In 1983 Edward Bawden’s 80th birthday was marked by an exhibition put on by the Imperial War Museum in his honour. Raymond Spurrier went along to the exhibition to interview him for a feature article, ‘Travels of a War Artist’, that was published in The Artist magazine. Raymond had been an admirer of Bawden’s work for a good many years and approached him with some trepidation, announcing himself as a fan of longstanding. Trained as a designer, that aspect of his work can be seen in Bawden’s watercolour paintings. He typically produced larger works than many and included much detail in his pictures. In the years leading up to the war he had become well known for his book illustrations and poster designs and worked with large-scale colour lino prints and managed to incorporate intricate detail whilst retaining the impact of a poster. In 1993, ‘Contemporary Art’ was the Europa theme for postage stamp designers in participating countries. In Britain, the Royal Mail issued a set of four stamps, one of which featured a work by Edward Bawden. The image portrayed was a cropped version of Kew Gardens designed for use on a 1936 London Transport poster. It was reproduced in an inch by an inch and a quarter format in which it clearly lacked the intended impact of the original poster and it was all but impossible to see the detail, but at least his importance as an artist had been recognised.
Bawden was one of the first to be commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee and went off with Ardizzone in 1940 to work in France until the evacuation of troops from Dunkirk in May. He then spent time in the Middle East and North Africa as well as Italy and Greece with remarkable experiences along the way. In all he produced more than 300 paintings as an official war artist but the 68 shown at the Imperial War Museum were but a small sample, and the war years were a tiny fraction of a prolific working life. Raymond wrote that he knew few other contemporary artists whose work could sustain such enjoyable and prolonged inspection as that of Edward Bawden, CBE, RA and believed that it was time for a much larger retrospective so that his war pictures could be seen in the context of his other work that is all too rarely seen.
Six years later, in 1989, the V&A in collaboration with the Kent Institute of Art and Design went some way towards filling that gap with a small but representative exhibition entitled The Art of Design which ran from July until 29 October that year. In another review article for The Artist by Raymond Spurrier under the heading ‘A touch of poetry and peculiarity’, he described the showing which the press handouts at the time described as ‘the first major London exhibition to look at the diversity of Bawden’s outstanding achievements’. However, he noted that in terms of size it was not at all major and even lacked a catalogue. But the representative exhibits included sketchbook drawings and designs as well as better known press adverts, posters, paintings, engravings, and designs for wallpaper, tapestries, pottery decoration and garden furniture. Raymond’s review concluded with a plea for a major retrospective and a lavishly illustrated catalogue as a comprehensive record of his work. Edward Bawden died on 21 November, less than a month after the exhibition closed. A few years before his death he had donated the contents of his studio to the Cecil Higgins Gallery in Bedford which now holds a major archive of the work of this leading 20th century artist and designer from all periods of his career from 1922 until his death. Posthumous exhibitions have since paid tribute to Edward Bawden, notably by the Fine Art Society, London and the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden in addition to the exhibitions in Bedford.