John Banting (1902–1971)
Composition aux feuilles et fleurs, 1937
Oil on paper
10.8 x 15.2 in.
27.5 x 38.5 cm
b. 1902, London, England
d. 1972, Hastings, England
John Banting was an English artist best known for his Surrealist works. Born in London in 1902, he began drawing at 18 under the influence of vorticism, an artistic movement relating art to industrialization. In 1921, Banting attended life drawing classes at the Convent Square Art School under the direction of Bernard Meninsky, later studying at the free academies of Paris. Though his early works were influenced by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, his personal style evolved to include forms and subjects such as plants, shells, and feathers, which he often constructed into figures.
By 1925, Banting worked from a studio on Fitzroy Street where he was associated with the Bloomsbury group, a collective of English writers, intellectuals, and artists. During this time he made illustrations for Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and for ballets such as Prometheus and Pomona.
In 1930, Banting traveled to Paris where he met André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Subsequently, his style shifted towards Surrealism. In 1936 he contributed to the International Exhibition of Surrealism in London, where he showed works with a Stalinist position within the Trotskyist Surrealist movement. After Marcel Duchamp invited Banting to contribute to the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in 1938, he had a solo exhibition at the Storran Gallery in London.
At the beginning of World War II, Banting was declared unfit for active service. Instead, he worked as an art director for the Ministry of Information’s Strand Films, served as the art editor for the leftist monthly Our Time, and co-edited the anthology Salvo for Russia. In the 1950s, Banting lived in Rye and later moved to Hastings in 1965. Although he produced few paintings towards the end of his life, he devoted himself to writing and continued to contribute his earlier works to Surrealist exhibitions. Today, his work can be found in public collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Tate Modern in London.
