adrianflowersarchive.com

8.11.19 – 13.02.10

Tall, good-looking, talented and personable, when new RAF recruit Cyril Ewart Lionel Grant arrived in Britain from the West Indies in 1942, he was welcomed as a hero. Commissioned as a Flight Lieutenant, Grant trained as a navigator and flew in Lancaster bombers. However, a decade later, in spite of becoming a qualified barrister, Grant found himself in an England where attitudes to race had hardened. He spent his life contesting such negative attitudes, and achieved a significant success in promoting a multi-cultural Britain, through his writing, acting and organisational skills. Like the painter Frank Bowling, ‘Cy’ Grant (1919-2010) was born and raised in Guyana, (then known as British Guiana) and grew up near the Demerera river, and later in the town of New Amsterdam. Beterveragting, his home town, is notable for having been purchased in the 1830’s by a co-operative of former slaves, and Grant himself, one of a family of seven, was the great-grandson of a slave. However, he was born into a middle-class family and had a good education, albeit learning mostly about English history and little about the Caribbean. He inherited a love of music from his mother, a music teacher, while his father, a Moravian minister, introduced him to literature, emphasising to his son that some famous European authors such as Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas were black. Grant worked for a time for a magistrate in Guyana, gaining experience in legal affairs, but his family could not afford to send him abroad to study law.

During WWII, along with hundreds of other men and women in the West Indies, Grant was recruited by the British armed forces and took ship to England. Commissioned as a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF, he was navigator on a Lancaster bomber of 103 Squadron based at Elsham Wolds, near Grimsby in Lincolnshire. In 1943, after being shot down over the Netherlands, he spent two years in a prisoner of war camp, Stalag Luft III, where he made good use of his enforced captivity, studying and writing poetry. A photograph of him taken by the Germans during this period was titled ‘a member of the RAF of indeterminate race’—a phrase that would later become the title of his autobiography. Although he qualified as a barrister in 1950, specialising in anti-racism cases, Grant found that he was discriminated against because of his skin colour and West Indian origins. For a time he persevered with his studies, availing of a three year scholarship under the Colonial Scheme for Further Education and Vocational Training, and to improve his diction joined an amateur theatre group, where he discovered he had a talent for acting. In time, however, Grant abandoned his hopes of becoming a barrister, finding he could earn a much better living as a singer and actor. He featured on entertainment shows on radio and television, including Cliff Mitchelmore’s Tonight programme, where he sang, in an engaging calypso style, ditties penned by Bernard Levin, such as 

Heartache today for the deb’s delight, 
no more of those glamorous nights;
So shed a tear for the deb of the year,
who lost her vocation in mid-career.

He stayed with the Tonight programme for several years, but left when he felt that he was being patronised and typecast by Mitchelmore.

During these years Adrian Flowers photographed Cy Grant on several occasions. The earliest photographs were taken on
20^th November 1954 (Job no. 1367), taken on black and white 120mm film. They are portrait shots, mainly head and shoulders, although in some of these images, Grant is playing the guitar. On 21^st June 1955 (Job. no. 1625), Flowers photographed Grant at a social event, probably a small party held at Cy and his wife Dorit’s house in Highgate.

Later that year, on 19^thDecember  (Job No. 1397, 1955) at a supper party held to celebrate Angela Flowers’ 23^rd birthday, a group of friends including Cy and Dorit, Heinz Kurth and the poet Jon Silkin gathered at the Flowers’s flat in England’s Lane. Aged nineteen, Dinah Holland, younger sister of Angela, also attended the party, which was informal, with guests sitting on the floor around a tablecloth spread out picnic-style.

In one photo, Angela is filling a glass and handing it to Silkin, while in another Grant plays the guitar. Bottles of wine and a Greek vase on the tablecloth lent a Mediterranean flavour to the party. Dorit was expecting her first child at this time and in June 1956 (Job no. 2017), Flowers photographed her and her infant daughter Dana.  

In October of that year  (Job no 2188), in what appears to be an improvised recording studio in the England’s Lane flat, Flowers photographed Grant playing the guitar and singing into a microphone. Not long afterwards, when Adrian and Angela had moved to a new flat in Grange Road, Highgate, they held a small party, with Cy and Dorit present. Angela had given birth to her second son Matthew a few days earlier, so the event was probably to celebrate the new arrival. (Job No. 2258)

That same year, 1956, Cy Grant became the first black person to host his own British television programme, For Members Only, and the following year, in Sea Wife, a film set in the Pacific during WWII, he played the role of a ship’s purser who, along with three passengers, is stranded in a life raft after their ship is sunk by a Japanese submarine. Although a romance, featuring also Richard Burton and Joan Collins, Sea Wife is unsentimental in its depiction of colonial attitudes. Grant saves the lives of his companions, but is persecuted by the fourth occupant of the liferaft, a deranged white Englishman, and, in a shocking scene, is abandoned in a lagoon where he is killed by a shark. In playing the role of ship’s purser, Grant hoped to improve attitudes in Britain towards immigrants from the West Indies. In another film, The Man from the Sun, he again directly confronted racist attitudes. Although Grant chose his roles carefully, it was difficult for him to avoid being stereotyped. During the first performance of the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd, staged in Nottingham in 1964, he sang “Feeling Good”, (subsequently released on the record Cy and I). The lyrics herald a ‘new dawn, a new day’, but Grant was cast in the role of ‘Negro’, a black man who only manages to get ahead by avoiding a class war being fought by the play’s main protagonists, ‘Sir’ and ‘Cocky’. Grant then played Othello in the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester in 1965, before going on to a leading role in Gerry Anderson’s puppet television series Captain Scarlett and the Mysterons, where he played Lieutenant Green. He also made a brief appearance  as Dr. Gordon in Anderson’s science fiction film, Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, and featured in other cameo roles over the years, including in The Persuaders, Softly Softly and Blakes 7. His last film role was in At the Earth’s Core.

Grant’s daughter, Samantha Moxon, recalls her father becoming frustrated at the stereotypical roles offered to black actors, and his increasing awareness of institutionalised racism in British society. Eventually he turned his back on acting and in 1974 founded, along with John Mapondera from Zimbabwe, “Drum”, an arts centre in London devoted to promoting black talent. The following year, Drum presented a two-week programme at the ICA. Grant was already moving on; he adapted Aimé Césaire’s 1939 poem Notebook on a Return to My Native Land. which he toured to venues throughout Britain in the mid-1970s. Exploring issues of race, the epic poem celebrates ‘negritude’, a central tenet of the Civil Rights movement in the USA. The final photographs of Grant taken by Adrian Flowers date from 26^th February 1975 (Job 7758); however these are not preserved in the AF Archive. In 1981, Grant became chairman of Concord, a festival that again celebrated cultural diversity in Britain. He was a prolific writer, and among his books are Ring of Steel, a study of the Trinidadian steelpan band, (with a focus on how scrap metal is transformed into uplifting music), and Blackness and the Dreaming, an account, inspired by Joseph Campbell’s writings on mythology, of Grant’s own road to self-discovery. Grant died in 2009, aged ninety. He was survived by his wife Dorit, and four children. In 1997 he had been made an honorary Fellow of the University of Roehampton, and in 2017 a plaque was unveiled at his home, at 54 Jackson’s Lane, Highgate. 

Text: Peter Murray

Editor: Francesca Flowers

All images subject to copyright.

Adrian Flowers Archive ©

Angela Mary Flowers
19th December 1932 – 11th August 2023

The oft-repeated concept, that Angela Flowers was ‘a force of nature’ who had somehow emerged, fully-formed, as a leading contemporary art gallerist, is belied by even a brief glance at her family background. Angela grew up in a world comfortable with international trade, enterprise and culture. On her father’s side, she was descended from a German family named Schwann, who had come to Britain in the early nineteenth century, to run textiles factories in Huddersfield. Somewhere along the way they founded the University of Huddersfield. Not once, but several times during the nineteenth century, the Schwanns married into the Holland family. It was an alliance good for the arts: in 1926 Ismena Schwann married Theodore Holland, a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, who taught Jacqueline du Pré’s mother.

Born Angela Mary Holland, in Croydon on 19^th December 1932, Angela was proud of the fact that her great-grandfather, (on her mother’s side) Jesse Worts Ward, had in 1869 founded The Croydon Advertiser. In turn, Ward took pride in his mother’s family, the Bayleys, who built ships at Ipswich; large ocean-going vessels: whalers, East Indiamen, and clippers that brought cargoes of wool from Australia. Angela’s grandmother, Emma Ward, was a talented artist. She married into the Stibys, an old Dorset farming family. When Angela was still in her teens, Arthur Stiby, who had edited The Granta magazine at Cambridge, became editor of the Croydon Advertiser. To the present day, as with Robert, Jamie, and other members of the family, the Stibys sustain a lively presence in the arts.

Angela was the eldest of two daughters born to Olive (née Stiby) and Geoffrey Holland. She had a younger sister, Dinah, born in 1937. The previous year, Geoffrey had used an inheritance to commission a large Modernist house “Peverel” at Shellwood Road, Leigh, near Reigate. Listed in Pevsner, it was the first commission in the UK for the architect Frederick Curtis. Although Curtis had been born in Frankfurt-on-Main in 1903, the son of a British architect and a German mother, he fled Germany when the Nazis rose to power, and became a lecturer at Liverpool University. He subsequently designed Underground stations in London, including Perivale and Hangar Lane. Angela remembered Austrian maids in the house when she was a child, and surmised that her father had helped them escape to Britain. Geoffrey’s sister Betty married the French poet and translator Pierre Leyris, and was a friend of Balthus. She appears in several of his paintings.  Although idealists, Angela’s parents were also practical people. During WWII, Olive worked in a munitions factory, while Geoffrey served in Italy as an intelligence officer, and afterwards was a school teacher. 

During the war, Angela was sent to a boarding school founded by the war artist Eric Kennington. She later attended Westonbirt school in Gloucestershire, which she disliked, and Wychwood in Oxford. There was a spell as an au pair in Paris, followed by a diploma at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in South Kensington, London. (Other graduates of the Webber Douglas include Angela Lansbury, Julian Fellowes, Terence Stamp and Steve Berkoff). In the late 1940s, Angela’s parents began to collect works by contemporary artists, including John Minton, John Piper and Denis Mitchell. They introduced her to art at an early age, particularly as a result of visits to Cornwall. Although quite shy, Angela was embarking on a career in stage and screen when, in 1951, having been introduced by Len Deighton, she met and fell in love with the photographer Adrian Flowers. They married soon afterwards and, while living in a flat near Primrose Hill, in 1953 Adam, their first child, was born, followed by Matthew three years later. A third son, Daniel, was born in 1959. In 1956, Angela and Adrian bought a house at Grange Road in Highgate.  

From there, after Adrian suffered a period of illness, the family moved to a basement flat with use of a garden, in Hamilton Terrace, St John’s Wood. In 1964, with a growing family, Angela and Adrian moved to a house in Patshull Road, Kentish Town. The following year their daughter Francesca was born. Not long afterwards, Angela decided to start her own art gallery. Given her background and determination to succeed, Angela’s only limitation was that she did not have funds at the outset equal to her vision. But living on her wits, and being continually inventive, gave her an edge. Almost her first job was at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, and it is likely that her familiarity with the artists of St. Ives that led Adrian, at the outset of his career, to document Peter Lanyon, Denis Mitchell and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in an important series of photographs. Angela recalled that when Adrian was photographing the artists in their studios, they assumed that she also was involved in the world of contemporary art.

While working as a bookkeeper at the ICA, in 1970, Angela opened her first gallery, at 15 Lisle Street. The receptionist at the ICA had been married to Patrick Hughes, and so Angela invited him to be the first artist to show at her new enterprise. The gallery was in what is now London’s Chinatown, above the offices of Artists International Association, a left-wing association of artists founded in the 1930s. Angela was given the space, on the basis that the lease had not long to run, and also that her artists would become members of AIA. However, the AIA staff disliked Angela and made life difficult for her, particularly when her little upstairs gallery became a commercial success. Early shows such as Tom Phillips sold out. When the AIA wound up in 1971, Angela moved her gallery to Portland Mews.

From the outset the focus was mainly on younger British artists. In addition to the British artists, international artists also showed at Angela Flowers Gallery: Ray Johnson (American) in 1972, Arakawa (Japanese) and Jeanne Masoero (Italian) in 1971.  In the early years, the artists showing with the gallery included Patrick Hughes, Boyd and Evans, Brendan Neiland, Derek Hirst, Jeff Nuttall, Tom Phillips, Ian Breakwell, John Loker, Jeanne Masoero, Nancy Fouts and David Hepher. Angela was noted for encouraging young artists, and for championing women artists, notably Penny Slinger, Amanda Faulkner, Glenys Barton and Nicola Hicks. Hicks, who married Angela’s son Dan, has been with the gallery for more than thirty years. Penny Slinger’s 1973 exhibition was titled “Openings”; the works relating to the theme of food, mouths and vaginas. Exhibition themes such as Small is Beautiful, Postcard Art, and Artist of the Day—the latter set up in 1983—helped establish Angela Flowers as a leading contemporary art gallery in London. Later artists joining the gallery included Bernard Cohen, John Kirby and Peter Howson. Angela herself cut a dash, whizzing around town in a dark red Chevrolet Impala. 

The Angela Flowers Gallery in London thrived, as did Adrian’s photography studio, but the strains placed on their marriage resulted in its dissolution, and in 1973 they divorced. Five years later, the gallery moved to Tottenham Mews. Angela’s new partner, Robert Heller, and the theatre impresario Michael White brought their business acumen to bear on the gallery, which became profitable in 1987. The following year, a second Angela Flowers Gallery, housed in a large former warehouse space, opened at Richmond Road in Hackney. The inaugural exhibition featured works by Lucian Freud and Eduardo Paolozzi. Angela’s son Matthew became Managing Director in 1989, and over the ensuing decades, galleries bearing the name Flowers were opened in Los Angeles (1998), New York (2003) and Hong Kong (2020) In 2002, Matthew oversaw the move from Hackney to one of London’s largest contemporary gallery spaces, Flowers, at Kingsland Road in Shoreditch. After some thirty years together, Angela and Bob Heller were married in 2003, at Islington Town Hall. Bob died in 2012.

As early as 1959, Angela and Adrian Flowers had bought an old cottage, set on a hillside overlooking the sea, in the coastal village of Rosscarbery, in West Cork, Ireland. Initially, it was a holiday home, but given Angela’s irrepressible and enterprising personality, soon it was being enlarged and renovated, and she began hosting summer exhibitions of contemporary art in a space beside the cottage. This gradually developed, until by the 1990s, in a new purpose-built gallery space, the Angela Flowers Rosscarbery weekends became a fixture in the London art world, attracting critics, artists, and collectors to Ireland. Among the artists featured at exhibition were William Crozier, Anthony Daley, Ian Breakwell, Lucy Jones, John Kirby, Terry Frost, Nicola Hicks, Patrick Hughes, Tai Shan Schierenberg and Boyd and Evans. Andrew Logan exhibited his outdoor Pegasus sculptures in the top field at Downeen in 1991. John Kirby and Ian Breakwell were both inspired to buy cottages on the same road as Downeen.

Throughout her life, interwoven with Angela’s love of art was a passionate devotion to music, ceramics, fashion, poetry and design—part of her legacy to her children, Adam, Matthew, Daniel, Francesca and Rachel—the latter now a celebrated painter in her own right. Although described as a force of nature, Angela could be reticent, even shy, living for others and through others, often denying her own talents. She was a meticulous planner, looking forward to birthdays, dinners, vernissages, and other celebrations with joy. Such energy, and a restless spirit, sustained her to the end. In 2022, the year before she died, Angela was guest of honour at an exhibition in West Cork of photographs taken by Adrian Flowers in St. Ives in the late 1950s. Approaching her ninetieth year, she was intrigued and delighted to see her younger self in several photographs, along with Peter Lanyon and Ben Nicholson. The exhibition was held in the Adrian Flowers Archive, now located at Ballydehob, not far from Angela’s beloved gallery and home at Rosscarbery. The last exhibition held at Rosscarbery featured works from Angela’s own personal collection of paintings. Based on the theme of snow, it included works by Jack Smith, Henry Kondracki, Tai Shan Schierenberg and other leading artists.

In 1994, Angela was made a fellow of the Royal College of Art, and five years later was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of East London. She and her daughter Rachel moved from their Modernist home “Jordleys”, at Goring upon Thames, in 2014 to the seaside town of Ramsgate in 2014, where several family members lived, and with characteristic brio painted her house bright Mondrian yellow. This was partly in celebration of Vincent Van Gogh, who resided in the town in 1876. She died at Ramsgate, on 11 August 2023. 

Text: Peter Murray

Editor: Francesca Flowers

All images subject to copyright.

Adrian Flowers Archive ©

https://www.flowersgallery.com/usr/library/documents/main/angela-flowers-1932-2023-amended.pdf

Obituaries

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/aug/14/angela-flowers-obituary

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2023/08/13/angela-flowers-gallery-contemporary-art-obituary/

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/angela-flowers-obituary-vmndh3cfh

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/angela-flowers-british-gallerist-dead-1234677006/

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/08/14/angela-flowers-has-died-aged-90

Guardian Profile

https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/apr/03/books.guardianreview3

How we met: Angela Flowers and Andrew Logan

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/how-we-met-angela-flowers-and-andrew-logan-1367552.html

Further information:

www.flowersgallery.com