An Abiding Standard: The Prints of Stanley Anderson RA

Staged in partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, An Abiding Standard (2015) was the centrepiece of a multi-component research project comprised of a series of exhibitions and a catalogue raisonné. The exhibition reintroduced contemporary audiences to a major figure in the history of British printmaking. Much of Stanley Anderson’s extensive and diverse output – representing a career spanning half a century – had been hidden from view, in part due to incomplete records.

An Abiding Standard was accompanied by an oeuvre catalogue that, for the first time, gathered and documented all of Anderson’s 260 prints to achieve a fuller profile of an artist whose reputation rested mainly on a series of line engravings on the theme of rural crafts and farm labour, which earned Anderson a CBE in 1951. Constituting less than fifteen percent of his output, those engravings long overshadowed Anderson’s other achievements as a printmaker, both thematically and technically: etchings engaging with the down-and-out in 1920s London, alternative London views of construction sites and demolitions, and marketable interwar drypoints of continental scenes. Juxtaposed with his seemingly nostalgic ‘craftsmen’ engravings, they demonstrate the politics of Anderson’s work, a lifetime project pieced together through archival research.

The project was extended in Unmaking the Modern, a series of bespoke follow-up exhibitions designed further to contextualise Anderson’s work to construct the portrait of a printmaker who, sceptical of progress and modish conformity in the art of his day, commented on urban values and countered an age that, in his view, was marked by spiritual vacuity, emotional detachment and academic elitism. To bring this home, Unmaking the Modern reached out to regional audiences and reinserted his prints into the context of the artist’s home counties. Reflecting on research and its dissemination, Heuser proposes exhibition curating as a public-orientated alternative to traditional art history.