Join us for our monthly Book Club to discuss: “Circles & Squares”…
A spellbinding portrait of the Hampstead Modernists, threading together the lives, loves, rivalries and ambitions of a group of artists at the heart of an international avant-garde. Hampstead in the 1930s. In this peaceful, verdant London suburb, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson have embarked on a love affair – a passion that will launch an era-defining art movement. In her chronicle of the exhilarating rise and fall of British Modernism, Caroline Maclean captures the dazzling circle drawn into Hepworth and Nicholson’s wake: among them Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Herbert Read, and famed emigres Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and Piet Mondrian, blown in on the winds of change sweeping across Europe. Living and working within a few streets of their Parkhill Road studios, the artists form Unit One, a cornerstone of the Modernist movement which would bring them international renown. Drawing on previously unpublished archive material, Caroline Maclean’s electrifying Circles and Squares brings the work, loves and rivalries of the Hampstead Modernists to life as never before, capturing a brief moment in time when a new way of living seemed possible. United in their belief in art’s power to change the world, her cast of trailblazers radiate hope and ambition during one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century.
[published by Bloomsbury, 2020]
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These discussion meeting are free of charge, relaxed & informal and take place at “Pebbles” cafe (in the old Havens building on Hamlet Court Road), starting 2pm – all welcome!
As the political situation of 1930s Europe worsened, the Artists International Association adopted a ‘popular front’ methodology encouraging a wide range of artists to exhibit under their pro-communist anti-fascist umbrella. This became especially important with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War when the AIA sought to raise funds for sending food, supplies and ambulances to the frontlines and assisting refugees trying to escape.
Artists Nan Youngman & Priscilla Thornycroft painting: Spain Fights On
Today we will look at the work of the Artists International Association and British artists’ responses to the Spanish Civil War.
Please note we have a new venue and a new meeting time:
The Beecroft Art Gallery, Southend
11am-1pm om Saturday 7th May
£10 on the door as usual
All welcome!
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A couple of initial resources:
The Exhibition “Conscience and Conflict” at Pallant House Gallery and a BBC article about it; there is also a book (out of print, but maybe at the library):
Our next art discussion meeting will consider the Artists International Association, an exhibiting society founded in 1933. It’s aim was the ‘Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development’.
In turn we will look at the formation of working class art groups such as the East London Group and the Pitman Painters (the Ashington Group) as well the arrival of Mass Observation in “Worktown”.
All welcome!
Saturday 26th March, 10am-midday
Civic Centre Committee Room, Southend
£10 tickets on door
Oliver Kilbourn (1904-1993): End of Shift [c.1934; Laing Art Gallery; artuk.org]
Peal Binder (1904-1990): A Jewish Restaurant in Brick Lane [c/o SpitalfieldsLife]
Brynhild Parker (1907-1987): Windy Day on Marine Parade [c.1925; Beecroft Art Gallery; artuk.org]
Greetings!
It gives me huge pleasure to announce that I will be in conversation with Alan Waltham, curator and custodian of The East London Group on
Friday 11th March, 2022 at 2.30pm
Venue: The Beecroft Art Gallery, Southend
£10 tickets are available via Eventbrite (click on link)
Join Alan Waltham, curator of “Brothers in Art: Walter and Harold Steggles” currently on show at the Beecroft Gallery to discuss the East London Group.
The rediscovery of the East London Group, triggered by a surprise inheritance and the 2012 publication of David Buckman’s “From Bow to Biennale”, has garnered a revitalised appreciation of these working class artists’ paintings, many of which hadn’t been seen since the 1930s.
This afternoon, curator Alan Waltham discusses this renewed recognition of the East London Group, his personal link to the Steggles Brothers and, by way of some of the most iconic of their paintings, the origins and history of the Group. Alan will be in conversation with Dr ML Banting, independent researcher in the field of early 20th-century British art.
All welcome!
“Brothers in Art: Walter and Harold Steggles” runs at the Beecroft Gallery until 3rd April, 2022. There are further details about both the exhibition and the East London Group artists here and on artuk.org here.
Photograph: East London Group artists Elwin Hawthorne, Phyllis Bray, John Cooper and Brynhild Parker at the Lefevre Galleries [c. 1932] from the article “Phyllis Bray, Artist” at SpitalfieldsLife website.
From the Introduction of “Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys” by Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler:
“Frances Mary Hodgkins (1869-1947) has always been difficult to locate within existing art-historical frameworks. Resisitant to any particular style, forever on the move, her place within modernist art has never been settled. Born in New Zealand in the second half of the nineteenth century, she exemplified the progressive attitude and spirit of the ‘colonial woman’: a single, talented local artist who left for Europe in her early thirties. From that point onwards, Hodgkins seldom had a fixed abode, and determinedly avoided any encumbrance, without property or any family of her own, her entire life. Instead she worked, as she wished, as an independent professional artist in a career that spanned six decades, drawing inspiration from the changing scene around her that her freedom and transience afforded.”
Hodgkins life, let alone her art, is then utterly fascinating, especially when as Hammond and Kisler write next: “It was not until Hodgkins was approaching the age of sixty that she began to establish a central place for herself within British modernism.”
The book brilliantly illuminates the artist’s journey with some glorious reproductions of paintings many of which are located in New Zealand and Australia, which leads us to online resources:
Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys by Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler [2019; Thames & Hudson]
The “European Journeys” book was published to coincide with an exhibition at Christchurch Gallery and their website is certainly worth exploring.
Another recent exhibition, at the Jonathan Grant Gallery in Auckland also has a fabulous website: Frances Hodgkins and her Circle
And the Museum of New Zealand has many of Hodgkins’ paintings in its collection.
The Tate Gallery in London also holds some [here], including:
“Loveday and Ann” is one of Hodgkins’ earliest oil paintings. Having had a flourishing career in Paris, as an exhibitor and teacher of watercolour, the outbreak of war brought her to the safety of Cornwall. Her art, however, inspired by the modern French avant garde, from Vuillard to Matisse and Picasso, confused, disorientated and shocked the British viewer. “This is the exhibit of a pyrotechnic artist in paint, it is not portraiture, or if it is, I never want to meet Loveday and Ann” was one critics 1916 response, notes Samantha Niederman.
“Frances Hodgkins” by Samantha Niederman [2020; Eiderdown Books’ Modern Women Artists series]
For me, “Ann and Loveday” represents the full glory of Hodgkins’ paintings: the combination of gorgeous colour, the flowering of multiple patterns and a finger-tingling texture. There’s something vibrant about them – the very paint is exhilarating. And whilst it is possible to relate some of the painterly ideas and experiments to Fauvism, Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism; Hodgkins works are the creations of a particular singular vision. How to describe that vision in words is, as it should be, next to impossible. One late exhibition was reviewed by John Piper, who extolled the artist’s ‘songlike expression’ and focused on her achievement as a colourist, borrowing terms, as many others had, from music: ‘…it means talking of scintillations and explosions, chromatic runs and exciting leaps…’ – but then how else might one encapsulate another painting that is in the Tate:
It really is a poem in paint; the visualisation of a distilled memory of a visit to Bridgnorth possibly a few years earlier. Tate quotes Hodgkins’ friend Hannah Ritchie saying it was “a picture done in her studio after a good deal of thinking round the material she [had] gathered”, and they link it to a pencil drawing at Christchurch Art Gallery, “Sabrina’s Garden”:
which really would exemplify the artist’s mind, that visionary creativity that can translate “nature” into “art”. It would also seem pertinent in relation to “The Lake” to quote Eric Newton who declared: Frances Hodgkins “can juggle with colour orchestrally”. We might even to go further for her colours seem incredibly unique. A late painting, for example:
is “Ornaments” [1942; Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki] combines a still life with landscape – a development, as Frances Spalding notes, of the Seven & Five Society’s interest in still life on a window sill [European Journeys: “Frances Hodgkins and British Modernism” pp7-24]. But those colours! There’s alchemy at work here surely as the browns, pinks, greens and yellows unite with rhythmic lines, pulsating textures and eye-bewitching patterns, to conjure a mesmerising harmony of golden light.
at The Pebbles Cafe in the old Havens building on Hamlet Court Road
to discuss (amongst other things no doubt!):
“Angelica: Paintress of Minds” by Miranda Miller [2020, Barbican Press]
There is a great article by Miranda Miller about Angelica Kauffman in Historia [here] in which she notes:
Like us, Angelica lived at a time of enormous change and was often bewildered by it. At the end of her life, still anxious to avoid scandal, she made a bonfire of most of her private papers. In my novel I’ve presumptuously tried to bring them back to life.
And a number of Kauffman’s paintings can be seen on the Royal Academy site [here] including
With our “Words & Pictures” book club starting up again next week, I thought I’d highlight just some of the rather exciting art and fiction books I’ve spotted coming over the next few months.
First up in January is “Bacon in Moscow” (Cheerio Publishing) by James Birch – a fabulous memoir of setting up an exhibition of Francis Bacon’s paintings in Moscow in 1988 – as with everything at the tail end of the USSR, its success was more by luck than judgement. From the Colony Room in London to the Artists Union of Russia, the young curator finds himself in the mix of all sorts of intriguing characters including a KGB officer, a glamorous young fashion designer, and of course Francis Bacon himself!
March brings “Edith and Kim”, the new novel by Charlotte Philby (The Borough Press) and, half-way through a proof copy, I can say it is absolutely brilliant! The Kim of the title is Kim Philby; the Edith is Edith Suschitsky, better known as Edith Tudor-Hart who until now I had only thought was a rather wonderful photographer but, as the archival research that underpins the novel reveals, Edith worked secretly for the Communist Party. Indeed it was Edith who introduced Kim Philby to his Soviet handler. Charlotte Philby brings all the suspense of such a dangerous and difficult life to the fore, from the Bauhaus to the Isokon building – and, as a reader, one finds oneself looking at the world through very different eyes.
“Letters to Gwen John” by the artist Celia Paul looks equally as fascinating:
Letters to Gwen John is Paul’s imagined correspondence with Gwen John, whose life and work have loomed so large in hers. These intimate, passionate, haunting letters allow Paul to reach across eras, to weigh up the sacrifices she has made, and to explore the rich possibilities of a life apart. With illuminating insights into the life and work of Gwen John, Letters to Gwen John is a unique form of memoir and conversation, and an unforgettable insight into a life devoted to making art.
Coming in April, the publishers (Jonathan Cape) say the book will include more than fifty artworks, reproduced in colour, by both Gwen John and Celia Paul.
“Firebird (A Bloomsbury Love Story)” is Susan Sellers’ new novel (to be published by Edward Everard Root in May). With the backdrop of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on the one hand and the Bloomsbury Group on the other, we are in 1921 when the ballet star Lydia Lopokova meets economist Maynard Keynes: “Vividly recreating Lydia’s journey from Tsarist St Petersburg to Jazz Age London via the Paris of Picasso, this richly imagined novel celebrates the love story of two of the twentieth century’s most dazzling original figures” – I can’t wait!
May 2022 also sees the publication of Frances Spalding’s “The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars” (Thames & Hudson) – A fresh look at a period of English art that has surged in interest and popularity in recent years, authored by one of Britain’s leading art historians and critics – which will bring a thrill to everyone who comes to our Art, Books & Culture Group discussions each month as Frances explores how the modernism of abstraction and Surrealism interweaves with British tradition and the Romantic spirit of place.
I can’t resist also adding in a novel from last year which will come out in paperback in June and which I think is absolutely tremendous: Michele Roberts’s “Cut Out” (Sandstone Press). It tells the tale of Denis – whose mother kept a highly significant secret from him – and Clemence who, now elderly, remembers the time she worked with Matisse. The story cuts between the two characters and past and present time-frames – eventually unfolding to reveal the secret – as, in-between, Michele Roberts positions word-pictures based on photographs taken of the elderly Matisse as he made his now famous cut-outs. What’s especially extraordinary is how, without missing a beat or making it feel forced, Roberts subtly uses language and description to conjure almost unconsciously so many of Matisse’s paintings in the mind’s eye.
It’s going to be a great year for us arty-booky folk methinks!
A few weeks ago, as part of my research on Nancy Cunard as an uncommon viewer – early research sorties into the art worlds in which she moved, lived and worked – the Librarian at Washington State University sent me some reproductions of items in their archive: namely correspondence between Nancy Cunard and Nina Hamnett. One, a postcard to Hamnett written in 1942 when Cunard was living in London is an invitation for them to meet up, go for a drink, and discuss working together on a project that would combine Hamnett’s illustrations with Cunard’s poetry – a project that seems not to have ever come off. However, the postcard also mentions “Salvo for Russia” which Cunard calls a ‘circular’ that had come out earlier in the year [April, 1942]. All had sold, but Cunard writes: “In case you’ve not seen it will bring Thursday, a lovely work of etchings at 2 guineas per copy… Mary Wykeham and John [Banting], and others”.
In her biography of Nancy Cunard, Anne Chisholm notes that Salvo for Russia
“contained poems, etchings and engravings to be sold to help the Soviet war effort.”
This portfolio of 10 prints was produced to provide aid to Soviet Russia, which in 1942 was fighting against the invasion by Nazi Germany. John Piper explores the impact of the Second World War on the British landscape and architecture in a characteristic Neo-Romantic work. John Buckland Wright contributes a quintessentially Surrealist print. The portfolio demonstrates the importance and variety of printmaking in the mid-twentieth century British art scene.
But it is to the Ashton Rare Books website we must go for more interesting information:
Cunard, Nancy and John Banting (Eds.) ~ Salvo for Russia : A Limited Edition of New Poems, Etchings and Engravings Produced in Aid of the Comforts Fund for Women and Children of Soviet Russia.
Privately Printed, London : 1942
and they describe it as:
Nancy Cunard’s very scarce portfolio ‘Salvo for Russia’ and one of the few major works of English Surrealism.
emphasising further:
Published by Nancy Cunard as ‘a limited edition of new poems, etchings and engravings’ to raise money for the ‘Comforts Fund for Women and Children of Soviet Russia’ after the invasion by the Germans, this is one of the very few British purely Surrealist publications.
Another Rare Books shop, Maggs of Bloomsbury, tell that only 100 copies of the ‘circular’ were published, and that it included:
…four poems by Cecily Mackworth, James Law Forsyth, J. F. Hendry and Nancy Cunard, along with ten etched and engraved plates by some of the leading British surrealists of the mid-20th century, including John Banting, Ithell Colquhoun, Roland Penrose, John Piper and John Buckland Wright, along with others by Mary Wykeham, C. Salisbury, Julian Trevelyan, Geza Szobel and Dolf Reiser.
John Banting’s “The Spirit of Appeasement” (other versions are called “Janus” and “The Eye of the World”).
In “Surrealism in Britain”, Michel Remy describes Janus as: “the two-faced divinity of war and peace… a monument to indifference.” The image shows the two forces of war and peace, bony and skeletal, as “inextricably entangled” – the world trapped within. Moreover, Remy says that Salvo for Russia, published just after Hitler’s surprise invasion of the USSR, was the “only instance of actual collaboration between surrealists and Marxists”.
Certainly Nancy Cunard’s poem “Russia – USSR” calls on the mighty strength of the Soviet Union; the first part reads:
“I see a man standing sharp against skyline, a woman on the horizon,
Born in a vast October, guarding the East and West of life.”
What is fascinating is that such a unique collaboration of artists and poets came about in London 1942.
The Ashton Rare Books website includes all the various mages, including “Attack” by Mary Wykeham, who Nancy Cunard mentions in the postcard and of whom very little – at least that I can find online – seems to be known.
Also, there is a version – titled “Zodiac” – of Ithell Colquhoun’s “Dance of the Nine Opals” [1942; private]:
inspired by the Merry Maidens, a stone circle near Penzance, and her increasing fascination with Celtic lore and magic.
The original of Julian Trevelyan’s image from Salvo for Russia is in the Tate collection and portrays the utter dehumanisation of war:
And what a marvellous meeting of the Group last Saturday for our ‘travels’ with Nancy Cunard through the art worlds of London, Paris and Harlem in the 1920s/30s. Here are a few resources that might be useful as starting points for further research.
Key biographies:
and for her poetry, there is a digital collection from the Bodleian Library online here which includes a fabulous introductory essay, Edith Sitwell’s poetry journal Wheels in which Cunard published is available online c/o the Modernist Journals Project.
The most recently published selection is:
The images on the cover of these books lead us immediately to the portraits of Nancy Cunard, the easiest to access being photographic portraits.
The Curtis Moffat photographs are at the Victoria & Albert Museum – here
Man Ray’s are in the Pompidou Archive – here – and his portraits of Henry Crowder – here
And it is very interesting to explore Barbara Ker-Seymer’s archive at Tate – here which includes photographs of Nancy Cunard, Edward Burra, John Banting and several other ‘personalities’ of the inter-war years.
The portrait paintings are slightly more difficult to track down:
Alvara Guevara’s very fashionable 1919 portrait is at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne – here – and the fabulous Eugene McCown is at the The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas archive:
As for Brancusi’s extraordinary sculpture of Nancy Cunard, there is a short essay on the Christie’s website – here.
The John Banting portraits seem only to be available as reproductions in the biographies, this one – from 1931 – is the frontispiece to Hugh Ford’s introduction in the re-published version of Negro Anthology [Continuum, 2002]:
There is much to be said, and more to explore, about Nancy Cunard’s relationship – as muse, patron and associate – with up & coming artists and photographers; as well as the global extent of her image in 1920s & 30s newspaper columns, moving from her status as glamorous debutante and fashion icon through to her trips to Harlem in 1931 and 1932 where racism and sexism are very much part of the ‘tabloid’ news agenda. There is a long and illuminating essay on all this at the Modernism/Modernity site – here.
One photograph by Man Ray [1928; Pompidou archive] that fascinates me is:
Might it have been taken in her Paris flat? Combined with the biographies, I found myself peering closely to see what paintings Nancy Cunard had on her walls. Many were lost and destroyed during WWII, but Anne Chisholm notes:
The only paintings from Nancy’s collection I’ve been able to discover (so far!) are:
The information given on the painting’s provenance in the catalogue of the Tanguy exhibition held in Baden-Baden in 1982 stated that the work belonged for a time to Nancy Cunard. If this is true, it must have been acquired during Tanguy’s exhibition in 1927, when the writer, then Louis Aragon’s lover, visited the show.
And the second painting is:
Marie Laurencin (1883-1956): Les bergères / The Shepherdesses [1922; private; c/o Christies]
Moving to a cottage at Reanville, in the Normandy countryside, Nancy Cunard – alongside surrealist poet Louis Aragon at first – set up her Hours Press to publish poetry in limited, and very contemporary, artistic editions which would include, in 1930, music and lyrics by her lover Henry Crowder (the jacket is a collage of photographs by Man Ray).
It was through her relationship with Henry Crowder – both her experience of their relationship, and hearing his stories of being African-American – that Nancy Cunard began her life-long commitment against racism.
One aspect was her support for the Scottsboro Boys, another the publication in 1933 of Negro Anthology which was dedicated to Henry Crowder; in the Foreword, she wrote: “It was necessary to make this book – and I think in this manner, an Anthology of some 150 voices of both races – for recording of the struggles and achievements, the persecutions and the revolts against them, of the Negro people.”
Part of Cunard’s research for the book was to travel to Harlem to meet poets, novelists and political writers to ask them to contribute. On her second trip, Cunard travelled with the surrealist John Banting, despite this I’ve not [yet] found any clues to her meeting with visual artists. However, she must have come across, for example, the illustrations by Aaron Douglas to the poetry of Langston Hughes whose poem “I, Too” led Cunard’s Anthology:
Paintings by Douglas encapsulate the Harlem Renaissance, including:
Douglas painted these murals to reflect African and African American history, the African American present, and his vision of a promising future… with graphically incisive motifs and the dynamic incorporation of such influences as African sculpture, jazz music, dance, and abstract geometric forms – NYPL.
And other artists might have included:
(Left) Winold Reiss: Interpretation of Harlem Jazz I [c.1920]; (Right) Stephen Longstreet’s sketchbooks [Beinecke Library; Yale]
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One aspect of visual art that Nancy Cunard did focus was that made in Africa. In Man Ray’s photographs we see her collection of bracelets, bangles and sculptures:
Some of her collection would be reproduced in Negro Anthology; a section is devoted to the variety of sculptures, masks and decorations from across Africa: Bambara Sculpture from West Africa, masks from Northern Congo and Nigerian bracelets and anklets. Indeed, Jane Marcus writes in the introduction to Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger that other “monumentally grand projects” lie in the archives, including: “a precise scholarly art-historical book on African ivories and a collection of notes, photographs and museum postcards from all over the world on the representation of Blacks in Western art.”
I’ve much more reading and research to do, but what is certain is that Nancy Cunard was close to art and artists and thought seriously about visual culture throughout her life.
thecommonviewer 