Edward Wolfe (1897-1982) was born and brought up in South Africa and moved to London in 1916 to study at the Slade (1916-1918). When still a teenager he made the acquaintance of Nina Hamnett who asked him to join Roger Fry's Omega Workshops painting designs on furniture, lampshades and other household objects. It was Fry who was quick to acknowledge Wolfe's natural abilities as a draughstman in the modern idiom and he included him in his 1918 article 'Line as a Means of Expression in Modern Art' alongside Matisse, Modigliani and Gaudier-Brzeska.
Although Wolfe never met Gaudier-Brzeska, who was killed in the Great War in 1915, his presence and influence was still deeply felt at the Omega Workshops when Wolfe began working there in 1918. Gaudier's mastery of line and his 'great spirit', as Ezra Pound remarked, was a defining influence on the teenage Wolfe and his earliest drawings were imbued with a vital savagery reminiscent of African tribal carvings. Nina Hamnett, who had known both Modigliani and Gaudier so well, was instrumental in nurturing Wolfe's youthful promise. Through Osbert Sitwell's initiative Wolfe was also able to see Modigliani's work at first hand when he arranged a show of his paintings and drawings in London in 1919.
Writing about Wolfe's early drawings in The Burlington Magazine Roger Fry observed, 'The calligraphy is of the new kind, far subtler, more discreet and unemphatic than the old, but it is the calligraphy that first of all strikes us. One is indeed surprised to find young artists drawing with such a delightful freedom from all self-consciousness, so entirely without bravura and display.' Of course these fluid, lyrical qualities were also striking features of Gaudier-Brzeska's draughtsmanship. When Wolfe became friendly with Jim Ede during the early 1920s he was able to examine at close hand the many hundreds of Gaudier's line drawings in Ede's collection.
Whilst working at the Omega Workshops Wolfe began exhibiting a the London Group which was the most advanced exhibiting society in England at that time. When Ezra Pound reviewed a London Group exhibition in 1919 he identified Wolfe's work 'as good as any anything in the show'. Pound was the principal promoter of Gaudier-Brzeska's legacy and recognised some similar qualities in Wolfe's work - a particular intuition and primal energy impressed him.
Wolfe's drawing style was to become even more fluent and ornamental under the influence of Matisse and a certain exoticism which descended from Gauguin. Indeed Mary Chamot in her book Modern Painting in England described Wolfe as 'an English Gauguin'. He travelled widely spending long periods in Mexico and South Africa which fuelled an alluring romanticism in his work.
In his monograph about the artist John Russell-Taylor observed:
'Throughout his career, Wolfe used almost any graphic medium which came to hand. He was adept at painting in oils - his early career at the Slade ensured that - and his oils were perhaps the medium in which he showed to most advantage. But he was also a brilliant draughtsman, and a compulsive one: even at the last, given a ball-point pen or a fibre-tip, he would start sketching portraits of those around or make elaborate designs out of doodles.'
Bryan Robertson's introduction to Wolfe's 1967 Arts Council retrospective also acknowledged the importance of his drawings:
'But more recently I have preferred his portrait drawings: so classically compressed, intelligent and unrhetorical, to his painted likenesses, with practically all the relevant drawings of sitters up to the present, young and old, famous or anonymous we have clearly a strong contribution to English portraiture in the 20th century.'
