May Morris 2016

The MAY MORRIS conference takes place 13-14 May, based at the William Morris Gallery with visits elsewhere.              Programme details here

May Morris: conference to examine influence of Arts and Crafts pioneer

May Morris Conference 2016

Friday 13 May and Saturday 14 May 2016

William Morris Gallery

Forest Road, London E17 4PP

The William Morris Gallery is to host a landmark conference presenting important new insights into the career of leading arts and crafts designer May Morris, the younger daughter of William and Jane Morris.

The event, which marks thirty years since the publication of Jan Marsh’s seminal biography, Jane and May Morris – A Biographical Story, will bring together new research on May’s life and work from curators, academics and independent scholars. The conclusions of the conference will inform a major new exhibition of May Morris’s work at the William Morris Gallery in 2017.

May Morris was a professional designer, embroiderer, teacher and writer. She exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, founded the Women’s Guild of Arts and was responsible for designing some of Morris & Co’s most iconic textiles. May also participated in the early Socialist Movement and was instrumental in preserving and shaping her father’s legacy.

Included in the two-day study event are visits to the V&A’s Clothworkers’ Centre and the William Morris Gallery’s collection store to view rare May Morris textiles. Delegates will also have the opportunity to take part in a riverside walk exploring the environment in which May lived and worked in Hammersmith, led by the William Morris Society.

The keynote lecture will be delivered by Jan Marsh, who will reflect on the growth of public and academic interest in May Morris’s career since the publication of her biography in 1986.

Jan Marsh, President of the William Morris Society,  says:

‘Always overshadowed by her illustrious father and also by her mother’s reputation as a Pre-Raphaelite muse, and originally ignored by the Dictionary of National Biography, May Morris has never received the attention her own achievements deserve.   This Conference will explore many facets of her career, bringing a wealth of recent research into view.’

Anna Mason, Manager of the William Morris Gallery, said:

‘’May Morris was a talented designer and maker and made a unique contribution to the international development of art embroidery. The William Morris Gallery holds a rich archive and is delighted to be collaborating with our partner organisations to convene this conference. We hope it will bring even more new material to light in advance of the exhibition planned in 2017.”

The full programme can be viewed at https://maymorrisconference2016.eventbrite.co.uk. Single and two day tickets can also be bought via this link.

The conference is open to the general public as well as those with an academic or professional interest in May Morris’s life and work. 

Burghley House collection

Burghley House, the great Elizabethan prodigy house built for William Cecil outside Stamford, Lincolnshire, has an amazing mainly baroque picture collection, mostly  purchased in the 17th century by Lord Burghley's heirs the Earls of Exeter.

The Burghley art collection is now viewable online - which is often preferable to viewing in situ where works may be hung high or in poorly-lit corners - and contains several Adoration of the Magi images,

including an early work on copper by Ventura Salimbeni 

plus this by Giacinto Gimignani  (no, me neither)  

  these after Rubens and Carlo Dolci 

  

and this later image attributed to a painter in the circle of Jan van Haensbergen, where the European Magi have come on horseback and the African on a camel:

  

Other items of note are the portrait of (probably) the 5th Countess, with her brother and a kneeling pageboy,  

by miniaturist Nicholas Dixon, dated to 1668

finally, this exquisitely worked bust of A Moor, decorated with enamel and precious stones,   from around 1600

The turban feathers and the whole plinth were added later, so that it was described in a 1690 inventory as 'A moore's head cutt out of an olive stone [it is in fact agate] with pearle, rubies and diamonds'.

Modern Scottish Women 1885-1965

Norah Nielson Gray, Military Hospital Abbaye de Royamour, 1918

The blurb describes this exhibition as 'revelatory, fascinating, inspiring',  but I was most struck by the speed with which one forgot that this - paintings and sculptures - was all 'work by women', and simply absorbed it visually as one compelling artwork after another.   Stylistically they display their relation to the art movements of  the decades spanned by the selection, and to some degree the subjects also reflect historical events, notably the two European wars.   But they are also most strikingly individual.

Mary Cameron, Les jouers, Edinburgh Museum

Overall the impression is of  compositional strength, vibrant and confident colour, cogent lines, persuasive forms. And variety of subject and handling that makes the viewing experience so rewarding.    According to curator Alice Strang,   

Edinburgh-trained Mary Cameron, nicknamed Bloody Mary, fell in love with Spain and at the turn of the century produced frank and uncompromising paintings of bullfights. One in particular was so gory it was used as a postcard in anti-bullfighting propaganda in France and Germany.  "The press, when they reviewed Mary Cameron’s work, always had to stress her femininity, almost to make up for the pretty brutal paintings. She was having none of it, saying, ‘Hang on a minute, look at my paint-splattered hands, Painting is hard work, you have to roll up your sleeves, it is manual labour’,”

Dorothy Johnstone, Life class, 1923, Edinburgh Museum

The majority of images are figurative, as was most British art of the period,   But works by       and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham - one of the better-known painters here - have that essential abstraction of shape and hue where perception precedes interpretation.

Wilhelmina  Barns-Graham, Glacier Chasm, 1951, BarnsGraham Trust

Doris Zinkeisen, Belsen April 1945, IWM

 Several are extremely powerful, but others are quite joyous.  Including Agnes Miller Parker's crowd scenes The Horse Fair and the Round Pond - where the vertiginous view is anchored by the ball towards which the circling mutts converge, with its colour matching that of the main figure.    

Agnes Miller Parker, Round Pond, 1930

On at Edinburgh's Museum of Modern Art till 26 June 2016 and even if like me you have always liked this era's art, certainly vaux le detour for a revelation and delight.

Anne Redpath, Indian Rug /Red Slippers, c1942, NGS  

Sarah Remond

Sharing an informative post about abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond

here         https://bedfordcentre.wordpress.com/2015/12/02/commemorating-sarah-parker-remond-pioneering-abolitionist-and-anti-racism-campaigner/   
and the commemorative plaque in Rome

Embroidered Minds - William Morris and Neurology

updated link to Embroidered Minds website

VERY SADLY, Leslie Forbes, prime mover in this project, died early July 2016 following a major epileptic seizure.  At this date  the Embroidered Minds project consisted of one site-specific exhibition and the publication of Part One of the one part of the accompanying novel.  Plans are being made to continue and complete the project as Leslie intended.

It's difficult to summarise the Embroidered Minds project except to quote the authors in saying it's a collaboration of artists, writers, medics and scholars, weaving a part-factual, part-imagined fantasy around and across the connections between Jenny Morris and her family, and Victorian neurologist William Gowers.  The connecting thread is the neurological condition of epilepsy, which Jenny suffered and Gowers investigated and treated. 

Jenny  is the least-written about of the now-famous Morris family, who lived with the always famous Morris firm in Queen Square, where the site is now occupied by the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.

In its initial installation at 23 Queen Square, Embroidered Minds is an installation created by artists Julia Dwyer, Caroline Isgar, Sue Ridge and Andrew Thomas, with texts by novelist Leslie Forbes and medical input from Renata Whurr and Marjorie Lorch.   On this occasion, it is site-specific, but the elements are flexible and portable to any number of other locations just as its contents are open to interpretations and responses.  In another form, it will be a four-part novel linked to the displays

 

The aim is to investigate the relevance today of a 'conspiracy of silence' that surrounded Jenny Morris's condition and still partly shrouds pubic understanding.  Though it should not be separated from the ideas, the artworks are beautiful in their own right also and the whole assemblage is absorbing.

ON 23 January 2016  @ 2.15 pm  Leslie Forbes, Sue Ridge and myself  are elaborating - not to say embroidering - on the subject   in a presentation entitled 'Sex, Drugs and Epilepsy in the Morris Family'  at the William Morris Society,  26 Upper Mall, Hammersmith.

Facing Britain's Imperial Past

Manchester City Galleries 

I once worked with a colleague from the same post-war generation as myself who said that his school (I think as late as the early 1960s) continued to mark ‘Empire Day' – an event of which I had barely heard and was astonished it might still be celebrated.  Because the dissolution of the self-styled ‘British Empire’ with the independence of India and Pakistan, followed by the swift transformation of other colonies into supposed equal members of the rebranded ‘Commonwealth’ was always presented as a jolly good idea rather than with any sense of lost glory, failure or defeat.  Subsequently, if not generally ignored and essentially forgotten, Empire became a realm of embarrassment and shame, as the once-renowned military adventures were rediscovered as aggressive adjuncts to conquest, exploitation, oppression.  So one would not have expected, in the last part of the 20^th century, to see any exhibition unequivocally devoted to the subject, and not least because most of the directly associated art – fanciful battle paintings, tear-jerking scenes of suffering (European)  women and children, heroic equestrian statuary – is poor in quality as well as ideologically. Stubbs’ painting of a cheetah being an exception.

Artist and Empire: facing Britain’s Imperial Past at Tate Britain is thus an interesting post-imperial project, ranging far and wide geographically and stretching from the 16^th to 21^st century.  Its aim, to quote the brief guide, is to ‘illustrate the complicated histories embodied by objects, inviting us to consider how their status and meaning change over time. In reflecting imperial narratives and post-colonial re-evaluation, it foregrounds the peoples, dramas and tragedies of Empire and their resonance in art today’.  Note the careful absence of any celebration in that final sentence – Empire is not (yet?) the source of any joy or commendation.  

The display is too heterogenous to summarize,  and I am personally less interested, visually or conceptually, in imagined scenes of bloodthirsty events masquerading as heroic defeats (Rorkes’ Drift, General Gordon etc)  for which artists usually had to seek out Zulu performers to portray savage ‘fuzzywuzzies’.  The most interesting aspect of Artists and Empire is the endeavour to create a dialogue between domestic British representations of Empire and responses to it from India, Africa and the Americas, representing the coloniser in their own art forms, including sculpture and textiles.  One would like to see this exchange expanded, for the present exhibition is largely drawn from British collections, limiting the range of depictions, many objects being trophies or curios that imperialists obtained overseas.  A selection with a Southeast Asian focus is however scheduled for Singapore in late 2016.

Singh Twins / Museum of London 

Notable too is the extent to which, if most (white) Britons have airbrushed Empire from their historical sense, so that it has become as fantastic as the world of Arthur and Merlin, artists of Indian, African and Caribbean heritage remain highly conscious of the colonial legacy.   Here, the Singh Twins' intricate painting EnTWINed answers Eastward Ho and Home Again, mid-Victorian portrayals of troops sent from Liverpool to quell the Indian insurrection (though sadly the pictures are widely separated in this show, so their dialogue, including that with the triumphal picture of Britannia spearing the Bengal tiger, also on display, is not immediately visible).   

Hew Locke /Hales Gallery

Donald Locke’s unsettling Trophies of Empire stands near his son Hew’s image of the statue of Bristol slaver Edward Colston draped with glittering yet tawdry ornaments, from the Restoration series. 

PS    this message just received from BBC Arts Desk.  If the senders [anonymous to me] mean  what they say in the 'personal note', they should be kept to their promise....

ARTSNIGHT: Kwasi Kwarteng

WATCH HERE FROM 28 November: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qmklr 

Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng is the guest curator of this episode of Artsnight. The author of the book 'Ghosts of Empire', Kwasi looks at how the British Empire impacted on art, architecture and literature. He meets one of Australia's greatest living novelists - Peter Carey - to discuss the writer's obsession with early colonial life, as well as exploring Tate Britain's Artist and Empire exhibition. Comedian Shazia Mirza discusses why fabric and clothing is so vital to the story of the Indian sub-continent. And we meet the sculptor Fowokan, who found a way of reconnecting with his ancestral African past through his work.

On a personal note I'd also like to add that our team in BBC Arts is a small group of people who are really trying to change the nature of Arts programming at the BBC and with this episode of ARTSNIGHT we wanted to produce and provoke a broader and more diverse discussion about the cultural legacy of the British Empire (at least broader and more diverse than you usually find on TV...). I hope we've made at least a small change to the way this subject is discussed.

I would also highly recommend another episode of ARTSNIGHT to the people on your mailing list, which is the one we made with George The Poet for 30 October. He is a young British-African spoken word poet who used his episode to explore the nature of "black culture", including an interview with Paul Gilroy - that seems like it could be pertinent to the themes explored in 'No Colour Bar'. By the time you send the email out tomorrow, I'm afraid that there will only be one more day left to watch it on BBC iPlayer (!).

ARTSNIGHT: George The Poet 

WATCH HERE UNTIL 29 November: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06l53tw

In this episode of Artsnight, George the Poet explores the meaning of black culture in four spoken word chapters. Racheal Ofori opens up some black female stereotypes, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Dennis Bovell look back at the beginnings of dub poetry, Professor Paul Gilroy explains some of the history of black diasporas, and Akala likens rap to the works of Shakespeare. George the Poet asks - what is black culture?

Marie Stillman at Delaware

photo Jan Marsh

Just a few installation shots to show how splendidly the Delaware Art Museum team have presented Poetry in Beauty and given Marie Stillman a great showcase.  it looks and is absolutely wonderful -  and invites us to new levels of analysis and evaluation. 

photo Jan Marsh

photo Jan Marsh

photo Jan Marsh

photo Jan Marsh

There is also a clip from BBC USA,  but it may not connect:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34751133