Donald McGill, Artist

If we are to trust George Orwell’s own tastes, and later those of his wife and editor Sonia, he had little regard for the importance of some visual arts, but considerably more for others. That is to say that he seems to have regarded his theatrical and film reviews as ephemeral, so that Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus included almost none of them in the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, but his writings on comics, paintings, and postcards – all three have been known and kept in print regularly from their first appearance.

The significance of Orwell’s work is two-fold: it has been one of the most significant influences on the field of cultural studies, and in making his studies so wide-ranging Orwell also showed how important all aspects of a work can be.

Orwell wrote essays on two very different artists: Salvador Dali, and Donald McGill. As Orwell refers to specific works students can be at a disadvantage if they know nothing of the works in question. Fortunately, Dali’s art has been widely distributed since at least the 1970s, but that of Donald McGill was not so easily available. In 2009 the Donald McGill Museum (Greaves and Thomas) improved that, publishing – with the permission of the Orwell estate – “The Art of Donald McGill” as an illustrated pamphlet. This contains Orwell’s essay, a three-page Introduction and finally a two page biography of McGill.

The Art of Donald McGill (Donald McGill Museum)

Orwell’s essay uses the style he was developing of writing a general section before listing items (“their habitual subject-matter”): sex, home life, drunkenness, stock-figures, politics etc, before writing his deeper appreciations. As Orwell describes the subject matter he lists the conventions of the joke. Greaves and Thomas illustrate each point with a typical McGill postcard of that type.

The Introduction criticises Orwell for not having done enough research about Donald McGill, suggesting, for instance, that contrary to Orwell’s observation there were McGill postcards on homosexuality and drunken women. They qualify this, though, when they say such were McGill’s “earlier” works, not those of the period when Orwell would have been collecting them. And they do not comment explicitly to deny that McGill was not only a real person with “a style recognisable at a glance” but also a “trade name”.

Orwell’s essay appeared in the September 1941 issue of Horizon, illustrated with some McGill postcards, but none of those that he mentioned. The great advantage of this pamphlet is that Greaves and Thomas have discovered at least three or four postcards that Orwell described and print them appropriately, as well as printing three of them in colour on the back cover, confirming the accuracy of Orwell’s descriptions.

Orwell collected “The Art of Donald McGill” in Critical Essays 1946, and it appeared in the American edition of the same year, Dickens, Dali and Others. More extraordinarily, it appeared in translation in the Polish magazine Kultura in 1950. Perhaps the Poles, too, concluded with Orwell that “On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

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