Tsg modern british heroines

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL EXHIBITIONS 2014

EDINBURGH international FESTIVAL EXHIBITIONS 2014

1-30 august 2014

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modern british heroines

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michael becker

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koji hatakeyama

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helen denerley

16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ tel 0131 558 1200 email mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

Cover: Lapis lazuli detail, courtesy of Michael Becker, 2014 Left: Downstairs at The Scottish Gallery, March 2014. Photograph: William Van Esland

MODERN BRITISH HEROINES Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 1912-2004 Prunella Clough 1919-1999 Joan Eardley 1921-1963 Mary Fedden 1915-2012 Elisabeth Frink 1930-1993 Gwyn Hanssen Pigott 1935-2013 Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975 Gwen John 1876-1939 Winifred Nicholson 1893-1981 Anne Redpath 1895-1965

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FOREWORD To accompany and complement the exhibition of new work by Victoria Crowe for the Festival 2014 we have curated a survey of ten 20th century woman artists each of whom made a significant, individual contribution to the history of Modern British art. None is defined by the fact of her gender nor are we trying to make the case for a distinctive thread of femininity running through the period.

However their contribution is such that in art, as with literature, parity between the sexes has been achieved in the post War decades and there is no requirement for contemporary, critical ‘positive discrimination’. Yet the individual stories mirror the age as each woman faced discrimination and critical dismissal and seemed to have more to prove to emerge from the shadow of a husband, partner or master, or otherwise embraced an individual, unconventional life to pursue the path of her vocation. From the short life of Joan Eardley, full of passion to be herself and fulfill her destiny, to the long, productive life of Mary Fedden, quietly emerging as a beloved people’s painter but always a consummate picture-maker. From the quietism and delicacy of Gwen John and Prunella Clough and Winifred Nicholson who emerged from behind the stifling, larger personalities of male contemporaries to achieve their proper places.

To the sculptors Elisabeth Frink and Barbara Hepworth who match and balance the extraordinary richness of modern English sculpture.

To the potter Gwyn Hanssen Pigott who learned with Coper and Leach but whose legacy forms the basis for so much contemporary practice from Edmund de Waal to Rupert Spira and Julian Stair. And the Scots, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Anne Redpath each of whose genius, in very different ways, outshone and outlasted the conventionalities of their early lives to achieve full flowering and wide acclaim in the male-dominated worlds of the St Ives and Edinburgh Schools. Victoria Crowe needs no leg-up from a feminist standpoint as she makes her way, quietly but in triumph, but she can perhaps look at the heroines of the Modern British School for the fact of their lives and the great legacy of their work.

Guy Peploe

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Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE, HRSA, HRSW (1912-2004) Wilhelmina Barns-Graham was born in St Andrews and attended Edinburgh College of Art from 1932-1937. She moved to St Ives in the 1940s where she joined the artist societies of Newlyn, St Ives and Penwith and became friends with Winifred Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. A trip to Switzerland in 1948 inspired her Glacier Series and further significant travel to Italy in 1955 highlighed her strong draughtsmanship. She divided her time between St Andrews and St Ives from 1960 and produced various significant series of abstract works from the geometric to the more organic. Later in her life her work took on a colourful, painterly flourishing in tandem with magnificent printmaking with Graal Press, consolidating her place as a major Modern British figure. She died in St Andrews in 2004.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Balmungo Studio, c.1992, photograph

by Rowan James. Image courtesy of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Charitable Trust.

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Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 1 Last Light No.1, 1998 acrylic on paper, 76.4 x 56.4 cms signed lower right Provenance The Barns-Graham Trust, Inventory no. BGT3085 6

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Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 2 Summer - Yellow, 1999 screenprint, 54.5 x 74 cms (edition 16/75) signed and dated lower right Provenance The Barns-Graham Trust 8

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Prunella Clough (1919-1999) Born in Chelsea, London in 1919, to an affluent middle-class family, Clough was initially educated privately by her father, the poet Eric Taylor, before enrolling at the Chelsea School of Art (now Chelsea College of Art and Design) in 1937. Her aunt was Irish artist Eileen Gray who was a pioneer of modernist architecture and design. Clough is considered one of the subtlest and most poetic British artists of the post-war period. Her early work is characterised by the proletarian subject matter of labour and the urban landscape described within a narrow tonal range. Later, she moved to more poetic abstractions inspired by her sensory impressions of the world around her as she encourages the viewer to see the beauty and boldness in the everyday. She associated with like-minded individuals and was part of the group which included Michael Ayrton, Keith Vaughan, John Croxton and the poet Dylan Thomas that met in the Camden Hill Studio. This was the studio which John Minton shared with Scots, Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. She was a highly influential artist and teacher to a whole generation of painters, where she taught at Chelsea and Wimbledon Schools of Art. In 1999, three months before her death, she won the prestigious Jerwood painting prize.

In 2007 she was the subject of a major exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London.

Prunella Clough, 1964 by Jorge Lewinski Š The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth / Bridgeman Images 11

Prunella Clough 3 Winter Hedge, 1956 oil on board, 86 x 64.6 cms signed lower left Provenance The Hon. Mrs Peter Harvey Exhibited Prunella Clough, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1960, cat. 55; A Human Edge: Paintings, Constructions and Graphics by Prunella Clough, Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, 2012 Literature Frances Spalding, Prunella Clough: Regions Unmapped, Lund Humphries, 2012, p.127 12

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Prunella Clough 4 By the Seaside I, 1999 oil on canvas 72.2 x 81.5 cms Provenance Karel Reisz; Annely Juda Fine Art, London 15

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Joan Eardley RSA (1921-1963) Over 50 years have now passed since the death of Joan Eardley in August 1963. In one important sense her light, that burned so brightly, is still shining today; her work seems as urgent, honest and enthralling as when it was made. She would have been little concerned with her artistic legacy being a person entirely caught up with the drama and tribulation of the process of making art. It was the process that truly mattered; sometimes her drawings were given to the children who thronged through her Townhead studio, to be later used to light a fire in the paternal hearth, or discarded paintings on board used to lag the loft space of her Catterline cottage. But she was a passionate, driven painter who worked tirelessly, no doubt to the cost of her health; the next picture was the only one that mattered. These character traits were not at the cost of humanity, indeed her work could not have been made without a deep sympathy for her subject and the wider human condition.

Joan Eardley was born in West Sussex. She studied at Goldsmith’s and Glasgow School of Art from 1940 to 1943 and then in 1947 at Hospitalfield under James Cowie. A Post-Diploma at Glasgow in 1948 was followed by travel in Italy and France. From the 1950’s, Eardley’s output divides between work depicting the townscape and children of depressed urban Glasgow from her studio in Townhead and powerful landscapes and seascapes from her cottage at Catterline, in Kincardineshire.

Joan Eardley painting in Catterline. Photograph by Audrey Walker 17

Eardley painted in all seasons and throughout the day so that her subject changed continuously in the light. Here she looks to the cliff-top across the field in winter dusk, the sunset a lamp in the dirty sky. She has worked quickly with a brush and knife as the subject is about to be extinguished by the on-coming night.

Joan Eardley 5 Sunset Landscape, 1963 oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30.5 cms Provenance Artist Studio no. EE338; Private Collection, Edinburgh Exhibited Joan Eardley, Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1964, cat. 49 18

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Mary Fedden OBE, RA, RWA (1915-2012) Mary Fedden was born in Bristol. She left school at sixteen to study at the Slade School of Art in London. After leaving the college she made a living teaching, painting portraits and producing stage designs for Sadlers Wells and the Arts Theatre.

At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Fedden enlisted in the Land Army and the Woman’s Voluntary Service where she was commissioned to produce murals for the war effort. In 1944 she was sent abroad as a driver for the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes.

After the war, Fedden returned to easel painting and developed her individual style of still life painting. In an article in The Artist magazine, Fedden wrote: ‘I really float from influence to influence. I found the early Ben Nicholsons fascinating as were the paintings of his wife Winifred.

I also admire the Scottish artist Anne Redpath and the French painter Henri Hayden’.

In 1951 Mary Fedden married the artist Julian Trevelyan whom she had met before the outbreak of war. They bought a studio together on the River Thames at Chiswick, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. From 1958-1964 she taught at the Royal College of Art and was appointed the first female tutor in the Painting School.

Her pupils included David Hockney, Allen Jones and Victoria Crowe.

Subsequently, Fedden taught at the Yehudi Menuhin School and was elected Royal Academician. From 1984 to 1988 she was President of the Royal West of England Academy. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath and an O.B.E. for her work in 2009. She died at her home in Chiswick in 2012.

Mary Fedden in her studio, c.2012, photograph by Anne Purkiss 21

Mary Fedden 6 Still Life, 1991 oil on board, 61 x 52 cms signed and dated lower left Provenance Private Collection, The Scottish Borders 22

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Elisabeth Frink DBE, RA, CH (1930-1993) Elisabeth Frink was born in Thurlow in Suffolk in 1930 where she witnessed firsthand the danger of wartime Britain. She studied at the Guildford School of Art from 1946 to 1949 and at the Chelsea School of Art from 1949 to 1953. She is most associated with the post-war school of British sculptors, including Reg Butler, her tutor Bernard Meadows and Eduardo Paolozzi. Her work is distinguished by her commitment to naturalistic forms and themes, often including religious motifs. She concentrated on bronze outdoor sculpture with a scarred surface created by repeatedly coating an armature with wet plaster; each coating is distressed and broken, eliminating detail and generalising form. Frink frequently portrayed animals in her work; they were used to convey strong feelings such as panic, tension or aggression.

Our example is a baboon which dates from 1989, another version, Seated Baboon by Frink is in the Tate Collection. She first produced a baboon after being commissioned by the Zoological Society of London in 1976. During the late 1980s she returned to the theme.

Edward Lucie-Smith writes ‘had she lived, the theme was likely to have taken a central position in her work… What appealed to her from a purely visual standpoint was the baboon’s physical compactness, and most of all its massive skull and head. She once remarked that a baboon was a much better subject for sculpture than a monkey, whose spidery limbs and long tail made it difficult to portray in three dimensions. As her drawings demonstrated, the underlying theme or allegory is the confrontation of the wholly natural with the human – that is, with an intelligence which has started to disassociate itself from natural things. Her baboons are alert but contemplative. They are also, like her dogs, to a certain degree inscrutable, and she is careful not to endow them with human emotions.’

(Edward Lucie-Smith, Elisabeth Frink, Sculpture Since 1984 And Drawings, Art Books International, London, 1994, p.28)

Elisabeth Frink in her studio, c.1980. © Peter Kinnear, FCR145 25

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Elisabeth Frink 7 Walking Baboon, 1989 bronze edition 6 of 9 H: 29.8 cms signed and numbered ‘Frink 6/9’ 27

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Gwyn Hanssen Pigott (1935-2013) Gwyn Hanssen Pigott was born in Australia in 1935 but came to England in 1958 where she served apprenticeships with English potters Ray Finch, Michael Cardew and Bernard Leach. Influences in her work include the Song Dynasty and the quiet still lifes of Georgio Morandi. She worked at the Aldermaston Pottery with Alan CaigerSmith, and also had a studio in France for a period during the 1960s.

She returned to Tasmania in 1974 to establish her own studio. Her work gradually developed from single objects to still life groups which are now recognised as her signature work, these influenced a whole generation of new artists. She gained international status as an artist during her lifetime and her work is held in numerous collections worldwide. The Scottish Gallery held a solo exhibition of her work in 2008.

‘I once wrote, before I knew pots like these by Gwyn but it might have been about her, “the objects in the middle, my main concern, are about life and still life at once. They can be used but their function is partly frozen in reflection about themselves …” Objects such as these fill the gap between prose and poetry, between ordinary and breathtaking, combining both.’ Alison Britton, July 2008

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, 2013 © Erskine, Hall & Coe Limited 29

Gwyn Hanssen Pigott 8 Three Blue, 2008 translucent porcelain, 52.5 cms (w) x 30 cms (d) photograph: Brian Hand Exhibited Festival Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, August 2008, cat. 3 30

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Barbara Hepworth DBE, RA (1903-1975) Born in 1903 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, Barbara Hepworth was an eminent English artist and sculptor. She learned to carve stone while in Rome in 1925-1926, together with her first husband the sculptor John Skeaping. Hepworth thus aligned herself to the direct carving movement championed by modernist sculptors such as Brancusi, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska. After their return to London, Hepworth and Skeaping held their first important exhibition, showing mainly stone carvings of figures and animals, at the Beaux Arts Gallery in June 1928. Hepworth and Skeaping’s relationship deteriorated and their marriage was dissolved in 1933. Later that year Hepworth travelled to France with fellow artist Ben Nicholson, whom she later married in 1938. These visits, which continued up until 1935 put them in personal contact with an international avant-garde, in particular Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Hans Arp, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian. By this stage Hepworth was the first sculptor to be working in purely abstract form. Hepworth and Nicholson first visited Cornwall in 1939 and relocated to St Ives that year. From then her artistic direction changed to incorporate references to landscape forms and patterns of nature. In Cornwall Hepworth associated with fellow St Ives painters and enjoyed the intellectual engagement of an artistic community. Hepworth tragically died in a fire in her studio in 1975. Her work is represented in more than a hundred public collections throughout the world and a museum dedicated to her work opened in Wakefield in May 2011.

Barbara Hepworth, 1968 by Jorge Lewinski © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth / Bridgeman Images 33

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Barbara Hepworth 9 Delphi (Stone Form), 1960 oil, pencil and wash, 97 x 76 cms signed and dated lower right Provenance New Art Centre, Roche Court Sculpture Park Š Bowness, Hepworth Estate 35

Barbara Hepworth 10 Group of Three Magic Stones, 1973 Silver, slate base, 7.6 x 35 x 31 cms Edition 2 of 6 Provenance Artist’s inventory number BH 569; Private Collection, courtesy New Art Centre, Roche Court Sculpture Park © Bowness, Hepworth Estate 36

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Gwen John (1876-1939) Gwen John was born in Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire in 1876, although she spent most of her career in Paris. She was the sister of the painter Augustus John, with whom she studied at the Slade School of Art in London from 1894 to 1897. Moving to Paris in 1898, she studied under the American-born painter James McNeill Whistler, whose muted colours and subtle harmonies of tone were a great influence on her work. She also became an artist’s model for the sculptor Auguste Rodin in 1906, with whom she began an intense romantic relationship which lasted for 10 years. Rodin’s celebrated statue Whistler’s Muse is testament to his relationship with Gwen, who served as the model for the masterpiece. Her brother Augustus was a brilliant draughtsman with a flamboyant personality; it was he who found fame as an artist, while his more reserved sibling remained unknown and impoverished throughout her life. Augustus predicted that one day she would be considered the better artist. After a number of years of self neglect Gwen John died in Dieppe in 1939.

She rose to fame posthumously with a memorial exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery in 1946 which established her reputation. Her work is now in the collection of The Tate Gallery and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Gwen John, c.1916, image courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, London 39

Gwen John 11 Untitled (Still Life Plant), c.1925-30 gouache and watercolour on paper, 8 x 5.5 cms Provenance Sarah John, the artist's great niece 40

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Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) Winifred Nicholson was born in Oxford in 1893. She was encouraged to paint as a child by her grandfather, the artist George Howard. In 1912 she began her formal studies at the Byam Shaw School of Art. In 1920 Winifred met the painter Ben Nicholson. They married within the year and worked alongside each other in Italy, France, Devon and Cornwall and spent their winters at a villa among vines on the mountainside above Lake Lugano on the Italian-Swiss border.

In Paris Winifred and Ben were able to see works by Derain, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. They particularly admired the primitivism of Gauguin and Rousseau. In 1923 they exhibited together (the first of many joint exhibitions) at Paterson Gallery in London. The following year they acquired an old farmhouse, Bankshead, in Cumberland. The home became a source of huge inspiration for Winifred and remained so for many years. Artists such as Paul Nash, Ivon Hitchens and Christopher Wood visited the Nicholsons at Bankshead and shared Winifred’s love of the farmhouse and surrounding countryside.

After separating from Ben Nicholson (who had met the artist Barbara Hepworth) Winifred moved with the three children to Paris in 1932. In Paris she met many artists including Naum Gabo, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. By 1938, with war looming Winifred returned to Britain (she also persuaded Piet Mondrian to travel with her to escape the threat of fascism).

Winifred was a keen traveller, together with the poet Kathleen Raine, she visited the Hebrides and Western Scotland on a number of occasions during the early 1950s and in 1953 she exhibited works from these trips at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. She also visited the Isles of Scilly, Orkney and Catalonia in the 1950s and made numerous trips to Greece in the 1960s and ’70s.

In 1969 a Retrospective exhibition was held at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. Shortly afterwards, 12 of her pictures were shown in The Helen Sutherland Collection, a touring exhibition which opened at the Hayward Gallery. In 1972 she was given a solo exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and in 1979 she was given a retrospective exhibition, organised by the Scottish Arts Council, which travelled from Glasgow to Edinburgh, Carlisle, Newcastle and Cornwall. Winifred died at Bankshead in 1981.

Winifred Nicholson, 1979, The Scotsman Publications Ltd 43

Although it is difficult to date Winifred’s still life paintings, it seems likely that Winter Landscape was painted circa 1971 at her Cumberland home, Bankshead. The mauve and blue bulbs are Iris Reticulata.

Winifred planted bulbs of snowdrops, crocus and iris in the autumn and would paint them as they emerged in early Spring.

“Flowers mean different things to different people – to some they are trophies to decorate their dwellings (for this plastic flowers will do as well as real ones) – to some they are buttonholes for their conceit – to botanists they are species and tabulated categories – to bees of course they are honey – to me they are the secret of the cosmos.”

From The Flowers of Winifred Nicholson, Crane Kalman Gallery, London, 1969

Winifred Nicholson 12 Winter Landscape, c.1971 oil on canvas, 51 x 76 cms Provenance Acquired from the artist's family by a private collector Purchased by Mr and Mrs Gibson at the exhibition below, December 1988 Exhibited Modern British, Crane Kalman Gallery, London, December 1988 44

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Anne Redpath OBE, RSA, ARA, RWA (1895-1965) Anne Redpath was born in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders. She was the pivotal figure in the group of painters now referred to as The Edinburgh School. She had attended the Edinburgh College of Art, receiving her diploma in 1917. After a lengthy spell in the south of France, Redpath returned to Hawick in the mid-1930s. Her brilliant manipulation of paint, left in delicious peaks or eked across a rough surface with a palette knife, is characteristic of her varied responses to different subjects at different times. In the last years of her output she often favoured a limited palette; perhaps a few brilliant, jewel-like notes enlivening a dark/white composition.

Redpath was an inspirational person and formed many enduring friendships. Her flat in London Street became an artistic salon, celebrated by Robin Philipson’s famous, affectionate group portrait in The Scottish National Portrait Gallery. She had considerable commercial success in her lifetime enjoying a fruitful, consistent relationship with The Scottish Gallery and latterly with Reid & Lefevre in London. Since her passing her reputation has been further enhanced with retrospective and centenary exhibitions so that now she is established as one of the great figures in 20th Century Scottish Painting. In July next year The Scottish Gallery will hold an exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of her death.

Anne Redpath, 1961, image courtesy of the Michie family 47

Redpath spent 14 years living in France following her marriage in 1920 to the architect James Michie, who was tasked with designing cemeteries on the Western Front for the War Graves Commission. This gouache belongs to a later period in her life when she was based in Edinburgh but made regular visits abroad.

Menton, in the South of France was close to where Anne had lived with her family up until 1934.

Anne Redpath 13 Street in Menton, c.1949 gouache, 37 x 45.5 cms signed lower right Exhibited The Edinburgh School - Works on Paper, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, April 2010, p.15; The Michie Family, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, June 2012, p.22 48

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