
abNorman, Geraldine (16 July 1976). "Authenticity of Palmer drawings is challenged. A question of art: Are thirteen Samuel Palmer drawings brilliant modern forgeries?". The Times. pp. 1, 12.
^Grigson, Geoffrey (1947). Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years. London: Kegan Paul. pp. 4, 7, 8, 23–25, 33, 45–48.
^Grigson, Geoffrey (1960). Samuel Palmer's Valley of Vision. London: Phoenix House. pp. 1–10.
^
abcVaughan, William; Barker, Elizabeth E; Harrison, Colin (2005). Samuel Palmer: Vision and Landscape. London: The British Museum Press. pp. 60–61.
ISBN9780714126418.
^Grigson, Geoffrey (1947). Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years. London: Kegan Paul. p. 119.
^Grant, Thomas (2015). Jeremy Hutchinson's Case Histories. London: John Murray. p. 209.
ISBN9781444799736.
Ostrom, Hans. "The Mint," in British Literary Magazines: The Modern Age, 1914–1984. Ed. Alvin Sullivan. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986, 264–267. (Grigson edited The Mint.)
Julian Symons, "Grigson, Geoffrey Edward Harvey (1905–1985)",
rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009, accessed 2 December 2013.