Refiguring the 50s: Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and L S Lowry

REFIGURING THE 50S: JOAN EARDLEY, SHEILA FELL, EVA FRANKFURTHER, JOSEF HERMAN AND L S LOWRY SARAH MACDOUGALL

EXTRACT FROM This is the full original essay.

DATE 2014 SOURCE Published in Sarah MacDougall, ed., Refiguring the 50s: Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and L S Lowry (London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2014), pp. 20–45.

Refiguring the 50s: Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and L S Lowry

The historian David Kynaston offers us a snapshot of Britain in 1945:

Shops on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street, red telephone boxes, Lyons Corner Houses, trams, trolley-buses, steam trains. […] Smoke, smog, […] wash day every Monday […]. Central heating rare […] Abortion illegal, homosexual relationships illegal, suicide illegal, capital punishment legal. White faces everywhere. Back-to-backs, narrow cobbled streets, Victorian terraces […] Suits and hats, dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, […] Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, […] Meat rationed, butter rationed, lard rationed, margarine rationed, sugar rationed, tea rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, sweets rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed. Make do and mend.1

Refiguring the 50s explores the long decade which followed on the heels of the Second World War – defined here as roughly 1945–62 – through the work of five powerful, individual, figurative painters: Joan Eardley (1921–1963), Sheila Fell (1931–1979), Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959), Josef Herman (1911–2000), and L S Lowry (1887–1976). All worked within a broadly realist tradition to capture a Britain and her people exhausted by war yet on the cusp of change. Each of them identified strongly with a particular place and people among whom they chose to live and work and which formed, for a significant part of their careers, the primary focus of their practice: Eardley, the Townhead area of Glasgow and its inhabitants, particularly its children; Fell, the landscape and community of her native Aspatria in Cumberland (now part of Cumbria);2 Frankfurther, London’s East End, as well as the new immigrant communities whom she worked alongside at Lyons Corner House, Piccadilly; Herman was celebrated during this period for his studies of the indigenous mining community in Ystradgynlais in South Wales; and Lowry, who had built his reputation on the multi-peopled cityscapes of his hometown of Manchester, received wide recognition for his work in this decade.

Despite often widely differing approaches to figuration and practice, each artist produced a concentrated and coherent body of work imbued with this strong sense of place, and of the 1

largely working-class community associated with it. All were observers of the human condition; each (arguably) a pioneer in depicting their chosen community, but also exploring questions relating to their own identity – whether of class, ethnicity or sexuality – as well as notions of displacement and belonging. They presented their subjects sometimes with pathos and sometimes with humour, but always with sensitivity, empathy and dignity. In bringing their work on these subjects together, this exhibition and publication seek to present a compelling alternative vision of postwar Britain in all its complexity.

As historian Dominic Sandbrook has noted of Britain in the mid-fifties: Perhaps the main impression that would have struck a foreign visitor […] was that of sheer clamour and commotion. Not only was Britain extremely crowded […]. Its population was more tightly packed into cities and towns than anywhere else on the Continent […] [;] eight out of ten Britons lived in urban communities’.3

In addition, throughout this decade and well into the next the British class system – Upper, Middle and Lower – remained in place, effectively satirized, and imprinted upon the popular imagination by the famous comedy sketch on the Frost Report in 1966. Lowry’s world exemplified this: his ‘city gents’ in their three-piece suits with bowler hats and furled umbrellas at one end of the scale, his clothed capped workers in overalls at the other.

In this period, roughly two-thirds of the population considered themselves working class.4 This classification included many categories of manual labourers – among them the miners, observed

by Herman and (briefly) Fell, the dockers captured by Frankfurther, and the factory workers who people Lowry’s canvases; while, the land workers, by now a minority, peopled Fell’s rural Cumbrian canvases.

The miners had a strong hold on the public imagination and Herman’s powerful depictions of them struck an emotional chord, particularly after he was commissioned to paint a large-scale mural for the 1951 Festival of Britain. Their female equivalent is to be found in Frankfurther’s lined and careworn women, often in drab headscarves or turbans (concealing curlers), who

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inhabit the old East End. The two groups exemplify what was still a largely conservative era. The cities were littered with bomb sites and children still played in the streets of Glasgow, Manchester and London trailing ‘pieces’ (of bread) or teddy bears, chalking the walls and pavements and poring over comics. The welfare state was in its infancy and the National Assistance Board (as experienced by and portrayed by Frankfurther) was still a reality for many.

Although the pace of change and a new spirit of optimism began to sweep the country following the Queen’s coronation in 1953 (which Lowry, among the crowds, captured from a ringside seat outside Buckingham Palace) 5, rationing only finally ended in 1954.6 Townhead, London’s East End, Manchester, the mining towns of Ystradgynlais and Aspatria, and the surrounding hills of Cumbria, all remained rooted in an earlier, less consumerist age. Yet in her pioneering portraits of the new immigrant populations – West Indian, Pakistani, Cypriot – whom she worked alongside in the West End (although they were confined to living beyond its margins), Frankfurther also documented the changing landscape of Britain.

As well as a shared subject matter, a range of personal and professional relationships, link all five Refiguring artists. Herman and Lowry twice exhibited together in London in 1943,7 and then once in Wakefield in 1955.8 Both were fellow members of the exhibiting society the London Group (Lowry elected 1948; Herman, elected 1953),9 and both were included in a number of important exhibitions in this decade including the Festival of Britain’s 60 Paintings for ’51, dominated by the so-called realist painters,10 and John Berger’s 1952 exhibition, Looking Forward: an exhibition of realist pictures by contemporary British artists11 (a smaller version of which was then reprised by the Arts Council to tour the provinces in 1953, with Berger’s own Herman drawing of a labourer holding a rake gracing the cover).12 Herman in particular, was championed by Berger, for whom his paintings represented the ‘oppression, endurance, the weight of labour’.13 ‘Realism,’ Herman himself remarked, ‘is so much less than reality […]

There is more to a miner or a peasant standing doing nothing than meets the eye’.14

As a newly-arrived refugee living in Glasgow (1940– 43), Herman had created work that looked back to the lost working-class Warsaw of his youth. After he learned in 1942 that his entire family had been killed these pictures had darkened to include desperate families: mothers and fathers saving children from flames and pogroms. Eardley met and was inspired by Herman in 3

this period (she helped ‘borrow’ him an easel from the Glasgow School of Art which he kept for the rest of his life).15 Her own preference for working-class life and urban themes perhaps stems from Herman’s influence in this period. 16 In Ystradgynlais in South Wales in the mid-1940s and 1950s Herman found an alternative working-class community which, with its own language and customs, must have seemed much like the one he had lost.17

Herman also met a young Sheila Fell in London in the 50s, no doubt encouraging her to experiment with studies of her own mining community, such as the charcoal interior In a Mine (c. 1955). Although these proved short-lived, Fell continued to make her native Cumbria her subject for the rest of her life, embedding her figures within the landscape so closely that it is impossible to separate them from it; they are unified with the natural environment. In Wedding in Aspatria (1958) the newly-weds cling together at the base of a tempestuous landscape but remain, nevertheless, at home in the fierce wild setting from which they have emerged. ‘I do not want to be thought of primarily as a landscape painter’, Fell wrote: I hope that the nearby community is implicit in my landscapes […] A painter can be rooted in reality, but by his efforts transcend it. Or he can be rooted in his dream but lean out of it towards reality. The greatest artists have both these qualities.18

Her timeless, labouring figures also inhabit similar ‘peasant’ landscapes to those that Herman first developed in the 1950s and continued to (re)create for the rest of his life, both in Britain and on his travels abroad. In contrast to their integration within Fell’s work, however, Herman’s Ystradgynlais figures stand out strongly against the landscape – their plain, working clothes offset by the blue, golden or twilight skies that glorify their labours as they stop to rest or make their way home. They too belong to the landscape they inhabit and identify with it, but it has not conquered them; instead, they return as heroes to the warm welcome of home.

In London Fell also met and was befriended by Lowry, who offered her crucial, lifelong support.

Despite the differences in their approach, they shared an interest in setting their working-class subjects within the land or city scape with which they each most identified. Both experimented with the possibilities of the strong vertical format; Lowry sometimes subverting expectations by

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using a portrait format for a cityscape and conversely, a landscape format for urban group portraits including the gangling, puppet-like forms of his City Gentlemen, who have been detached from the city which they inhabit.

Frankfurther, as Margaret Garlake has observed, stands apart from these shared relationships. 19 Although she and Fell were born within a year of each, they came from very different backgrounds. Frankfurther born to a comfortable, assimilated, German-Jewish middle-class family forced to flee to England in 1939, and Fell to poor, working-class parents in a Cumbrian mining town. They overlapped by a year at St. Martin’s between 1950 and 1951, where they must at least have passed one another on their way to class, but there is no evidence that they ever met. Like Eardley, both were strong-minded, individual women seeking to establish their place as painters in what was largely still a male-dominated profession. Frankfurther was primarily interested in subject. Although she worked at developing her technique, it was always in the service of more truthfully rendering her subjects. ‘Style and technique’, she observed, ‘are only the vessel for the true content’, and although she allowed that the vessel was ‘essential to hold the contents together’, she insisted that ‘[…] content is what really matters and it should determine the form’. Fell however worked holistically towards a synergy of ‘structure, form, colour, and the poetry or chemistry that comes from a unity of these things’.20 Apart from one rare moment of unity, their work diverged along wholly separate lines.

Frankfurther also probably never met Herman, yet their shared preference for humble subjects must have been apparent when their work was exhibited together as part of a large group show at Ben Uri in 1956.21 Between 1952 and 1956 Frankfurther showed regularly at the East End Academy exhibitions excerpts from her ‘Whitechapel Diary’, comprising hundreds of swift, fluid sketches of characters from the East End streets, many observed; others drawn from memory on tiny sheets of paper. They recall Herman’s earlier autobiographical cycle, ‘Memory of Memories’, executed in Glasgow, and Lowry’s scribbled observations on scraps of paper, made on his frequent tours of Manchester. He too saw his subjects everywhere, from the waiting rooms of the new NHS hospitals to the streets of the city and its outlying areas; as did Frankfurther, who was both a hospital and prison visitor in this period.

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When Lowry painted the first of his many portraits of ‘Ann’ in 1957, he claimed that it was the first portrait he had painted for 30 years. Although Ann’s beauty conforms to that of a 1950s’ screen idol, her chalk-white complexion also has all the eerie, iconic perfection of an Elizabethan portrait icon. After Lowry’s death, efforts to trace the model proved fruitless and most commentators concluded that she was in fact an imaginary, composite figure: some thought that he had conflated Sheila Fell’s dark-eyed good looks with those of the ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn, whom Lowry admired and saw perform on several occasions. The smooth surface of Ann’s portrait contrasts with the rough-hewn surface of Lowry’s Two Heads in profile, one of his most striking portraits (not least because of the subjects’ similarity), although in a later version this rough surface has been smoothed away. Similarly, Eardley’s Boy’s Head, also seen in profile, escapes sentimentality because of a strong individuality offset by the loosely worked, roughly churned paint applied with a palette knife.

Three portraits: Herman’s The Welsh Miner (1948), Frankfuther’s Portrait of a Woman and Fell’s Clifford Rowan (c. 1952) show a rare moment of unity. All are set against muted backgrounds and their subjects are depicted with folded arms, It is here, perhaps uniquely, we see their work at its closest. Herman’s miner fully occupies his frame with a decided physical presence though his black and fathomless stare is impassive and impenetrable. Frankfurther’s young woman avoids our gaze, and her pose suggests a patient stoicism, yet she also exhibits a quiet determination. Both can be read as archetypes of the male and female worker. Fell’s portrait is clearly identified as that of her friend and fellow student Clifford Rowan; his physique, which literally extends beyond the top of the frame, is imposing, yet his eyes are masked, occluded, and his expression equally impossible to read. Hands Although portraits are rare in Fell’s work she painted a series of highly accomplished studies of her mother Ann, including Portrait of Ann Fell 1 (c. 1955), during the 1950s.22 Her commissioned portrait from 1962 of Nobel Prize winning crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin (1910–1994),23 with its predominantly green palette and strongly planted figure seems a natural development from these. Fell successfully captured Hodgkin’s ‘other-worldly quality, with her slight figure, wavy […] hair, startlingly blue eyes, and preference for handmade clothes that made few concessions to fashion’.24 6

Frankfurther never painted her own family but often put family life at the centre of her compositions. Couple with Infant (1956) depicts her Lyons co-worker and friend, Catherine Jones, and her partner, both from the Windrush generation, together with their new-born daughter. The tired mother appears to release her child only reluctantly to the new father, who is awkward, not yet used to the responsibilities of parenthood, but the warm, mellow palette and the baby brings a tenderness to the scene and the baby unites them. This preference for a warm palette traditionally associated with the feminine indicates Frankfurther’s over-riding sympathy for her female subjects and spills over into her depiction of West Indian Waitresses (c. 1955).

The waitresses make a natural pairing with her West Indian Porters (c. 1955), both observed from life by Frankfurther at Lyons, and probably painted in the same year, although on close examination there are as many differences as similarities between them.25

Both Frankfurther (never a mother herself) and Herman (a loving father) repeatedly explored the mother and child motif; Eardley and Lowry almost never; Fell not at all. Eardley, as her biographer Christopher Andreae makes clear, never included a mother and child among her Glasgow works. Her Venetian Beggar Woman No. 2 (c. 1949), expressionistic and darkly moving, is atypical; the woman, seen by Eardley on her travels through Italy, cradles a child in an attitude reminiscent of a pietà (a subject also treated by Frankfurther). A sense of alienation separates Lowry’s angular, disconnected mother and child, in stark contrast to Frankfurther’s many tender mother-and-child studies. Herman, for whom the mother and child pairing was particularly heartfelt and poignant, is uncharacteristic in his early Mother and Child (1945), where the doll-like figures are not wholly connected. More typical are two later compositions, Mother and Child (1945–50) and the late Mother and Child (1968–9), dark in the spirit of Rouault; in both the mother grasps her baby in a tight embrace. Parents and children people Herman’s compositions throughout his long career, often as vignettes amid larger scenes, sometimes at twilight as in Street Scene, Ystradgynlais (1945), where amid a small group an aproned worker holds a small child by the hand. By contrast, Eardley’s Townhead series including Baby on Boy’s Knee (1959) illustrates the role of substitute parenting those older siblings often provided for the younger and how reluctantly this role was sometimes performed.

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Frankfurther, like Eardley, loved children and got on well with them. During her early years at St Martin’s she spent three summers working in children’s camps in North Carolina teaching arts and crafts (among other subjects) to a class of adoring children, although a brief stint as a teacher in the East End proved disastrous (she even stayed on for two years at St Martin’s to complete a teacher-training course, before deciding she was temperamentally unsuited to teaching). Both women created highly successful portraits of children using a bold palette. Frankfurther’s Girl with a Teddy Bear and Eardley’s Little Girl with a Squint both suck their fingers. Frankfurther’s little girl is serious, where Eardley’s is playful; her clenched fist perhaps conceals the chalk that created the graffiti on the wall behind her. Eardley recreates the random expressiveness of this graffiti plastered across the tenement walls by collaging strips of newspapers or painted letters into the background of her works. Her Townhead studio was treated as ‘open house’ by her young neighbours and her vividly evoked studies of them are empathetic but unsentimental.

Boys and girls stare out at us unabashed from a series of portraits including the moving Brother and Sister (1955); Boy with Piece, and Girl in a Red Jumper: they are vital, scruffy, raw. The boy in The Khaki Shirt displays a cool insouciance. Attitudes are also captured through posture in Girl in Blue, Winter, her hands sunk deep in her pockets, warding off the cold, while the Girl in a Red Dress, casually swings her arms.

This preference for a strong, Fauve palette marks Eardley out from Frankfurther, Lowry, and Herman with their shared inclination for muted colours. For them, technique was secondary to subject. In her London studies, Frankfurther often chose to minimise – sometimes to eliminate – the background altogether and chose the palette that best potrayed the austere lives of her subjects. Living off meagre earnings herself, she worked mostly in oil on paper (a medium shared at least once by Lowry), which was cheaper than canvas. Fell, also impecunious, initially concentrated on more monochromatic forms, but as she started to make money from teaching and to sell more work however, she was able to break out and experiment more freely with colour.26 For Fell, as for Eardley, technique was of the greatest importance, and both were preoccupied throughout their careers with form as well as with colour.

In their depiction of urban life, the artists’ focus moves from the macro to the micro. Lowry’s name is synonymous with street life, however the majority of Lowrys in this exhibition are not 8

the large-scale industrial works but smaller compositions, more intimate in scale, for by the 50s he was leaving the larger works behind. Figures in a Street (1960), painted at the close of this decade, is a microcosm of his familiar world: chimneys smoke against a hazy background, children play in the streets, women carry shopping, and in the background a man, woman, and child – possibly a family (though not united) – peer over the railings behind them. Increasingly, in this decade, Lowry began to foreground small groups such as these and to reduce the details of their surroundings to a minimum. He observes his subjects with interest, sometimes humour, but remains a detached observer. Herman and Frankfurther, however, achieve empathy for their subjects by a further narrowing of focus: Herman restricts his canvas to the streets of Ystradgynlais, often focusing on small groups or single individuals; Frankfurther restricts her street life to that of the East End and to the individuals who people it in portraits including The Newspaper Seller (c. 1955) and Old Man in Brown Cap, she captures the harsh unrelenting ‘stark struggles’ of their lives. Conversely, in small groups, such as the lithograph Street Conversation, her characters stopping in the doorway to converse, capture the warmth and intimate rhythms of life in the old Jewish East End. The theme of the outsider pervades postwar culture from Sartre to Colin Wilson. The latter’s non-fiction study exploring the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society, and society’s effect on him, was published to great controversy in 1956. Individual marginalized figures can also be found in Eardley’s Venetian Beggar Woman and Lowry’s Woman with a Shopping Bag (1956), who appears to have become separated, unanchored from an earlier, large-scale composition. Her marginalisation is literally represented here by the compressed, narrow format and unfinished background that encloses her curiously elongated figure. Yet the similarly compressed couple in The Assignation (1960) do not belong in this category, instead their mismatched heights and (unusual) closeness evoke a humorous tenderness, while in the haunting Portrait of a Young Man (1955) Lowry captures the existential angst of the age.

Lowry’s Protest March (1959) and Frankfurther’s Demonstration (c. 1956) show an artistic response to political events: Lowry’s protestors gain momentum and impact as they crowd into their vertical canvas, facing us out as they move towards us in one body; Frankfurther’s crowd of women are broken up by the dramatic entrance of mounted policemen who sow fear among 9

them, they purse their lips with disapproval, lift hands to their faces to shout out or, cross their hands over their heads for protection. Similar political concerns were also evidenced by Herman whose (lost) Aldermaston March (1963) commemorates the first London CND march in 1958.

His socially aware work has strong resonances with Frankfurther’s and contemporary commentators noted its warmth, in contrast to Lowry’s detachment. Yet as Andrew Lambirth has commented of Herman, ‘more often than not,’ his figures are ‘anonymous, and represent the universal […] they stand for the dignity of labour, of the working man’, while Frankfurther concentrates on the particular. They shared a background as Jewish émigrés (Herman refuted the term ‘refugee’) forced to leave their native lands during the era of National Socialism and both chose to embed themselves in new communities. Both were strongly left-wing. Frankfurther applied to become a social worker before her death (her application was posthumously approved). Herman chose a community which was in many ways like that he left behind.

Frankfurther, restlessly searching, lived among one established, but changing community, and worked among another newly arrived. Closely affiliated to both, she was perhaps truly at home in neither. It could be observed of both artists (as has been suggested of Herman’s generation of Polish émigrés) that they were ‘rooted in a European culture more emotionally generous, more learned and more concerned with meaning than the one they found here’. 27 It is not surprising to learn that most of the five artists discussed here also shared a ‘pantheon’ of favourite painters: Rembrandt, Daumier, Permeke, van Gogh and Käthe Kollwitz were variously admired by Eardley, Fell, Frankfurther and Herman and underpinned their appreciation of the working figure. As Sheila Fell put it, ‘One has one’s family of artists around one. The people whose work one loves. It’s like sitting in the kitchen at home, only instead of relatives one has the paintings of Cézanne, Daumier, van Gogh, Permeke’. Yet just as these historical figures ranged widely in their form, method, and interpretation of their preferred subject matter, so too did the inheritors of this tradition, working through their own concerns in a different age. The work brought together here indicates how, despite shared concerns, these artists remained strong individualists, each representing their own chosen communities through a particular focus which allows us to see this important decade through their eyes. They invite us to refigure the 50s.

Acknowledgments: with special thanks to Beate Planskoy 10

© Sarah MacDougall 2014 Printed: in entirety Published in Sarah MacDougall, ed., Refiguring the 50s: Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and L S Lowry (London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2014), pp. 20–45.

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David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945-51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007; reprinted 2008), p. 19.

Cumberland is a historic county of North West England, which had an administrative function from the 12th until the late twentieth-century. Bordered by Northumberland to the east, County Durham to the southeast, Westmorland and Lancashire to the south, and Dumfriesshire in Scotland to the north, it formed an administrative county from 1889 to 1974 (excluding Carlisle from 1914) and now forms part of Cumbria.

3 Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good (London: Little Brown, 2005; this edition, Abacus, 2013), pp. 31-32.

4 Sandbrook, op. cit., p. 34.

5 L S Lowry, The Procession Passing the Queen Victoria Memorial, 1953, UK Government Art Collection.

6 Sandbrook, op. cit., p. 48.

7 The exhibition took place at Alex Reid & Lefevre (St James’s, London, SW1) from late February to 10 March 1943. They were probably brought together as two painters of working-class life. Lowry had previously held his first one-man exhibition at the same gallery in 1939.

8 Paintings and Drawings by L. S. Lowry and Josef Herman, Pottery by Nehemiah Azaz (Wakefield: Wakefield City Art Gallery, 1955).

9 They were also later shown together posthumously as part of the group exhibition Twentieth Century Painting & Sculpture: L S Lowry, Henry Moore, Laura Knight, Alberto Morrocco, Beatrice How, Sheila Fell, Alan Lowndes John Piper, Mary Fedden, Josef Herman, Vincent Bennett, John Bratby, Elisabeth Frink, Jack Knox, Anthony Eyton, Derek Hill, Gwen John, William Crosbie (London: John Martin Gallery, 2002); and at The London Group exhibition in Southampton, 2014.

10 It also included Julian Trevelyan, Frances MacDonald and Leonard Applebee, and fellow émigrés Martin Bloch, Peter Peri, Siegfried Charoux and Lucian Freud.

11 Herman showed (38) Tired Miner, Lent by Dr. H. Roland; (39) Mother and Child, charcoal drawing, private collection; (40) Tapping the Barrel, ink drawing, collection of Dr. H. Roland; (41) The Little Harbour, collection of Dr. H. Roland; Man with a Rake, pen and ink, lent by John Berger, esq; and Lowry (56) Family Group; (57) A Procession; (58) Portrait of a Woman;(59) The Gateway (60) Beach Scene, Lancashire, all courtesy of the Lefevre Gallery.

12 A smaller selection of works from the exhibition made by John Berger was then shown under the auspices of The Arts Council in 1953 as a touring exhibition ‘in the provincial galleries’. It included (9) Josef Herman, Tired Miner, oil 183/4 x 20 ins, Lent by Dr. H. Roland; (13) L S Lowry, A Procession, oil, 14 ½ x 20 ¼ ins, lent by the Lefevre Gallery; and (40) Josef Herman, Man with a Rake, pen and ink, 9 x 73/4 ins, lent by John Berger, esq.’ (None of these three works was for sale).

13 Cited Tate label to Herman’s Evening, Ystradgynlais, 1948, oil on canvas Presented by the Roland Collection 1982, reference TO6523; see also Judith Walsh, “ ‘Partial, Passionate and Political’: Art Criticism in the 1950s”, in S. MacDougall, ed., Refiguring the 50s: Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and L S Lowry (London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2014), pp. 46-59.

14 Douglas Hall, Josef Herman NAL File, accessed 4.12.13.

15 It was only returned by his widow after Herman’s death (see Monica Bohm-Duchen, The Art and Life of Josef Herman (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2009), p. 49.

16 The Scottish painter and stage designer Tom Macdonald recalled her as one of ‘a small group of artists’, himself included, who came under Herman’s influence. See Bohm-Duchen, ibid., p. 59.

17 Both artists would also be represented by the London dealers Roland, Browse & Delbanco.

18 Sheila Fell, exhibition catalogue (London: London South Bank Centre, 1990).

19 See Margaret Garlake, “Representing the Postwar World” in S. MacDougall, ed., Refiguring the 50s, op. cit., pp.

10-19.

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Sheila Fell, op. cit., p. 25.

Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists This was a group show of 86 exhibits by 86 artists. Herman showed (4) Peasant and Horse Cart; Frankfurther (42) Stateless Person. Frank Auerbach (39) also exhibited City Building Site within the same exhibition.

22 See Cate Haste, “The Poetry of Place: Sheila Fell” in Sarah MacDougall, ed., Refiguring the 50s, op. cit., pp. 7687.

23 The Festival Pattern Group brought together design, science and industry by commissioning textiles, wallpaper, domestic objects and Festival exhibits based on x-ray crystallography after Dr Helen Megaw, a leading Cambridge University crystallographer, suggested using the surface molecular patterns revealed in x-ray crystallography. After hearing a presentation by Dorothy Hodgkin to the Society of Industrial Artists, Mark Hartland Thomas, chief industrial officer of the CoID, took up the idea and formed the Festival Pattern Group. Festival of Britain online.

24 In the late 1930s and early 1940s Hodgkin’s future husband, Thomas, taught history to unemployed miners in Cumberland. See Dictionary of National Biography: Georgina Ferry.

25 See Jorg Garbrecht’s “In Focus: Eva Frankfurther” in S. MacDougall, ed., Refiguring the 50s, pp. 88-89, and Sarah MacDougall, “The Lives of Others: Eva Frankfurther”, ibid., pp. 90-103, for a more detailed discussion of these works.

26 Sheila Fell, interviewed in 1965 for her Abbot Hall, Kendal exhibition by Border-ITV news: youtube.

27 Douglas Hall, cited in my Tate paper on Hodin: see notes in my conference papers.

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