Category: Portraits

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Portraits

Angela Flowers

Angela Flowers age 19. First photograph of Angela by Adrian Flowers, 1951

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 19th 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.

Painting by Emma Maria Ward, 1893
‘Cox and Grapes’ 1963. Photograph by Adrian Flowers (with Emma Ward painting)

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. 

Adrian Flowers with Adam Flowers. Angela Flowers and sister Dinah Holland.

Peverel, Leigh, near Reigate

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.  

Adam Flowers with Angela Flowers, 1955. Photograph by Adrian Flowers

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.

Peter Lanyon in his studio in St Ives, 1954 with Angela Flowers.
Photograph by Adrian Flowers

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.

Angela Flowers outside her second gallery in Portland Mews, D’Arblay Street, London. Photograph by Malcolm Lauder. 1971

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. 

Angela Flowers with gallery artists in 1970.
Photograph by Adrian Flowers

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.

Downeen, Rosscarbery, in late 60s. Photograph by Adrian Flowers

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. 

Angela Flowers wearing Zandra Rhodes cape. Photograph by Adrian Flowers

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

Categories
Artists Portraits

Robert Adams

Robert Adams in his studio 26.9.55. Photograph by Adrian Flowers

During the 1950’s and 60’s Adrian Flowers photographed the painter and sculptor Robert Adams on several occasions. One photo, taken around 1955 [AF 1750], shows Adams in his studio in London, sitting casually on a high stool made of welded metal, poring over a sketchbook on a drawing table. The form and construction of the stool suggests it was made by the artist. On a shelf are several of Adams’ sculptures. One, a small bronze work, part of the Growing Form series, dates from around 1953. Another relates to the ‘Penwith Forms’ series, and dates from 1955. Adams has dressed elegantly for the occasion of Flowers’ visit, and is wearing a white shirt and cravat. Behind the artist are rolls of drawings, cleverly suspended in loops of string. The drawing table is a fold-out affair, part of a room divider that also contains bookshelves. A large abstract painting can be glimpsed in the background. Another photograph taken on that same visit shows Adams working on a tall wooden sculpture. The sculpture stands on a workbench in the same studio, with its white-painted brick walls and overhead girders. On the walls are T-squares, a brace, saws and loops of wire. A third photograph shows Adams, his wife Patricia and their dog Tishy, surrounded by sculptures, including a welded metal piece from c. 1950, one of an abstract series inspired by drawings of dancers.

Robert Adams in his studio September 1955. Photograph by Adrian Flowers
Robert Adams in his studio with his wife Patricia and their dog Tishy.
Photograph by Adrian Flowers

Several years later, around 1960 [AF 3376], Flowers photographed Adams in a park, with houses in the background [perhaps Hampstead Heath?], standing beside a large sculpture, made of straight lengths of metal rod welded together. This work is likely Triangulated structure No. 1, its form evoking the facets of a crystalline rock formation. Another set of photographs [AF 4217, 3376] taken around 1961, show Adams standing in his studio, surrounded by tall welded-metal sculptures. By this date, the artist’s work has evolved, and his now making tall free-standing and wall-mounted abstract pieces, in which circular plate-like forms are counterpoised with slender vertical and horizontal rods and bars. Adams also appears more confident in this set of photographs, smiling, relaxed, leaning against the wall. Another set of negatives [AF 2576] are of Adams’ carved wood sculptures set on plinths, and wall-mounted reliefs, displayed within a classical house setting. The sculptures on plinths are paired forms, evoking the streamlined wings and fuselages of aeroplanes.

Robert Adams with his work, Triangulated Structure No. 1, 1961.
Photograph by Adrian Flowers

Adams had a good grounding in the technical aspects of sculpture. Having left school in Northampton aged fourteen, he worked for a local firm that manufactured agricultural machinery. From 1937 to 1946 he attended life drawing and painting classes at Northampton School of Art, and during WWII was a fire warden in Civil Defence. He first showed his work in a series of exhibitions held at the Cooling Gallery in London, along with other artist members of Civil Defence. In the post-war years he turned firstly to abstract painting, then sculpture, working mainly in wood, slate, plaster and stone. Although he remained a resolutely abstract artist, in Adams’ work there is always an underlying regard for the world of nature, and for plant and human forms. In 1949 he began to work in metal and for a decade after, in addition to making his own work, taught at the Central School of Art in London. He was influenced by, and became part of, the London Group of constructionist artists that included Adrian Heath, Anthony Hill, Victor Pasmore and Kenneth and Mary Martin. In 1947 Adams was included in the inaugural exhibition of Living Art, held in Dublin, as well as having the first of a series of exhibitions with Gimpel Fils in London. Shortly afterwards he travelled to Paris where he encountered the work of Brancusi and Julio Gonzalez. In 1949 he showed at Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris, the Redfern Gallery in London, and, the following year, at the Passedoit Gallery in New York. In 1951 he was invited to exhibit at the Sao Paulo Biennial and the following year was included with the group of young British sculptors in the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale whose work, using innovative techniques and breaking with traditional approaches to realist sculpture, led Herbert Read to coin the term Geometry of Fear.


In 1955 Adams had an exhibition at the Victor Waddington Gallery in Dublin, and also showed at Rutgers University that same year. Included in the Whitechapel Gallery’s influential 1956 exhibition This is Tomorrow, he was a frequent visitor to St. Ives, where he met Michael Snow, and in 1975 became a member of the Penwith Society. In 1962 a retrospective of his work was held at the Venice Biennale; another retrospective took place at the Campden Academy in Northampton in 1971, followed by one at Liverpool Tate in 1982. Adams was commissioned to make several public sculptures, including, in 1973, a large steel work for Kingswell in Hampstead. Beginning in the 1960’s, he also produced lithographs with abstract geometric designs, such as Screen II. His work has been catalogued by Alistair Grieve, in Robert Adams 1917-1984: A Sculptor’s Record (Tate Gallery 1992) and The Sculpture of Robert Adams (Lund Humphries 1992).

Robert Adams’ work featured in the 2022 exhibition at the Barbican Gallery, Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965.

Robert Adams, early 1962. Photograph by Adrian Flowers

Text: Peter Murray

Editor: Francesca Flowers

All images subject to copyright.

Adrian Flowers Archive ©

Categories
Artists Artists in London Portraits

Nicola Hicks

Nicola Hicks MBE, photographed by Adrian Flowers 9th March 1991

Dump Circus, Nicola Hicks’s current exhibition at Flowers Gallery, is in many ways the culmination of a long and fruitful association, one that began in 1984 when she was chosen as ‘artist of the day’ at the Angela Flowers Gallery. The 2021 exhibition is a summing-up, not only of Hicks’s practice as a sculptor but also brings to the fore her darker and more dystopian view of the relationship between the world of humans and animals. Throughout the years of showing with the Gallery, her work was often photographed by Adrian Flowers, both as documentation of studio practice and for catalogue publications.

Born in London in 1960, Nicola Hicks grew up in a house surrounded by art and music. Her mother Jill Tweed, a graduate of the Slade School, is a celebrated portraitist and animal sculptor, while her father Philip Hicks, a painter who died in 2021, taught at the Harrow School of Art and was an accomplished jazz pianist. Hicks inherited her mother’s instinctive affinity with animals—as a child she moulded images in clay in Tweed’s studio—and also her father’s humanitarian spirit: his 1969 Vietnam Requiem is a moving homage to those who suffered in that war. From the outset, animals played an important role in Hicks’s life; dogs were always a part of the household and her mother drew and sculpted sheep, dogs and horses. In 1978, aged eighteen, Hicks enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art, graduating four years later and continuing on to post-graduate studies at the Royal College of Art. In 1984, Elisabeth Frink chose the then twenty-four year old as ‘artist of the day’ at the Angela Flowers Gallery and the following year, Hicks had her first solo show, entitled No Ordinary Beasts, at Flowers. She enjoyed immediate success, exhibiting also at the Hayward Annual, Kettles Yard and the Serpentine Gallery. Works from this period include Hush and I Blow out the Flame (Dancing Girl) a sculpture depicting a pig, and the plaster and straw Death Comes a-Creeping, depicting perhaps an act of coitus, or the death of an animal. Brown Dog*, dating also from 1985, is cast in bronze and sited at Battersea Park. From the outset it was clear that while some of animals depicted by Hicks may be domesticated, in her art their wild nature is emphasised, their primal nature coming to the fore. Her work contains complex references, both visual, literary and metaphorical and her ‘hands on’ approach, while evoking Modernist and contemporary art practice, also references Palaeolithic paintings, where images were created by rubbing soot and ochre pigments onto the walls of caves; the oldest art works known to mankind. Her creatures seem often extracted from a primal sub-conscious sense of the world, evoking simultaneously both life and death.

In 1986, along with a series of large-scale drawings, Hicks’ site-specific sculpture The Fields of Akeldama was installed at the Angela Flowers Gallery at Rosscarbery in West Cork, Ireland. The title of this work refers to Akeldama, the ‘Field of Blood’, the valley near Jerusalem traditionally identified as the place where Judas Iscariot died. Hicks carved the forms of animals out of the living clay, mixed with straw; these outdoor works were eventually eroded by rain, returning into the ground from which they had been sculpted. In 1986 too, Hicks created earth works at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. During those years, her dogs—Brock, a Jack Russell and a greyhound named Rocket (rescued from the Battersea Dogs Home)—featured in her work, notably in the sculpture Rocket 6-1, shown at the Chicago Exposition in 1987, and in her 1989 show at Flowers East. She travelled to India in 1987 with the Henry Moore Memorial Exhibition, a journey that resulted in a new series of works, in which elephants and lions made their appearance. While she has showed at the Beaux Arts Gallery in Bath, and other venues, her principal affiliation has always been to Flowers Gallery, where she has exhibited regularly up to the present day. Works shown in 1989 include Shudder in the Citadel**, a tusked elephant of plaster and straw, wrapping its trunk around its foot, the handwrought surface still bearing the marks of the artist’s hands.

In 1988 Hicks represented Britain at the Rodin Memorial Exhibition in Japan, and the following year travelled in Australia, drawing and sculpting that continent’s flora and fauna, including tortoises and kangaroos. These works were shown in her 1991 Flowers exhibition entitled Fire and Brimstone, characterised by the translation of straw and plaster sculptures into bronze. The following year she exhibited drawings and sculptures inspired by Bill, her new-born son. A 1994 bronze sculpture of a cow falling, Cow Says Moo, was donated by Barbara Lloyd to Murray Edwards College in Cambridge. Other public commissions followed: the monumental bronze Beetle (2000) is sited at Anchor Square in Bristol, near Pero’s Bridge, while her equestrian sculpture of a mounted knight atop a column, also from 2000, is in the Inner Temple courtyard, London. In 1995 an exhibition of her work was held at the Djanogly Art Gallery in Nottingham, and also at Flowers East, featuring works that contained more than a trace of self-portraiture, such as Mother of Minotaurs, Bull Woman, My Love My Heart and Me—works that marked her own giving birth and her maternal relationship with her child.

Bull Woman 1993-94, photograph by Adrian Flowers

That same year, she was awarded an MBE for her services to the visual arts. Through these years, the complexities and nuances in Hick’s work continued to develop: In the sculpture Dan’s Story (2003)— as in a Renaissance painting—cherubs, or putti climb onto a lion’s back, cavorting and gamboling, sitting on the animal’s head grabbing its mane and pulling its long tail. But the darker side of Hicks’s sculpture is never far from the surface. With Banker II (2009) she created a ghoulish horned human figure, walking, carrying perhaps the remains of carcases in its hands. In Hypocrites (2011) a sad bear stands over a dog. The bear seems oblivious to the dog’s rolling over on its back. At Schoenthal, her Crouching Minotaur (2013) is sited in a field.

Hicks identifies so closely with animals that they seem to enter and possess her consciousness. Initially, her sculptures and drawings of animals concentrated on anatomy and movement, but in more recent years, the tone has become more dystopian, exploring the often-fraught relationship between animals and people. Affirming that her approach is intuitive and instinctive, rather than intellectual, she is not afraid to scrap a piece if she feels it is not going well. “The beauty of beasts is in their movement, and their expression. You don’t get much expression out of something when it’s rigid. When I start to make a piece of sculpture, it’s very often like – you almost want to dance, you almost want to get yourself into the pose, and you think – I’m making a cat, . . balancing very gently on something, that’s also balancing very gently, and it’s a delicate relationship that’s building up. Now how does that cat have to be, to balance – where is the tail going to be? And that’s where the movement comes in.”

In 2013 Hicks showed at the Venice Biennale and also had a one person-show at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut. Among the sculptures shown at Yale was Who was I Kidding (2013) where she adapted the story of the donkey from Aesop’s Fables. In this tale, a donkey wearing a lion skin and terrifying other donkeys, is unmasked by his own braying, and so becomes the subject of ridicule. The materials used, plaster and straw, add to the sense of the abject. There not an ounce of sentimentality in Hicks’s art, which is often brutally direct. She is acutely conscious of the tendency to identify traits in animals that resemble or echo human emotions. Termed the “pathetic fallacy” by John Ruskin in his 1856 Modern Painters, this is a point of view from which animals are seen, incorrectly, as exhibiting human emotions. Hicks is unambiguous on this point: “Animals are not cute and cuddly. From a distance perhaps, without your specs. As soon as you get close up, it’s a beast. It’s an animal, it’s surviving. . . We’re just another species. We think we’re so different and we’re not. I make sculpture for pure and emotional reasons. I didn’t choose to be a figurative sculptor. For me to be an abstract sculptor it would be pretending. That’s not how I work. That’s not how I think.” Not infrequently, the animals she depicts seem to be hurt or in pain. Nonetheless, her drawings bring them to life on the page, resonating with vitality and a sense of movement. While her subject-matter belongs within the realm of Bernini, the Baroque, Landseer, classic chapters in the history of Western Art, her approach is unique, personal and of our times. In placing a cat-like creature on top of an upturned tortoise, there is a gentle allusion to Polynesian creation myths, in which creation stands on the back of a tortoise. Having lived in Australia, tales of how the world originated would have been part of the culture she encountered. She blends these elements together to create works that resonate with a visceral visual and tactile strength, transcending time and place, and forcing the viewer to reappraise where the human race stands in relation to the natural world.

Hick’s work has been written about and reviewed extensively; by Mary Rose Beaumont in Arts Review (Sept 1988 and January 1991) and Brian Sewell in Evening Standard (Dec 1988). Robert Heller contributed an essay to the 1989 Flowers Gallery catalogue, as did William Packer. Giles Auty wrote about her work in The Field in November 1992, and William Packer in the Financial Times (18 July 1995) Tom Phillips contributed an introduction to her 1991 catalogue Fire and Brimstone. In 1998, Will Self wrote a catalogue essay for her show The Camel that Broke the Straw’s Back. The following year, on May 25, her work was reviewed by Frances Spalding in The Independent. In 2000 Tobey Crockett reviewed Hicks’s work in the January edition of Art in America.

Nicola Hicks in her studio in 1994. Photograph by Adrian Flowers

*https://artuk.org/discover/stories/nicola-hicks-brown-dog

**Shudder in the Citadel featured in the South Bank Show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAQO3W-eA3M

Text: Peter Murray

Editor: Francesca Flowers

All images subject to copyright.

Adrian Flowers Archive ©

Categories
Artists in St Ives Portraits

Roger Hilton

Roger Hilton photographed by Adrian Flowers in St Ives, May 1959

1911 – 1975

Like the journalist Jeffrey Bernard, whose “unwellness” fascinated theatre audiences for many years, the painter Roger Hilton combined a quintessential British cocktail of artistic genius, bleak humour and the gradual disintegration of bodily functions. Hilton’s last years are documented in hand-written letters to family and friends, published posthumously as Roger Hilton: Night Letters (Newlyn Orion Gallery 1980), with an introduction by his friend Michael Canney. Direct and uninhibited, these writings—mostly to his wife Rose—reveals a man both sensitive and aware of his shortcomings, and are a surprising pleasure to read. Several could not be published as they are so rude about fellow-artists, critics and friends. Suffering from alcoholism and peripheral neuritis, Hilton resisted efforts to admit him to the Maudsley hospital. His day to day needs were not complicated—crayons and paper for drawing, whiskey, batteries for his radio, cigarettes, and fuel for his lighter. He drew incessantly, rapid sketches capturing a zest for life and reflecting an obsession with the female body, even as his own body began to give up. What Hilton made of his life is also what invests his art with remarkable qualities—“make of your mistakes a strength rather than a weakness”—and he was unsentimental to the end: “And let there be no moaning at the bar, when I set out to sea.”

When Adrian and Angela Flowers first visited Hilton’s studio in St. Ives, in May 1959, the painter was relatively young, in good health and evidently pleased to have company and conversation. He was not yet resident in Cornwall; this was an exploratory visit. The Flowers had brought their two young sons, Adam and Matthew, while Angela was pregnant, expecting her third son, Daniel. The artist Denis Mitchell was also present. The photographs taken by Adrian [Job No. 3169] show a sparsely-furnished, white-painted studio, with bare wooden floorboards, the walls lined with abstract paintings. The furniture consisted of two tables, a single-bar electric fire and an old car seat, with Hilton seated on a Victorian chair, and Mitchell perched on a beer crate. Balding and wearing glasses, wearing a smart check jacket, Hilton holds court, clearly in good form. However, in little over a decade, he would become a virtual invalid.

Denis Mitchell, Roger Hilton and Angela Flowers
photograph by Adrian Flowers, May 1959, St Ives

During his lifetime, Hilton drew and painted, not as an enjoyable recreation, but compulsively, with a chaotic sexual frustration often bubbling over in his work. His paintings are the visual equivalent of the poetry of W.S. Graham, one of the many friends with whom he fell out. Graham described Hilton as ‘artist of the astringent, the uncharming, the unkitchened’, but Hilton’s instinctive grasp of the language of abstraction places him in the vanguard of progressive post-war British art. Explanatory labels in galleries and museums may attempt to sanitise Hilton’s failings. However, notwithstanding—or perhaps because of—his personality, his art remains compelling and visceral. Almost the first sentence spoken by his widow Rose, in the video documentary of a retrospective exhibition at the Newlyn Gallery, refers to Hilton’s depiction of the female body. She explains that he was trying to ‘look’ at the human figure in a new way, and it was not insulting to women. Nonetheless, after his death, it took her almost a decade to build up confidence to return to painting. When she met Hilton, she had been one of the Royal College’s most promising graduates.

Born in Northwood, Middlesex, Hilton came from a middle-class immigrant family. Originally from Hamburg, his father Oscar was a medical doctor, and the author of The Health of the Child; a Manual for Mothers and Nurses (1915), a book which decried the tendency for fashionable mothers to ‘sacrifice the welfare of the child to the pleasures of self-indulgence’, advocating instead breast-feeding (with precise instructions on caring for breasts and nipples). The book was dedicated to the author’s three sons ‘John, Roger and Michael’. During WWI, because of anti-German feeling in Britain, the family changed their name from Hildesheim to Hilton. Educated at Bishop’s Stortford College, Roger studied art at the Slade School under Henry Tonks, and between 1931 and 1938 spent a total of two years in Paris, during which time he studied at the Ranson college, an offshoot of the Academie Julian, in Montparnasse. He read French literature, and discovered Parisian cuisine and art. During the Second World War Hilton served in the army, afterwards teaching at the Bryanstown School in Dorset, and the Central School of Arts. Although he painted his first abstract work in 1950, by the end of the decade, reflecting his admiration for Matisse, Laurens and Picasso, he had returned to figurative art. Hilton developed his own personal visual language, one based on drawing, where mistakes were not erased but remained very much part of the work. In keeping with one of his early heroes, Piet Mondrian, the colours were simple; blue, red, black, white and green.

It is difficult to dislike the paintings of Hilton. Colourful, energetic and brimming over with vitality, works such as Oy Yoi Yoi are a brave attempt to lift post-war British painting out of an introverted and dull mindset. In spite of his chauvinism and frequent irascibility, it seems to have been difficult to dislike Hilton himself. But he did not make it easy. Pointing to a dog’s basket, he informed the painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham it was where women belonged. Barns-Graham was fond of him nonetheless, and appreciated the originality and honesty of his art. In 1965, having divorced his first wife Ruth David, Hilton married Rose Phipps, a woman twenty years his junior. The couple settled in Cornwall and had two children, Bo and Fergus. Hilton enjoyed the company of fellow St. Ives artists, particularly Tony and Jane O’Malley. An alcoholic in the last decades of his life, he was fortunate to live in a part of England where his drinking was tolerated, and where he could also exercise his considerable charm, chatting happily with visitors. Rural life was not uneventful however, and after several episodes of drink driving, Hilton found himself locked up in Exeter goal—the experience reminding him of years he had spent as a prisoner in a German POW camp, having been captured during the raid on Dieppe. As he inched towards death, Hilton’s art became ever more direct and instinctive. His late drawings, including lively female nudes, are among his best work. He died at Botallack, near St. Just, in 1975.

Text: Peter Murray

Editor: Francesca Flowers

All images subject to copyright.

Adrian Flowers Archive ©

Categories
Artists Portraits

Brian Wall sculptor

(b. 5th September 1931)

Brian Wall photographed by Adrian Flowers, on 6th February 1963

In 1956, Adrian Flowers visited the sculptor Brian Wall at his studio at Custom House Lane, Porthmeor in St. Ives. Using 120mm colour transparency stock, Flowers photographed a series of painted wood constructions by Wall, setting them up not in the studio but in the open air, on the flat sands of the beach. With titles such as Construction No. 1 and Construction No. 10, the modular black and white frames of these early works by Wall suggest the steel supports of Modernist buildings, while their inner panels, painted in primary colours, are in some ways the realisation in three-dimensional form of paintings by Mondrian.

Brian Wall with his “Construction” sculptures on St Ives Beach, 1956

Flowers photographed Wall and his sculptures several times over the following decades. A sequence of black and white portrait shots taken in February 1963 show Wall assuming various poses; seated, in close-up, head and shoulders, smiling, smoking a cigarette, making funny expressions, hand under chin. He appears by turns thoughtful, quizzical, good-humoured, tough and determined. One sheet of contact prints shows him seated on a high stool. A folder [ref 4456] also contains several large-scale prints, made from these negatives.

Contact sheet, Brian Wall photographed by Adrian Flowers, 6th February 1963

Born in Paddington on 5th September 1931, Brian Wall’s childhood was spent in London, although during WWII he was evacuated to Yorkshire. After the war he left school, aged fourteen, to work as a glassblower in a factory. In 1949 he enlisted in the RAF for two years, where he trained as an aerial photographer (as had Adrian Flowers and Len Deighton), before enrolling at Luton College of Art. Deciding to become a painter, in 1954 Wall settled in St. Ives, where initially he worked at the Tregenna Castle Hotel. Shortly afterwards he met Peter Lanyon, who helped him find a studio in Custom House Lane, where Wall worked alongside Terry Frost, Patrick Heron and Sandra Blow. In 1955 he was introduced by Denis Mitchell to Barbara Hepworth, becoming her first studio assistant. He also met David Lewis, who had written on the work of Mondrian and Brancusi, and in 1956 was elected a member of the Penwith Society, exhibiting his work in the Society’s annual shows.

Adrian Flowers photographing Brian Wall, February 1963

During these years, starting with the painted wood constructions, Wall developed his own sculpture practice, but quickly moved on making works in welded steel. The year after his first one-person show at the Architectural Association in 1957, he was included in the Arts Council exhibition Contemporary British Sculpture, and he also showed with the Drian and Grabowski galleries. In 1959, an article on his work was published in Architectural Design. Moving back to London, Wall became active in fine art education, serving on the National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design, and also on the Arts Council of Great Britain. In 1961-2, he taught at Ealing College of Art, before being appointed Head of Sculpture at the Central School of Art (now Central St. Martins), where William Turnbull and Barry Flanagan were also teaching. In 1961 Wall represented England at the 2nd Paris Biennale, and over the following years his work was shown in exhibitions throughout Britain. He featured in Bryan Robertson and John Russell’s 1965 Private View, a book documenting the rise of London as a centre for contemporary art.

A subsequent set of photographs [ref 5562] taken in London by Adrian Flowers record a series of medium and smaller sized welded steel sculptures by Wall, such as Untitled Steel Sculpture, Black 1964. Some were photographed in a studio setting, others in a laneway outside the artist’s studio. Several feature discs, and circles juxtaposed with straight pieces of steel, such as One Disc (1966); others are purely angular and geometric. Other photographs show the artist in his home, with family members, sculptures displayed on tables, and a geometric abstract painting on the wall.

In 1967 Wall had a solo exhibition at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and was included in the Tate’s British Sculpture in the Sixties. On 25th March of the following year his Always Advancing, a large public sculpture in the form of two A’s, was sited at Thornaby-on-Tees in Yorkshire. In 1968, Wall’s sculptures were included in an exhibition organised by the Whitechapel Art Gallery, New British Painting and Sculpture, that toured to cities in North America, including Portland, Vancouver, Chicago, Houston and San Francisco. The artist visited the US several times, becoming friendly with Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and the writer Clement Greenberg. In 1969, when the exhibition was shown at the art museum at Berkeley University, he was invited to become a visiting Professor there, and returned the following year, becoming a permanent faculty member in 1972. Although there were artists working in steel before Wall settled in San Francisco, they tended to work in less ‘pure’ modes. His presence in the area influenced several artists, including Fletcher Benton, to begin working directly, in a more abstract way, with welded steel. Taking up US citizenship, Wall became recognised more as an American sculptor and was appointed Chair of the Art Department at Berkeley, a post he held until his retirement in 1994. Throughout his teaching career, he continued to make his own work, setting up a studio and workshop in Oakland, where his assistant is the sculptor Grant Irish. He prefers to make his sculptures directly, working with pieces of steel on a one to one scale, rather than constructing maquettes, or working from drawings. This invests Wall’s work with qualities of lightness that are often absent in large-scale abstract metal sculptures. His pieces appear to teeter, tilt and turn. Circles, cylinders, I-beams and plates hover and jostle playfully. In spite of the massive scale, and the industrial materials he employs, there is a palpable pleasure and joy in his work.

Although Wall rejects the term “Constructivist” to describe his work—on the basis that his work does not relate to architecture, but emerges from a process of intuitive development—there is no mistaking the Central European and revolutionary Russian tradition of industrial materials used to make abstract art. This Constructivist tradition had been promoted in Cornwall during the war years by Naum Gabo, leading Ben Nicholson to adopt a pure minimalist approach to abstraction. Nicholson was an early influence on Wall who, from the outset, steered clear of the expressionist styles of Lynn Chadwick, Reg Butler and Kenneth Armitage, as well as the organic forms of Hepworth and Henry Moore.

A retrospective exhibition of Wall’s sculptures, organised by the Seattle Art Museum in 1982, toured to SFMoMa. The exhibition included two early St. Ives painted wood constructions; Metamorphosis (1955) and Right Angle Deck Construction with Vertical Movement (1956)—both revealing how close the artist had been to architecture at the outset of his career. Although most of the works in the Seattle show were from the 1960’s and 1970’s, including the brightly-painted Early Yellow (1975), there were more recent sculptures too, including October Jump (1981), in which two I-beam girders are supported by cylindrical and plate steel forms. Through the last four decades, Wall continued to exhibit in the UK, showing at Flowers Gallery in 2008 and 2011; he also showed with Flowers in Los Angeles, Max Hutchinson in New York, and with John Berggruen and Hackett Mills in San Francisco. In 2006, a monograph on his work, written by Chris Stephens, was published by Momentum Press 2006, and in 2014 Wall established a foundation to benefit working artists. As recently as 2015 a solo show held at the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University featured sculptures monumental in scale but light in feeling, reflecting Wall’s interest in Zen Buddhism—an interest which began in St. Ives in the 1950’s, and continues to inspire his work to the present day.

Text: Peter Murray

Editor: Francesca Flowers

All images subject to copyright.

Adrian Flowers Archive ©

For further reading, refer to Brian Wall by Chris Stephens, Suzaan Boettger and Barry Munitz. Momentum publishing 2006.

Categories
Portraits

Roland & Mario

Mario Amaya and Roland Penrose photographed by Adrian Flowers,
13th June 1968

In terms of promoting awareness of Surrealism in mid twentieth-century Britain, the artist and curator Roland Penrose (1900-1984) is a key figure. Born into an English Quaker family, he studied art in Paris and lived for extended periods in the South of France. A friend—and biographer—of both Picasso and Man Ray, Penrose also knew Paul Elouard and a wide range of avant-garde artists and writers. In 1936 Penrose organized the first exhibition of Surrealist art in London, which featured works by Magritte, Man Ray and Max Ernst. With Andre Breton attending the opening and Salvador Dali performing in Trafalgar Square, the resulting press attention had helped spread the fame and notoriety of the movement throughout Britain. Penrose was also a painter, and in works such as Self-Portrait, he represented himself as an embattled figure, an image prompted no doubt by the often mocking press reaction to the exhibitions and events he organized. In the late 1930’s, around the time he and his first wife, the poet Valentine Buoé, divorced, he met the American photographer Lee Miller, who had previously been muse and companion to Man Ray.
In 1947, along with Herbert Read, Penrose was a co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and twenty years later, as chairman, he oversaw the ICA’s move from its original premises at 17 Dover Street, to Carlton House Terrace, near Buckingham Palace. Key early figures in the history of the ICA include its long-time director Dorothy Morland, the collector Peter Watson, Eduardo and Freda Paolozzi, David Sylvester, Peter Gregory and interior designer Jane Drew. By 1968, Morland had been replaced by Michael Kustow, formerly of the Royal Shakespeare Company, while Penrose’s personal assistant Julie Lawson was now deputy director, a post previously occupied by Brenda Pool, Lawrence Alloway and Jasia Reichardt. When Penrose moved to Paris, to work for the British Council, it left a vacuum, and his role as innovator was taken over by Lawson, Alloway and Morland. With assistance from a trust set up by Penrose, Morland preserved documents relating to the history of the ICA, an archive now held by the Tate.

Mario Amaya and Roland Penrose photographed by Adrian Flowers,
13th June 1968 JN 6014

On June 13th 1968, at his studio in Tite Street, Adrian Flowers photographed Penrose, along with the art critic and curator Mario Amaya. The photographs show the two men, smartly dressed as if for a business meeting. Both are clearly in good humour, relaxed and smiling. In some images, Penrose, the older of the two, is seated on a vintage office chair. Beside him stands Amaya, hair carefully combed and silk handkerchief in breast pocket. The thirty-four year old Brooklyn-born Amaya was also editor of Art and Artists, a magazine he had founded in London three years previously. The photographs clearly relate to the exhibition curated by Amaya, “The Obsessive Image”, which inaugurated the ICA’s tenure at Carlton House Terrace and included works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Allen Jones, Francis Bacon and David Hockney. The catalogue introduction had been written by Penrose. “The Obsessive Image” finished its run just two weeks before the photo session. There was clearly a close bond between the two men, with Amaya continuing the pioneering work of Penrose, focusing on Pop Art in much the same way as Penrose had promoted Surrealism three decades earlier. Among the artists supported by Penrose were George Hoellering and Penny Slinger—a performance and installation artist whose work was also photographed by Adrian Flowers. A photograph of Roland Penrose, taken by Flowers in 1970, is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. Penrose and Lee Miller married in 1947 and lived for many years at Farley Farm in Sussex, where an archive and museum dedicated to their lives and work is maintained by their son Antony Penrose and his daughter Ami Bouhassane.

Sir Roland Penrose, photographed for the National Portrait Gallery in October 1970

However, the sequence of photographs taken on June 13th 1968 is remarkable for other reasons. Just ten days previously, in New York City, along with Andy Warhol, Amaya had been shot and wounded by a mentally unbalanced woman, Valerie Solanas. While Warhol was critically wounded, the bullet aimed at Amaya had grazed his back without causing any major harm. Discharged from hospital, he was able to return to London for the portrait shoot at Flowers’ studio. Two years later, he was appointed chief curator at the National Gallery of Ontario, and over the following decade, before his premature death from AIDS in London in 1986, Amaya was a popular and charismatic figure in the art world, best remembered for his championing of Pop Art and for publications such as Blacks: USA, Pop as Art, Art Nouveau and Tiffany Glass.

Mario Amaya and Roland Penrose photographed by Adrian Flowers,
13th June 1968

Text: Peter Murray

Editor: Francesca Flowers

All images subject to copyright.

Adrian Flowers Archive ©

Categories
Musicians Portraits

Kató Havas OBE

Kató Havas, photograph by Adrian Flowers, March 1961

(1920 – 2018)

Although still in her early forties when photographed by Adrian Flowers in March 1961, Kató Havas had already gained a reputation as one of the leading violin teachers in Europe and the United States. The photographs taken by Flowers that day show Havas demonstrating her technique of playing the violin, an approach more relaxed than the traditional concert style which had carried over from the nineteenth century. In some of the portrait photographs, a dark-haired and stylishly dressed Havas, holding her violin, looks directly at the camera. Other images show her playing, bow in her right hand, and left elbow directly below the violin. This was the loose, fluid style of playing that Havas had witnessed as a child, when she saw Gypsy musicians playing in her native Carpathia, and which she developed into the technique for which she became famous.

Kató Havas photographed by Adrian Flowers

Born in the market town of Târgu Secuiesc (Keszdivasarhely) in the Carpathian mountains, from an early age Havas’s parents, Sandor and Paula Weinberger, had encouraged her music studies, following the pedagogical system then being developed by Zoltan Kodály. In 1927, aged seven, Havas gave her first professional recital at Kolozsvár, playing works by Brahms and Schubert, and the following year enrolled at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, where she studied under Imre Waldbauer. Whilst a student, she met Bartók, Kodály and Dohnányi, with all three attending her first recital at the Academy. It was during this time that the pressure of performance began to affect Havas’s playing; the rigid technique she had been taught was causing tendonitis and other physical problems. In 1939, she travelled to the United States, making her debut at Carnegie Hall, and also learning, from David Mendoza, a more natural left-hand method of violin playing.

The following year, giving her Hungarian ‘minders’ the slip, she eloped with the author William Woods. Had she returned to Hungary, she would almost certainly have been amongst the more than one hundred thousand Transylvanian Jews who were exterminated in death camps. In 1944, all the Jews of her native town Targu Sacuiesc were deported to Auschwitz. Through his writings, Woods documented a world of terror from which he had helped Kató escape: published in 1942, his debut novel Edge of Darkness documents Nazi atrocities in Norway. This was followed with Manuela (1958) a novel recounting the story of a middle-aged ship’s captain who falls in love with a young female stowaway: the film version was directed by Guy Hamilton, and starred Elsa Martinelli and Trevor Howard. Woods and Havas went on to have three daughters, Susanna, Pamela and Kate, and Havas gave up giving concert recitals, concentrating instead on developing a more natural way of playing the violin, using rhythm and song: “Hear with your eyes, and see with your left hand”, she said, emphasising that a violin player should strive to feel there was ‘no violin’ and ‘no bow hold’.

Although in 1920—the year she was born—Transylvania had been transferred from Austro-Hungarian rule to the Romanian kingdom, Havas always regarded herself as Hungarian. Unable to return to her homeland for decades because of the post-war Russian occupation, she and Woods settled in Dorset, England, where he continued his career as a screenwriter, working mainly for television. Meanwhile, Havas took up music again, teaching, writing and gaining a reputation as teacher, performer and theorist; her approach enabling many musicians to overcome stage fright, and to give more natural performances. Her first book, A New Approach to Violin Playing was published in 1961: “A warm and beautiful tone has nothing to do with talent or individual personality. It is merely the putting the right pressure, on the right pot, at the right moment.”

Kató Havas. Photograph by Adrian Flowers

To achieve good results, never tell a pupil what not to do. Give her something positive to do instead. As soon as the cause of the trouble is recognized, track it down step by step with such compelling logic that there is not an atom of doubt left. Questions and discussions are to be encouraged, not only so that the pupil can work with the teacher but also to give her a chance to think things out for herself. Demonstrate: first, the incorrect way, to point out the faulty tone, and then the correct way. Results should be judged by the “degree of excellence in tone production” because the ability to listen, and listen continuously, is one of the greatest voids among young violinists (p.57). 

This was followed by several publications including her 1973 Stage Fright and Freedom to Play, published in 1981. Lecturing at Oxford University and television appearances brought Havas a degree of fame. She founded and directed the Purbeck Music Festival in Dorset, as well as the Roehampton Music Festival in London, and the International Festival in Oxford. In 1971, her marriage to Woods having ended in divorce, she married Tim Millard-Tucker, a design engineer. In 1985, the “Kató Havas Association for the New Approach” was founded, and in 2002 she was invited to return to Hungary to lecture at the Academy where she had studied in the 1930’s. In 2002 she was appointed OBE. Sixteen years later, Havas died, aged 98.

She had had a worldwide influence, and among those who benefitted from her teaching were Janet Scott Hoyt, Pamela Price in Sheffield, John Ehrlich and Don Peterson in Iowa, and Claude Kenneson in the University of Alberta. For many years Claude Kenneson had taught at the Havas Summer School in Dorset, and through his writings and career he endeavoured to continue her legacy in music.

Kató Havas photographed by Adrian Flowers March 1961

Text: Peter Murray

Editor: Francesca Flowers

All images subject to copyright.

Adrian Flowers Archive ©

Categories
Artists Portraits

Joseph Beuys

12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986

Joseph Beuys at the Whitechapel in 1972, photograph by Adrian Flowers

In February 1972, Joseph Beuys, by then something of a star in the international art world, visited London to perform Information Action at the Tate and Whitechapel galleries. The work consisted of a lecture and discussion, with Beuys drawing diagrams and cryptic notes on a series of blackboards, a technique that had become his signature trademark. This was far from being his first visit to the UK; two years previously Beuys had collaborated with Richard de Marco on a series of projects in Scotland. He also worked extensively with writer and curator Caroline Tisdall. The three blackboards resulting from the 1972 London event remained for over a decade in the store of the Tate education department, until in 1983, along with a board from a parallel event at the Whitechapel Gallery, they were accessioned into the Tate collection as artworks in their own right. Although in some respects souvenirs, the boards with their chalked diagrams still convey the excitement of the lectures, which were animated by the charismatic personality of Beuys himself. 

A series of photographs, taken by Adrian Flowers at the Whitechapel Gallery in Feb 1972, show Beuys with his characteristic gaunt expression, wearing a grey felt hat with black hatband. His face is lopsided, perhaps as a consequence of injuries received when he served in the German military during WWII. With its armband and brass buttons with crosses, the artist’s coat is also provocative, the red gorget patches on the lapels reminiscent of a military officer. Underneath the coat is visible the fisherman’s vest Beuys invariably wore. Another photograph shows the artist standing on a small balcony, high above the gallery floor, in a pose that again has historical resonances. A third image shows Beuys sitting on the bar of a scaffolding tower. The available props in the Whitechapel gallery space, ladders, towers and steeply raked rooflights, were used effectively, with Beuys becoming an actor in an expressionist stage set.

Joseph Beuys at the Whitechapel in 1972, photograph by Adrian Flowers

At the time of the Tate/Whitechapel event Beuys was head of sculpture at the Dusseldorf Academy, but his unorthodox teaching methods were becoming increasingly controversial, and in October of that year, notwithstanding protests amongst artists and students, he was dismissed. If anything, this increased his fame and, through association with movements such as Fluxus, over the following decade he enjoyed a successful international career, culminating in a retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1979. Seven years later, shortly after winning the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize, Beuys died aged 64. Over the decades following, while much of the mystique that had propelled him to the forefront of the international art scene began to ebb, his life, legacy and philosophies continued to fascinate biographers and critics, often eager to tear aside the veil of veneration with which this charismatic artist was regarded by his followers. He certainly mythologised his own life, creating fictional biographical details—such as his having been a Luftwaffe pilot, shot down in the Crimea, and rescued by local nomadic Tartars, who wrapped him in felt and carried him on a sled to a place of safety. These life episodes, heavily embellished rather than invented, were used by Beuys to explain and underpin the meaning of his artworks, especially his sculptures which often incorporated sleds, fur, fat and felt. 

As a teenager, Beuys had been a member of the Hitler Youth, had participated in the 1933 Nuremburg Rally, and later served as a radio operator in the Luftwaffe. His plane was indeed shot down in the Crimea, but he was rescued by German troops and saw further military service before the end of the war. In the post-war years, his art was largely based on a simultaneous reverence and revulsion regarding these aspects of his life. Often, albeit without any trace of humour, he brings to mind the fictional character Schwejk, an anti-hero who forms relationships with animals, and finds himself in absurdist situations. In essence however, Beuys’ ideas were not so innovative or revolutionary, but were based on the writings of Nietzsche and Rudolf Steiner, and on the training he received in the late 1940’s under Ewald Mataré at the Dusseldorf Academy. 

Joseph Beuys at the Whitechapel in 1972, photograph by Adrian Flowers

Beuys was an idealist, arguing for a spiritual rebirth for mankind, based on qualities of essential humanity. Drawing on shamanistic traditions, he regarded art, or what he called ‘social sculpture’, as a liberating force that could enact social change. He was often deliberately controversial in his lectures and pronouncements, comparing the suppressing of creativity in people—a consequence of industrialisation—as akin to the extermination policies of the Nazis. An ardent admirer of James Joyce, in the late 1950’s Beuys began work on a series of drawings inspired by the novel Ulysses. At one point, encouraged by the art critic Dorothy Walker, he considered setting up a free university in the Wicklow mountains, near Dublin. His assemblage of works, A Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland, is in the Museum of Modern Art at Oxford. He was also a frequent visitor to Scotland, where he collaborated with Richard de Marco on projects relating to Celtic history and legend, that formed part of the Edinburgh Festival. Beuys’s work in the UK and Ireland has been documented by his friend Caroline Tisdall, later art critic for The Guardian, who has also organised exhibitions and published several books on the artist.

Text: Peter Murray

Editor: Francesca Flowers

All images subject to copyright

Adrian Flowers Archive ©

Categories
Portraits

Shirley Williams MP

Baroness Williams of Crosby (1930 – 2021)

Shirley Williams MP in her office at the Houses of Parliament,
photographed by Adrian Flowers, for the Observer, 20th July 1973

On 20th July 1973, accompanied by his son Matthew (2nd assistant at that time, 1st assistant was Steve Garforth – see previous post from July 2020 ), Adrian Flowers brought his camera equipment to the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, to photograph Shirley Williams, for an article for the Observer. Williams at that time was poised to become the first woman prime minister, but in the event she stepped aside to allow James Callaghan to take up the leadership of the Labour Party. The photographs taken in 1973 provide a vivid record of a woman who was at the heart of British politics. Dressed in a white safari suit, her red leather handbag sitting on a desk strewn with papers and files, Williams was totally at ease with the camera. She had long been one of Flowers’ heroes, and her championing of progressive policies on education, race relations and society tied in closely with his own views. Just three weeks earlier, in Parliament, Williams had railed against the new Immigration Act, the wording of which was open to varying interpretations. She pointed out that people stopped for minor traffic offences were being taken to police stations and questioned about their status as immigrants: “There are particularly sensitive areas which the House must consider. One of these is the relations between the immigrants and the police. The relations between the police and in particular the Asian community have, by and large, been good. . . Civil liberties do not erode at the top: they erode at the bottom, among the most under-privileged, the most poor, the least popular. If the House cares—and I believe that it has always cared—about civil liberties, it must tonight take the not wholly popular but deeply important step of satisfying itself that the constitutional rights and civil rights of these people have been adequately protected by us.” [Hansard HC Deb 26 June 1973 vol 858 cc1405-70] But a few days later Williams, ever mindful of the well-being of all sectors of society, was seeking improved allowances for police officers based in London. As a member of Parliament, and then of the House of Lords, Williams devoted almost her entire life to politics and public service.
Born in 1930, Shirley Williams (née Brittain) was brought up in a resolutely left-wing household, albeit one in which social commitment was matched with a degree of prosperity. Her mother, Vera Brittain, originally from Staffordshire, was a prolific author and political activist: in 2014 Testament of Youth, an autobiographical memoir of her experiences as a nurse in the First World War, was made into a film by the BBC. Her daughter’s life was also shaped by war. Evacuated from Britain during WWII, Shirley Williams spent several years in St. Paul Minnesota, where she attended St. Paul’s school. Her father, George Catlin, while lecturing at Cornell University in the early 1940’s, was an advisor to American presidential candidates. Returning to Britain after the war, Williams attended St Paul’s School in London (where her father had also been educated) then studied at Oxford, before working as a journalist, and then entering politics. Much of her life was dedicated to breaking down those barriers of class and privilege that had paradoxically, during her formative years, given her access to inspirational figures including T. S. Eliot and Jawaharal Nehru. There were other paradoxes in her political life; motivated perhaps by her Catholic upbringing, during the 1960’s she opposed liberalising divorce and abortion, and was later opposed to gay marriage. As Minister for Education in James Callaghan’s Labour government in 1974, she championed comprehensive education but cut resources for teacher training.

Although she served in the Labour governments of both Wilson and Callaghan, she resigned from the Labour Party in 1981, to found, along with three other rebels, the Social Democratic party, which later merged with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats. Her first husband Bernard Williams, who she married in 1955, was an academic and later a philosophy don, while her second husband Richard Neustadt, like her father, was an academic who served also as advisor to American presidents including J F Kennedy and Bill Clinton. He and Williams met during her time as lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. After a distinguished parliamentary career, in 1993 Williams was appointed a member of the House of Lords, a post from which she resigned in 2016. Her own autobiography Climbing the Bookshelves was published in 2009. She died on April 12th 2021.

Text: Peter Murray

All images subject to copyright

Categories
Artists in St Ives

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

1912 – 2004

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in December 1954, photographed by Adrian Flowers

With the publication of Virginia Button’s recent book on Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, following on Lynne Green’s monograph W. Barns-Graham, A Studio Life, the achievements of this leading post-war abstract artist are now being fully recognised. Although a key member of the St. Ives group, Barns-Graham was unfairly marginalised in the 1985 survey exhibition ‘St. Ives 1939-64: Twenty-five years of Painting, Sculpture and Pottery’, held at Tate St. Ives—although two subsequent solo exhibitions of her work at that museum have gone some way towards remedying the oversight. In some ways, as Button points out, in refusing to remain silent on the issue of gender discrimination, Barns-Graham found herself alienated from the largely male cadre of curators, artists and patrons of the period, who felt she was not ‘playing the game’. The frontispiece in Button’s book, a photograph portrait taken by Adrian Flowers in 1955, shows the artist in her studio. During his visit, Flowers also took photographs of her paintings, sculptures and geometric plaster reliefs.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham in 1954, photographed by Adrian Flowers

The paintings, including White, Black and Terracotta (1954) are hard-edged abstract compositions, angular, often with interlocking forms. At that time, Barns-Graham was achieving widespread recognition; two years before, the first solo show of her work had been held in London, at the Redfern Gallery. Flowers photographed Barns-Graham and her then husband David Lewis, standing together, but at a slight distance. Having married in 1949, they were a golden couple in the art world, photogenic, stylishly-dressed and very much of the Modernist era, but Flowers’ images also capture a certain awkwardness between them.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and David Lewis in 1954.
Photograph by Adrian Flowers

Born into a well-off family in St. Andrews, Scotland, Barns-Graham studied at the Edinburgh College of Art, where in addition to conventional studio tuition, where the emphasis was on observational drawing, she attended lectures by Herbert Read, and was tutored by William Gilles, whose modernist abstract works were a great influence. In 1940, after spending some time travelling on the Continent, Barns-Graham settled in St. Ives where she met Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Borlase Smart, Naum Gabo and Bernard Leach, and began to explore abstraction. Although her early work was representational, and she showed with the Newlyn Society and at the Royal Scottish Academy, Barns-Graham quickly became seen as a leading progressive artist, not only for the quality of her work but also in terms of media coverage of the burgeoning art scene in Cornwall. Her marriage in 1948 to Lewis reinforced this celebrity, especially when he became secretary of the Penwith Society.

Tall, good-looking, gregarious and charming, Lewis was ten years younger than Barns-Graham. However, having come to Cornwall from South Africa, he was ambitious and by 1954 was beginning to see St. Ives as a cul-de-sac. The year after these photographs were taken, he and Barns-Graham split up, Lewis eventually settling in Canada, where he became a professor of architecture and urban planning. Their marriage was annulled in 1960. Although these events were a blow to Barns-Graham’s personal self-esteem, the set-back was temporary, and while retiring somewhat from the world, she continued to develop her art. Experimenting with different styles, she maintained an abiding interest in geology, which provided, so to speak, a bed-rock for her creative process. This was not surprising, as it was in Edinburgh that James Hutton in the eighteenth century had pioneered the modern interpretations of rock formation. The Cornish coastline and the beach at Porthmeor were a continuing inspiration to Barns-Graham, but from the 1960’s onwards, she travelled extensively, seeking both artistic inspiration and emotional solace in the harshest of landscapes, including the glaciers of Switzerland (which she had first visited in 1949) and the volcanic terrain of the Canary Islands. While her later paintings are more fluid, with colours mixing and merging, the earlier works tend to be hard-edged and geometric. Some echo the fractures and dislocations of faults in strata, while the use of red, reminiscent of liquid magma, is a recurring feature in her art. Barns-Graham’s use of vibrant colours gives her paintings an emotional kick, while her abstract compositions are hard-won, based on close observation of nature, careful thought and inspiration. In the 1990’s she created a series of energetic and colourful paintings, some with a series she titled ‘Scorpio’. Joyous and colourful, these works have echoes of jazz improvisation, and dance. From 1998, at the Graal Press near Edinburgh, she also explored the medium of screen-printing, working with the press’s founders Carol Robertson and Robert Adams. Although Barns-Graham died in 2004, both her work and her contribution to art are sustained by the Trust set up in her name.

[see Virginia Button Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (Sansom & Company, 2020)]

Text: Peter Murray

Editor: Francesca Flowers

All images subject to copyright.

Adrian Flowers Archive ©