John Armstrong was born in 1893 in Hastings. He studied at St. John’s College, Oxford, 1912-13, and then at St. John’s Wood School of Art 1913-14. During the war he served in the Royal Field Artillery 1914-19, before briefly returning to St. John’s Wood School. He began his professional career as a theatre designer in London, gaining important patrons including Lillian and Samuel Courtauld, who commissioned Armstrong to decorate a room in their Portman Square home. His first solo exhibition was at the Leicester Galleries in 1928. In 1933 he joined Unit One alongside Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Edward Burra, Henry Moore, Edward Wadsworth, John Bigge and Barbara Hepworth, with whom he exhibited at the Unit One exhibition. From the early 1930s onwards his work became Surrealist in style – uncanny, romantically dream-like and heavily imbued with symbolism. Armstrong died in 1973. His work is held in numerous international public collections including the Tate, the Imperial War Museum, the National Galleries of Scotland, and the National Gallery of Australia.

The political segment of Armstrong’s 1938 exhibition was steeped in restrained fear brought about by the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. Numerous British artists, particularly the Artists International Association (AIA), vociferously supported the Republican cause through fund-raising exhibitions. Alongside Armstrong’s famed depictions of decaying and destroyed houses, he produced a trio of outstanding works featuring sightless women: Dreaming Head, 1938; Tate, Heaviness of Sleep, 1938; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, and Encounter in the Plain. In Encounter in the Plain a monumental blindfolded woman of statuesque womanly physique, with her head literally in the clouds, dominates a near-barren landscape. Her blindfold renders her oblivious to the road lined with tombstones at her feet, leading to a distant village atop a rock formation, whilst behind her the white cliffs of Dover loom in the middle of the desert-like plain. An unsettling environment intimates an unknown, unseen threat: distorted scale prevents any sense of perspective whilst objects including the shell-like form in the foreground and the white flag (perhaps the flag of surrender) suggest an inexplicable symbolism.

Armstrong never officially joined Surrealism, but his work was closely aligned to Surrealist practices and politics, as noted in almost every review of his 1938 show. In the 1930s, the British Surrealists were a mutable, unstable group, what Michel Remy has termed “a forum of spectral voices”, particularly as the rise of Fascism in Spain, Italy and Germany forced many artists to emigrate to London and New York, throwing international Surrealism into flux. As with The Goddess, the daunting female figure of Encounter in the Plain is Surrealist to its core: the symbol of woman was at the very heart of Surrealism, the embodiment of love and desire, fear and death. From the outset, the Surrealists were infatuated with murderesses and the female hysterics and schizophrenic patients of famed French psychiatrist and teacher of Freud, Dr Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893). The artist’s muse and unattainable object of corporeal desire, she was everything the cold, rational, logical world of man was not – she offered the potential for a new, surreal, mode of existence that united mind and body, yet she was volatile, threatening, even dangerous. Magritte’s The Lovers (1928), ‘wrapped’ in a passionate embrace, exemplify this fusion of death and desire, locked in an act of erotic suffocation. Armstrong’s blindfolded woman becomes emblematic of this dualism: her overtly womanly form only serves to magnify her ominous enormity. The acme of Armstrong’s political works from the 1938 exhibition, Encounter in the Plain stands amongst the most powerful and significant works of inter-war British Surrealism.