Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Prints and Printmaking, 1 February – 30 April 2011;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Dreams and Nightmares, 22 May – 15 July 2012
Blair Hughes-Stanton, a close friend of D.H. Lawrence, produced engravings for several of his books and shared his contempt for the smug, rich and conventional. While studying at Leon Underwood’s unconventional school (1923-1925), life models were instructed to change positions frequently, which emphasised ‘form, volume and movement’. Hughes-Stanton’s work courted controversy when he began working with D. H. Lawrence shortly after the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928, producing a folio volume of his poetry collection entitled Birds, Bees and Flowers. In March 1930 Hughes-Stanton and his wife visited Lawrence in Vence, in the South of France. Lawrence succumbed to tuberculosis shortly afterwards and Hughes-Stanton produced A Man Died in response to Lawrence’s own elegy ‘A Man Who Died’: ‘All the lovely macrocosm / Was woman once to you / Bride to your groom / No tree in bloom / But it leaned you a new / White bosom’. The engraving depicts three nude, intertwined couples with the soul of the distinctively-bearded Lawrence himself, looking down at his body as a mob marked ‘THE PRESS’ stab at his heart and genitals.
