JAMES BOSWELL left his native New Zealand in 1925 to study painting in London at the Royal College of Art. He soon found himself in conflict with the English art establishment of the twenties and left the college for a while to work in the studio of a compatriot, Fred Porter, who had studied in Paris at the turn of the century and who, like many artists of his generation, was a radical socialist. He taught Boswell la belle peinture and introduced him to his circle.
Boswell was soon in the vanguard of the young intellectuals who belonged to the radical movement then gathering momentum.
By the by the early thirties he had given up painting and devoted himself exclusively to the struggle against Nazism in Europe and fascism at home. Satirical drawings and cartoons poured from his pen, appearing in The Daily Worker, The Daily Mirror, pamphlets and propaganda.
Paul Hogarth has written of this period:
‘His biggest achievement was to revive the spirit of social satire in English illustration. He set the example himself with hundreds of intensely observed, witty and savage drawings.’
But it was in Left Review – of which he was an inspired art editor from 1934-1938 – that his satirical pen found its most potent outlet. Together with James Fitton and James Holland – they were known as the three James – he hit out savagely at the bloated capitalists, fascists, appeasers of the Nazi regime; at the over-privileged and politicians.
In 1933 The Artists International Association (AIA) was formed at two meetings held in the studio of Misha Black. James, together with Pearl Binder, James Holland and several other artists from the left, were its founder members. He continued to support it and exhibit at AIA shows long after his political affiliations had been laid aside.
In 1936 he started working in the design studio at the Asiatic Oil Company (now Shell Oil) and began to lead the frustrating double life that he later tried to analyse in his only book - The Artist's Dilemma (1947). He described those times as 'working at commercial art during the day and trying to create a new world at night'.
He was called up in 1941 as a private in the RAMC and trained as a radiographer – a happy choice in a normally haphazard army system. He studied anatomy and drew extensively scenes from army life. 1943 saw him in Iraq. The year he spent there he filled his sketchbooks with luminous desert scenes, the daily life of the soldier and with a remarkable set of passionate anti-war drawings, the peak of his work as a satirical artist.
In 1947 Boswell became Art Editor of Lilliput. Richard Bennett was editor. Together they produced a magazine that has remained unique in Fleet Street, gathering round them a group of talented artists and writers – Ronald Searle, John Minton, André François, Gerard Hoffnung, James Fitton and James Holland, Edward Ardizzone, Paul Hogarth, Quentin Blake and many others. He also served on Jack Lindsey's Editorial Board for a series of books called New Developments and wrote the first one, The Artist's Dilemma
In 1951 he was commissioned to paint a huge mural in the Festival of Britain's Sea and Ships Pavilion. By this time he had returned to painting, studying life drawing and teaching himself basic techniques in a variety of styles. By the mid fifties, he had taken up abstract art, producing lyrical, green oil paintings, the paint thickly laid with pallette knife and brush.
Although born in New Zealand, Boswell was a London man. When in 1957, he and Betty, his wife since 1934, moved from London to Hove in Sussex, things began to fall apart. He embarked on a dramatic series of magnificent, rich, sombre, abstract paintings, some heavy with menace, which culminated in a one man show 1962 at the Drian Gallery, London.
That year, he met Ruth Boswell. When he finally sorted his tangled private life, the change in his work was astonishing. His paintings were filled with light, the menace was gone and everything was gold.
1967 saw a large exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute. His painting had changed considerably in the intervening years to luminous semi-figurative seascapes, landscapes and portraits
In his last years he found the form he wanted his work to take; pure gold surfaces with ‘simple marks to create a tranquil and undisturbed object.’ These absorbing paintings were inspired by frequent visits to the estuaries of Venice and Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, and by the mandala motif, ‘not a pure circle, but a living shape like a cell', which appears in all of them.
In 1970 Boswell was commissioned by British Petroleum to paint a mural for their new building in Wellington, NZ. It is called ‘The Golden Day’ and is now hanging in the Palmerston North Art College, New Zealand. Its five panels follow the passing of the day, from dusk to evening.
It was his last work.