Sidney Hunt was a British draughtsman, painter, poet and editor who published the avant-garde journal Ray

Ray

Ray may refer to:People:* Raymond* Ray * Ray In geography:* Ray, Arizona* Ray, Indiana and Michigan* Ray, North Dakota* Ray, Minnesota* Ray County, Missouri, a county in the United States...

 between 1926 and 1927.

Life

Sidney James Hunt was born in 1896 and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art

Slade School of Fine Art

The Slade School of Fine Art is a world-renownedart school in London, United Kingdom, and a department of University College London...

 in London. During the 1920s he designed ex-libris and contributed modern-style drawings for several international art magazines, such as Artwork, Der Querschnitt, Der Sturm

Der Sturm

Der Sturm was a magazine covering the expressionism movement founded in Berlin in 1910 by Herwarth Walden. It ran weekly until monthly in 1914, and became a quarterly in 1924 until it ceased publication in 1932....

, Tambour and Contimporanul. Hunt also published experimental poems in modern journals, such as Transition

Transition (literary journal)

transition was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by poet Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald and published in Paris...

, Seed, and Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms. In October 1925, he held his first solo exhibition at the Mayor Gallery in London. Between 1926 and 1932, he was a member of the Seven and Five Society

Seven and Five Society

The Seven and Five Society was an art group of seven painters and five sculptors created in 1919 and based in London.The group was originally intended to encompass traditional, conservative artistic sensibilities...

, one of the most progressive art societies in interwar England. In 1926 and 1927, Hunt edited the avant-garde magazine Ray

Ray

Ray may refer to:People:* Raymond* Ray * Ray In geography:* Ray, Arizona* Ray, Indiana and Michigan* Ray, North Dakota* Ray, Minnesota* Ray County, Missouri, a county in the United States...

, which has been described as the English equivalent of influential art journals from the 1920s such as Merz, Mecano and De Stijl. Ray featured work of leading figures of the European avant-garde such as Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...

, El Lissitzky

El Lissitzky

, better known as El Lissitzky , was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works...

, Theo van Doesburg

Theo van Doesburg

Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch artist, practicing in painting, writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl.-Biography:-Early life:...

, Naum Gabo

Naum Gabo

Naum Gabo KBE, born Naum Neemia Pevsner was a prominent Russian sculptor in the Constructivism movement and a pioneer of Kinetic Art.-Early life:...

 and Hans Arp. It has been said that Hunt died in his studio in 1940, aged forty-four, during The Blitz

The Blitz

The Blitz was the sustained strategic bombing of Britain by Nazi Germany between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941, during the Second World War. The city of London was bombed by the Luftwaffe for 76 consecutive nights and many towns and cities across the country followed...

.

Style

Much of his work is homerotic; he had homosexual patrons like Sir Edward Marsh; Flechtheim reproduced his Ganymede in "Querschnitt" (1921, VIII, p. 346); his drawings of boys appeared with those of Chubb in The Island in 1931; the bookplates he produced feature naked youths, and Oswald Blakeston published his experimental prose poem fantasies of 18 year old hermaphrodites in "Seed" (1933, I, p. 7). His themes included boys bathing, sunbathing, posing with pansies and possibly boy prostitutes on a "Saturday afternoon" in Artwork (1924, I, p. 75). He is one of the few modernist artists to use abstraction to express the essentials of male beauty in simplified forms like his painting of Ganymede or by contasts of black and white as in "Drawing" (1922). As Candela has speculated, he may also be the creator of the photomontages that he published in "Ray" (1927, pp. 2,15&27), as by the otherwise unknown P Capeli. His work as a pioneer of British modernism and as an abstract gay artist deserves much more reassessment.

External links