William Morris at the NPG

Six years before he died, William Morris (1834-96) published his novel News from Nowhere (above right), set in an idealistic vision of 1952. Nearly 120 years after his death the UK may be far from being the particular Utopia he imagined but Morris’s legacy is hardly inaccessible. His homes at the Red House (South East London), Kelmscott Manor (Oxfordshire) and Kelmscott House (West London) can be visited, as can the William Morris Gallery (East London). Morris & Co lives on to produce “authentic versions of his original designs”, and has a handsome website which would surely have met with his approval. Moreover Morris is currently the subject of an exhibition at Modern Art Oxford (post to follow) and the National Portrait Gallery in London is showing Anarchy & Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860 – 1960 (above left).

As its title suggests this is an ambitious exhibition in terms of its scope but, perhaps inevitably, is constrained by its NPG location: not all that much space and its strengths being portrait painting and photography, for example GF Watts’ William Morris (1870, above left) and Frederick Hollyer’s William Morris (1884, above right and in the poster). Nonetheless anyone who has an interest in Morris will be pleased to see items which, although in public collections, are not always on show or accessible. For example, the Prioress's Tale wardrobe, painted by Edward Burne-Jones on the exterior, (1859, below left) and Morris’s own La Belle Iseult (1858, below left) for which his wife, Jane, was the model.

Perhaps wisely, given that Tate Britain’s Pre-Raphaelite blockbuster was only two years ago, the NPG show plays down Morris’s relationship with the Brotherhood (he was not one of the PRB seven) and instead gives visitors a chance to appreciate his other interests, like the Arts and Crafts movement, socialism in the years before the Labour party was founded in 1900 and the Suffragettes. Eric Gill (1882-1940) was one of many influenced by Arts and Crafts –Adam and Eve garden roller (1910-20, below upper) while a painting by Roger Fry of one of the Labour’s founders, Edward Carpenter (1894 below lower) provides a link to the Bloomsbury Group.

Various aspects of Morris’s legacy up to 1960 are examined in a fairly rapid succession: Cotswold Arts and Crafts, the Garden City Movement, particularly at Letchworth, and then, following the Second World War, the Festival of Britain and the flowering of one of its assistant designers, Terence Conran. In 2012 the V&A exhibition, British Design 1948–2012, had had the space to cover the latter period more thoroughly but some of its exhibits reappear here, for example Lucienne Day’s Calyx fabric (below left) produced for the Festival in 1951. The interesting portrait of Herbert Read by Patrick Heron (1950, below right) was given to the NPG in 1968 by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.

Anarchy & Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860 – 1960 ends on 11 January.

Sculpture in Gloucestershire

There are currently two opportunities to see some modern British sculpture in Gloucestershire (SW England) – at Quenington and at Chalford, 18 miles (30km) to the west.

The Quenington Sculpture Trust has been running shows of contemporary sculpture in the riverside gardens of Quenington Old Rectory since 1992. The 10th show, Fresh Air 2011, which started on 19 June, features about 170 items from over 100 contributors, all in the delightful setting of Mr and Mrs Abel-Smith’s garden. Thanks to their support, what started as a local event has now become a significant biennale of sculpture with coverage in the national media.

Soaring Figure by Rick Kirby

Fragment by Jilly Sutton



Gallery Pangolin at Chalford is the showcase for the sculpture foundry, Pangolin Editions. The foundry had a long relationship with the sculptor Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003) and to mark the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, when Chadwick’s talent was first recognised, the Gallery is showing Strange Beasts Lynn Chadwick and the New Generation.

Beast VII by Lynn Chadwick

Lorraine Robbins, the curator, asked five young artists to produce responses to Chadwick’s work and these are displayed alongside the relevant piece. Robbins gamely made her own contribution intended as a reaction to Chadwick’s Beast VII, commenting:

What strikes me about Chadwick's work and this piece in particular, is a real maleness in its welded angular construction, emphasising hard geometric shapes. In her book, The Nude in Art, Lynda Nead suggests that ‘if the male signifies culture, order, geometry ... then the female stands for nature and physicality.' She also posits that within the ideal, muscular, male body there lies a fear that it may revert to ‘its own female formlessness' or 'the beast within'. Beast 43 started as a desire to physically become Chadwick's beast. I wanted to perch heavily and precariously on a plinth, an unsavoury intruder in the gallery. In making the cast I chose to wear a bra and G-string, (a garment described by Roland Barthes in his essay 'Striptease' as the ‘ultimate triangle'), the flimsy, ornate triangles of underwear forming a distorted echo to the simple, masculine forms of Chadwick's Beast VII.

Beast 43 by Lorraine Robbins

We are left to draw our own conclusions as to the significance of Robbins' head being concealed by an empty box of dog biscuits, in contrast to the ravaging mandibles of Chadwick’s creation. Beast 43 was still on sale when I visited – I hope it finds a buyer at £2000 before the show ends on 15 July.

Fresh Air 2011 closes on 10 July.

Geoffrey Grigson’s Definition of SW England

2011 will be the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain. Although now thought of as an exhibition on London’s South Bank which left us the Royal Festival Hall, it sponsored various other good works, one being a series of regional guidebooks. The About Britain Guides were published by Collins for the Festival Office in 13 volumes under the general editorship of Geoffrey Grigson, who also wrote the Portrait sections of Volumes 1, West Country and 2, Wessex.

In the 1930s Grigson had become an established poet, well-known in intellectual circles. He is one of the many writers and artists who Alexandra Harris, in Romantic Moderns, sees as coming to terms with Modernist abstraction by using it to reinterpret traditional English themes such as landscape. Her book is remarkably wide-ranging and informative, essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth century British art. Britain’s pavilion for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair by Oliver Hill embodies her theme (page 47-9):

"... as one approached it, the epitome of elegant concrete constructivism ... Then there was the inside. The ‘idea of England’ promoted in a series of displays ... was one of fishing, tennis and weekend cottages. ... This was a pavilion with mixed messages, advertising internationalism on the outside and Englishness within. ... it was a high-profile barometer of the difficulties involved in the attempt to reconcile international modernism with the language of national tradition."

Fourteen years and a world war later, much of this would be true again of the Festival of Britain, with its “contemporary” pavilions and domes and the Skylon on the one hand, and an eccentric mock-Victorian railway in Battersea Park on the other. As a later critic put it, “The contemporary style removed the visionary heat of Modernism from the exhibition, and replaced it with a cajoling warmth” (Robert Gregory, Architectural Review, 2000).

The Skylon, said to be, like the British economy in 1951, "without visible means of support"

To a reader today, Grigson’s depiction of the West Country seems very much of its time, although he avoided retrospective sentimentality in bringing the region’s history and its 1951 present together. Much of the business and manufacturing of the 1950s now seem almost as remote as the mining and cloth trades of the 18th century. The cover and dust jacket of each volume of The About Britain Guides provided a map of its region. As can be seen below, Grigson, by comparison with the SW England region used currently by the government (see this blog’s Profile above), chose to define West Country as being without the counties of Dorset and SE Wiltshire, both of which he placed in Wessex along with the Isle of Wight.

More recently, a government-sponsored website, ICONS - A Portrait of England, came up with a set of 11 English regions (including London) for its purpose, not dissimilar to Grigson’s, of being “a rich resource of material about our lives and cultural heritage comprised of the top 100 icons that best represent England ...”. ICONS excluded all of Wiltshire from its definition of the West Country and also excluded Gloucestershire. The county of Avon had a brief life from 1974 to 1996 when it was returned to its neighbours and Bristol.

Personally, I’m not sure where the West Country ends as one travels east in England, which is a small place in which to draw boundaries. On the whole I agree with Grigson, but some of West Dorset should probably be inside. I share ICONS’ reservations about Gloucestershire which, to me, consists of three distinct parts: the Forest of Dean, which is like nowhere else; secondly, the Cotswolds, which continue seamlessly into Oxfordshire; finally, Gloucester and Cheltenham (cities of the Severn plain) and the upper Severn valley, all going better with landlocked Worcestershire and the West Midlands than with maritime Devon and Cornwall.  It seems odd of ICONS to include the whole of Wiltshire and none of Dorset.

EPILOGUE

The Festival of Britain was open from May to September 1951. Any lasting effect, apart from its concert hall, was rapidly dissipated after the return of a Conservative government in October 1951. David Kynaston, in Family Britain, 1951-57, makes no bones about it: “... the Tory restoration – a restoration whose most obviously symbolic early action was the systematic, undeniably vengeful demolition of the entire Festival of Britain infrastructure on the South Bank, with the unavoidable exception of the Royal Festival Hall.” Another British historian of the period, Peter Hennessy (now Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield - in the County of Gloucestershire) takes a drier view in Never Again: Britain 1945-51, pointing out that “It was Herbert Morrison’s show. He picked up the idea and ran with it, selling it to the [Labour] Cabinet on the grounds that we ought to do something jolly ...”. Morrison (Foreign Secretary) would have been well aware that with a majority of only five seats after the 1950 election, Labour would be unlikely to last a full term and needed to court popularity.

Grigson continued to write poetry and about travel and the countryside. He died in 1985 at the age of 80. His third wife, Jane, was a well-known cookery writer as is their daughter, Sophie. In 2009 she wrote a tribute to her father in The Times when his guide to the British countryside, The Shell Country Alphabet, was republished.

ICONS seems to have been subsumed by Culture24 which “exists to promote and support the cultural sector online and to serve the needs of online audiences. We are a not-for-profit online publisher, working across the arts, heritage, education, and tourism sectors.” Culture24 was funded by the Arts Council, Department for Education and MLA Renaissance. The last of these, more prosaically the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, was abolished by the Coalition government in July 2010, and Culture24’s future must be doubtful, given the severity of recent funding cuts for public bodies.