Francis Carr

Francis Carr (born Geza Spitzer in Hungary in 1919), husband to Dorothy Carr – artist, designer and lecturer, is a socially motivated traveler across the boundaries between disciplines within the natural and built environment. This has taken him from teaching and pioneering screenprinting as a popular medium and legitimate print process to ambitious large scale land art commissions.

Carr was born into a middle class Jewish family – his father was a lawyer – but he decided to become an artist at the age of three. He nevertheless initially studied at law school, but the barrage of anti-Semitism he faced as a young man in 1938 impelled him to leave Hungary for England, where a relative stood surety for him. A spell at the Central School of Arts & Crafts in London was interrupted by World War Two service in the Pioneer Corps alongside many others of “the King’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens”, who took especial risks fighting for the Allied cause because, if captured by the Germans, they would have been executed as traitors rather than being detained as prisoners of war. It was for this reason that Carr adopted his English-sounding name – the surname he took was that of his wife Dorothy Carr.

He worked with the silk screen printers ‘Tribe Bros.’ in North London and later ‘Messers Bovince’. From 1956 he exhibited regularly, including a solo show at the Woodstock Gallery in 1959. Carr taught at the London College of Printing, Croydon College of Art and the Open University. In 1965 he was appointed Design Consultant to the Greater London Council Housing Division, for whom he carried out several large scale commissions. In 1968 he became chairman of the New Organisation. He organised the National Film Theatre’s Urban Cinema Festival in 1972.

He continued to develop his technique of screen printing from a commercial printing process to a fine art – his book on the subject was published by Studio Vista in 1961.

The work of which Carr is most proud is his 1961 mosaic “Magic Garden” at the New Kings School, New Kings Road, S.W.6, which has recently been restored with the help of the Twentieth Century Society and the Heritage of London Trust (mixed media, incorporating a large number of screen-printed tiles made by Carr himself). Other similar works which Carr created for schools no longer exist. Carr never wished to be tied down to one artistic discipline and he aimed to be a jack-of-all- trades, able, by virtue of what would now be seen as a very traditional art training, to turn his hand to any commission. His other work has included sculpture and the design of a maze in Kazakhstan. He deplores the lack of sensory experience in computer- based art. The last twenty years have seen Carr’s interests turn toward the environment – resulting in the foundation of the charity the Landscape & Arts Network in 1993.

His first print ‘After the Storm’ (1949), the first serigraph to be produced in the UK, was shown at the Arts Council Exhibition ‘The Mechanised Image’ (1978) and is now in the collection of The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings.

Through his seminal book ‘A Guide to Screen Process Printing’ Vista books 1961, conferences, exhibitions and over one hundred articles published in national and international trade and art journals he promoted the process, and attracted amongst his students Eduardo Paolozzi to his printing making classes.

Since 1967 he has organized a number of environmental art exhibitions and also established the ‘Landscape and Arts Network’ (www.landartnet.org). Some of his major land art commissions include the royal opening of the ‘New Harbour Commemorative Area’, Port Talbot, Wales and the ‘Tree of Life Maze’, Kazakhstan. He was artist in residence at Gun Powder Park, Lee Valley Regional Park from 1999 to 2002. In 2004, at the invitation of the United Nations, he was appointed jury member for the ‘Seeing the South’ land art competition in Beirut, Lebanon.

Francis and Dorothy Carr were the first artists to introduce screen printing into the UK in the late 40’s and early 50’s as a fine art process in its own right. What is particularly exciting and innovative about their place in its development is that they changed its application from commercial use, by sign writers and display firms, into an artistic medium for imaginative imaging.
Combining knife-cut, hand drawn, and later photographic stencils they exploited its inherent boldness and directness to produce a unique set of limited edition prints. These were called serigraph, a word coined in America meaning ‘to draw on silk’, although most of the Carr’s early prints were made using organdie, a sheer stiff muslin.

The most comprehensive exhibition of the Carr’s work – ‘The Creative Screen’ – was held at the Eckersley Gallery, London College of Communication, University of the Arts in 2002.