Refiguring the 50s

FELL

FRANKFURTHER

HERMAN

LOWRY

edited by Sarah MacDougall

Refiguring the 50s

REFIGURING THE 50s

EARDLEY

Refiguring the 50s Joan Eardley Sheila Fell Eva Frankfurther Josef Herman L S Lowry

Cover image: Eva Frankfurther, West Indian Waitresses (detail)

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Refiguring the 50s

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Refiguring the 50s Joan Eardley Sheila Fell Eva Frankfurther Josef Herman L S Lowry

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Ben Uri Art Identity Migration www.benuri.org.uk Ben Uri Gallery and Museum Limited Registered Museum 973 Registered Charity 280389 Registered Company in England 1488690

Copyright © 2014

Detail illustrations

ISBN 978-0-900157-50-9 hardback 978-0-900157-51-6 softback

Frontispiece Cat 21 Eva Frankfurther Demonstration, c. 1956 Private Collection

Edited by Sarah MacDougall Picture research by Phoebe Newman Catalogue designed and typeset by Alan Slingsby Printed by Gomer Press British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number applied for All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the permission of the copyright owners and the publishers.

Manya Igel Fine Arts sponsors free entry to all our exhibitions in 2014

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Contents 7 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 8 CHAIRMAN’S FOREWORD 10 REPRESENTING THE POSTWAR WORLD Margaret Garlake

20 REFIGURING THE 50s: CURATORIAL INTRODUCTION Sarah MacDougall

46 ‘PARTIAL, PASSIONATE AND POLITICAL’: ART CRITICISM IN THE 1950s Judith Walsh IN FOCUS

60 JOAN EARDLEY Ann Steed

62 THE LIVING PART OF GLASGOW: JOAN EARDLEY Christopher Andreae IN FOCUS

74 SHEILA FELL Steve Swallow

76 THE POETRY OF PLACE: SHEILA FELL Cate Haste IN FOCUS

88 EVA FRANKFURTHER Jörg Garbrecht

90 THE LIVES OF OTHERS: EVA FRANKFURTHER Sarah MacDougall IN FOCUS

104 JOSEF HERMAN Agi Katz

106 AS THOUGH FROM NOWHERE: JOSEF HERMAN David Herman IN FOCUS

120 L S LOWRY Andrew Kalman

122 GOING DEEPER INTO LIFE: L S LOWRY Claire H Stewart

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132 Timeline with selected exhibitions 140 Notes 143 Select bibliography 147 Contributors’ biographies 148 Catalogue of works 152 Picture credits 154 Ben Uri – Short history and mission statement 155 Ben Uri International Advisory Board 155 Ben Uri Patrons 156 Index

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Cat 25 Sheila Fell Women by a Stile, 1956 Private Collection, courtesy of Castlegate House Gallery

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Acknowledgments We extend thanks to all our lenders: Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections; Arts Council Collection; Book Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art; Boundary Gallery; City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries; Anna Fell; Cyril Gerber Fine Art; Flowers Gallery; UK Government Art Collection; Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries; Mason Owen Collection; National Library of Wales; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Somerville College, University of Oxford; Southampton City Art Gallery; the Frank Cohen Collection; The Lowry Collection, Salford; Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust; and other private lenders who wish to remain anonymous.

We also thank the copyright holders and their estates for kind permission to reproduce the works of these five artists: Anna Fell (on behalf of the estate of Sheila Fell), David Herman (on behalf of the estate of Josef Herman), Anne Morrison (on behalf of the estate of Joan Eardley), Beate Planskoy (on behalf of the estate of Eva Frankfurther) and DACS (on behalf of the estate of L S Lowry).

We are extremely grateful to to all our external catalogue contributors: Christopher Andreae, Dr Margaret Garlake, Dr Jörg Garbrecht, Cate Haste, David Herman, Agi Katz, Andrew Kalman, Ann Steed, Claire Stewart, Steve Swallow and Dr Judith Walsh.

Thanks are due to our designer Alan Slingsby, to our copy-editor Huw Molseed, to Katie Wilson for compiling the index, and to our distributor Bill Norris at Central Books.

We are indebted to the support of The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for a publication grant to

enable us to realise this publication and the kind assistance of administrator Mary Peskett-Smith; and for the support of the Government Indemnity scheme.

We also thank all of the following for their muchappreciated help: Catherine Antoni; Olivia Basterfield; Dr Shulamith Behr; Martin Bloom; Monica Bohm-Duchen; Pauline Bonard (DACS); Castlegate Gallery, Cumbria; Frank Cohen; Tim Craven; Cyril Gerber Fine Art; S. Peter Dance; Kate Davies; Rachel Dickson; Julian Doyle; Dr Wai Yi Feng; Flowers Gallery; Ben Folley; Paul Francis; Cherie Fullerton; Tom Furness; Melanie Gardner; Jill Gerber; Rachel Graves; Dawn Henderby; David Herman; Antony Hopkins; Allyson Kaye; Karine Lee; Dr Marian Malet; Anne Manuel; Juliette O’Leary; Nick Orchard; Barry Owen; Justin Piperger; Beate Planskoy; Dr Helen Scott; Leonie Siroky; Holly Taylor (Bridgeman Images); Jaimie Thomas; Maeve Toal and Jane Walker.

Thanks to all of the Ben Uri team for their hard work and commitment: the curatorial team: Phoebe Newman, Irum Ali, Kirsty Donald, Jenny Foot and Katie Wilson, with the assistance of Ngaio Hitti and Katie Young; Laura Jones and Kenike Palmer in Operations; Alix Smith, Aimee Taylor, Edward Dickenson and Danielle Heiblum; and in web and social media Lizzie Cowden, Celia Knight, Huw Molseed, Marie Pakholok and Catriona Sinclair.

Special thanks to our ‘Preferred Partner’, Manya Igel of Manya Igel Fine Arts for generously sponsoring free entry to all our exhibitions.

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Chairman’s Foreword 60 years on from the artistic debates which raged around abstract versus figurative art, interest in figuration is once more on the rise. As part of this renewed interest, Refiguring the 50s examines the work of five distinctive figurative artists working in 1950s’ Britain and their concern with a largely realist tradition: Joan Eardley (1921–1963), Sheila Fell (1931–1979), Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959), Josef Herman (1911–2000) and L S Lowry (1887–1976), who are brought together here for the first time in a museum survey.

Despite hailing from a variety of backgrounds, they reveal sometimes surprising similarities as well as divergences in style, treatment and artistic practice. Yet this seemingly disparate group is united not only by the unexpected early death of all three women (with an average age of less than 40), compared to the men, who both lived into their 90th year, but also, and more importantly, by a network of personal and professional relationships, artistic allegiances, and above all, through their shared subject matter: a concentration on working people – and the part they played in recording the drastic social changes of this decade. Work illustrating this trend ranges from strong single and double portraits, mother and child studies, and representations of street life and working life, both urban and rural, including portraits of workers and children, as well as the outsider figures who occupy society’s margins. In Lowry’s Mancunian factory workers, Herman’s south Wales coal miners, Fell’s timeless Cumbrian figures and Eardley’s streetwise Glasgow children we recognize an era now past, but Frankfurther’s migrant Lyons Corner House workers provide a link to our own multicultural age. All these representations stand out, as historically – as well as art historically – important records of the founding of a society that has changed beyond all imagining within the industrial sector, but little within the service sector. Today, more than ever, we continue to rely on the constant flow of migrant workers seeking to make

a new life in this country, who are prepared to build their futures here from the sharp end. In bringing together these individual artists and their diverse and absorbing subjects, we hope to also offer new insights into this important decade.

I would like to thank all our contributors for their valuable insights into differing aspects of this period: Dr. Margaret Garlake for her fascinating introductory essay outlining the landscape of postwar British art; and Dr. Judith Walsh for her discerning analysis of 1950s’ art criticism and the important part this played in the reception and perception of the work of these five artists. For the stimulating, individual essays inviting new readings of each of the individual artists’ careers, particularly as they relate to this decade, I also extend sincere thanks to: Christopher Andreae writing on Joan Eardley; Cate Haste on Sheila Fell; Sarah MacDougall on Eva Frankfurther; David Herman on Josef Herman; and Claire Stewart on L S Lowry. I would also like to thank Jörg Garbrecht, Andrew Kalman, Agi Katz, Ann Steed and Steve Swallow for their perceptive ‘in focus’ pieces on individual works by each of the artists.

We are very grateful to all our lenders from public collections: Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections; the Arts Council Collection; the City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums & Galleries; Dumfries and Galloway Council; the Gracefield Centre, Dumfries; and Dumfriesshire Educational Trust, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries; the UK Government Art Collection; the Lowry Collection, Salford; Somerville College, University of Oxford; the National Library of Wales; the Royal Academy of Art, London; Southampton City Art Gallery; and Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust. We also extend sincere thanks to the Boundary Gallery; Castlegate Gallery; Cyril Gerber Fine Art; and Flowers Gallery; as well as to The Frank Cohen Collection and to the Mason Owen Collection, and to all our private lenders who prefer to remain anonymous. In

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addition, we thank the Government Indemnity Scheme for their greatly appreciated support.

We also thank the copyright holders and their estates for kind permission to reproduce the works of these five artists: Anna Fell (on behalf of the estate of Sheila Fell), David Herman (on behalf of the estate of Josef Herman), Anne Morrison (on behalf of the estate of Joan Eardley), Beate Planskoy (on behalf of the estate of Eva Frankfurther) and DACS (on behalf of the estate of L S Lowry). This exhibition and publication are one of the many revealing outcomes of the post of Eva Frankfurther Research and Curatorial Fellow for the Study of Émigré Artists (2011–16), for which we also extend our thanks to the artist’s estate.

We are indebted to the support of The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for a publication grant to enable us to realise this ambitious publication and the kind assistance of administrator Mary Peskett-Smith.

We continue to thank Manya Igel Fine Arts for providing free entry to this and all our exhibitions in 2014; our catalogue designer Alan Slingsby; and our copy-editor Huw Molseed.

Finally, I pay great tribute to the curator and editor Sarah MacDougall for this important contribution to studies in postwar British art, as well as her enthusiastic and dedicated team headed by Phoebe Newman and Irum Ali with the assistance of Flora Allen, Kirsty Donald, Jenny Foot, Ngaio Hitti, Katie Wilson and Katie Young; our Operations manager Laura Jones; our Learning team: Alix Smith, Aimee Taylor, Edward Dickenson and Danielle Heiblum; and in web and social media Catriona Sinclair, Huw Molseed, Lizzie Cowden, Celia Knight and Marie Pakholok, who have all provided valuable assistance in transforming this vision into a powerful, revealing and persuasive reality.

David J Glasser Executive Chair

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Representing the postwar world Margaret Garlake In May 1945 thousands of ex-servicemen and women began to make their way home from the war. The country to which they returned was not the one that they had left; they confronted unfamiliar circumstances and an unknowable future. In the first years of peace many people continued to live in bomb-damaged buildings; food, clothing and petrol were strictly rationed and travel was difficult. At the same time party politics resumed; the Welfare State, planned in the later stages of the war, was brought into being and Britain gradually reconnected with the rest of Europe.

In its first five years the Attlee government enacted extensive legislation, seeking to convert a class- and wealthdominated society to a more egalitarian situation. While the primary focus was on education, health and housing, the infrastructure of the arts also changed radically, not least through the establishment of the Arts Council in 1946. It became, effectively, the cultural branch of the Welfare State.1 Infinitely well-intentioned, centrist and almost penniless, its tiny Art Department sought to sustain the optimism of Maynard Keynes who, but for his early death would have been the new Council’s first Chairman. In the spirit of the times he commented: ‘in every blitzed town in this country one hopes that the local authority will make provision for a central group of buildings for drama and music and art. There could be no better memorial of a war to save the freedom of the spirit of the individual’.2 Simultaneously, the British Council, which had been established privately in 1934 to support trade relations and had proved very effective in its wartime propaganda role, was incorporated into the Treasury funding system and closely linked to the Foreign Office to become ‘one of the arms of our diplomacy’.3 Efficiently professionalised, its Fine Art Department managed the cultural exchanges that underpinned diplomatic ­initiatives, enabling British artists to exhibit in numerous contexts abroad, most visibly at the Venice and São Paulo biennales. Though Henry Moore was the Council’s flagship artist, it was generally painters who

benefited, given the logistical problems of transporting sculpture around the world.

The British Council facilitated ‘Picasso-Matisse’, the exhibition which, opening in December 1945, reasserted the imaginative, life-changing role of art and announced the resumption of international cultural relations. Picasso exhibited work made during the occupation of Paris, commenting: ‘I have no doubt that the war is in these paintings’. Artists immediately, if contro­versially, acknowledged their emotional intensity, while conservative critics were outraged by Picasso’s much-imitated treatment of the human body, denouncing it as ‘deformity’ (figs. 1 and 2).4 Exhibitions followed of the work of Paul Klee (1945), Georges Braque and Georges Rouault (both 1946), Vincent van Gogh (1947) and Fernand Léger (1950). If none equalled Picasso’s impact, all had visible effects on British artists. Communications with the rest of Europe took longer to re-establish and depended heavily on British Council touring exhibitions. Consequently artists in search of new ideas continued to gravitate to Paris, as the natural source of information and role models. It was also a place to exhibit; Patrick Heron, Barbara Hepworth and Peter Lanyon were among the British artists who took part in the Salon de Mai and the more radical Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in the late 1940s.

The five artists who are the subjects of this exhibition were enmeshed in this postwar world. In 1946, aged just 16, Eva Frankfurther enrolled at St Martin’s School of Art, to be joined in 1950 by Sheila Fell. Their fellow students included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Elisabeth Frink, Joe Tilson and the colourist painter, Donald Hamilton Fraser.

Diana Chamberlain, F. Bateson Mason and Vivian Pitchforth were among the tutors. Doig Simmonds, a fellow student of Frankfurther and later a distinguished medical artist recalls that the syllabus focused on painting, with a certain amount of etching. Geared to producing teachers, it was unapologetically traditional: in 1950 life drawing had only recently replaced drawing from casts.5 During the 1950s Joan Eardley

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Fig 1 Pablo Picasso Woman Dressing her Hair, 1940 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fig 2 Pablo Picasso Still Life with Skull Leeks and Pitcher, March 14 1945, 1945 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

found a rich subject in the graffiti made by local children. She had attended Glasgow School of Art during the war when the presence of numerous Jewish refugees, including Josef Herman (whom she befriended), made it a cultural centre to rival London.6 In 1944, Herman settled in Ystradgynlais in south Wales while L S Lowry, a generation older, moved to Mottram, Cheshire.

Shortly after the war, a system of grants for ex-service people enabled many aspiring artists to take up places in art schools that they could never otherwise have afforded. Terry Frost, who had gone to work at 14, passed much of the war in a prison camp, painting portraits of his fellow inmates. Later he expressed the determination of those who sought a better future: ‘I’d promised myself that I’d paint, because that’s what I wanted to do and I didn’t have to do anything else. After all, I’d seen a lot of my mates killed’.7 Ex-serviceman’s grants not only benefited individuals but introduced fresh thinking to

art schools: people who, like Frost, had lost five years of their lives tended to act independently. Set a summer assignment at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1949 to make a painting on the subject ‘madrigal’, Frost produced his first abstract work (fig. 3). Made well before abstraction became common practice, it elicited only the dismissive remark: ‘This kind of thing is alright as long as it’s not an end in itself ’. Frost recalled: ‘And that was the only comment I got’.8 Postwar art criticism dwelt heavily on the intractable dilemma of explaining the gulf between abstraction and realism and how to reconcile them. Abstraction had developed in Britain gradually since the end of the First World War. 30 years later it still met with hostility and incomprehension. Realism, its counterpart, was closely examined and different approaches were recognised, each of which attracted supportive critics.9 The story of art during the first 15 years after the war is largely the record of the Refiguring the 50s 11

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Fig 3 Terry Frost Madrigal, 1949 Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

Fig 4 Francis Bacon Figure in a Landscape, 1945 Tate

intersection and divergence of realism and abstraction.

In practice, they co-habited in a situation that, for artists, was both complex and fluid. A few well-informed critics – Andrew Forge, a painter, David Sylvester, the Marxist John Berger, and his successor on The New Statesman & Nation, the artist Patrick Heron – exemplified the range of informed thinking on contemporary art in the early 1950s.

Forge recognised two broad strands within realist painting: ‘Modernist realism’ drew on the work of the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti and was exemplified

by Francis Bacon (fig. 4), Lucian Freud and Moore.10 Primarily concerned with the individual human body, it was indebted to existentialism and phenomenology (the study of human consciousness) and was, centrally, revelatory of ‘the human condition’.11 While this was Lowry’s principal concern, Berger supported the more politically conscious ‘social realism’ that he found exemplified in work by the four painters known as the Beaux Arts Quartet: John Bratby,

Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith.12 Social realism had many proponents, including Herman, whose work is evidence of his deep identification with Welsh mining culture.

In practice many realisms co-existed, from the chroniclers of agriculture and village life in Great Bardfield to Prunella Clough’s fishermen, lorry drivers and printers. A less literal, more overtly modernist realism was developed by Auerbach and Kossoff who gravitated to the numerous construction sites that emerged from bombed buildings across London.

Similarly there were numerous approaches to abstraction.

On the one hand there were the constructive artists, who included Victor Pasmore (fig. 11) and Kenneth and Mary Martin, whose beautiful, three-dimensional pieces were grounded in geometry and mathematical systems.

Conversely, by the mid-decade, there was an efflorescence of abstraction taking free, gestural forms, inflected by recent French and American painting.

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Fig 5 Jean Dubuffet The Busy Life, 1953 Tate

By the mid-1950s young painters were familiar with postwar developments in Paris: the raw, uncompromising imagery and surfaces produced by Jean Dubuffet (fig. 5); Nicolas de Staël’s bold, unmodulated blocks of colour (fig. 8) and the variants of Tachisme practised by Sam Francis and Georges Mathieu. As a result, when Modern Art in the United States opened at the Tate Gallery early in 1956, introducing Abstract Expressionism, its reception was both better informed and more sophisticated than had been the case with Picasso. American painting encouraged artists to experiment with large scale, rich colour and novel forms of imagery, from Bridget Riley’s black and white optical images to Robyn Denny’s irrational geometries. Freud (fig. 8) continued to paint the human body but now it emerged from great fluid swirls of pigment rather than from the tight, linear precision of a decade earlier, suggesting that realism was as much to do with the way that paint was applied as with subject matter.

In the early 1960s Pop Art emerged at the Royal College of Art. A hybrid that drew on advertising, comics and abstraction, Pop’s irreverent exuberance ensured its success. Bryan Robertson, the hugely successful director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, brought together painters and sculptors in the ‘New Generation’ exhibitions of the mid-1960s. Supported by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, these were an early product of corporate sponsorship.

Simultaneously, the young Richard Long was reinventing landscape as conceptual art before joining the powerhouse that was the sculpture department at St Martin’s.

By the early 1960s the dichotomy between realism and abstraction blurred as they merged in the richly fruitful semi-abstraction developed by Lanyon (fig. 7) and Heron, among others. Lanyon was an enthusiastic glider pilot whose sport became inseparable from his art as he explored in paint both his aerial experiences and the weather conditions upon which pilots depend, leaving a body of work that is Refiguring the 50s 13

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Fig 6 Lucian Freud Man’s Head (Self Portrait I), 1963 Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester

extraordinarily informative about atmosphere and light.

As he insisted, his paintings are not abstract, though they appropriate the marks, texture and liberated use of colour of abstraction.

Eardley adopted a parallel, equally unpremeditated approach in the late seascapes that she painted at Catterline, south of Aberdeen. They contain innumerable flecks of vivid colour – flashes of light among the inexorable weight of grey-green water crashing onto the beach. Similarly, Fell approached abstraction, especially when she painted snow

and water, with thick paint and layered surfaces which reveal a harsh, dramatic landscape, populated with tiny, seemingly fragile figures who worked on the small hill-farms or in the mines. Her workers are quite unlike Lowry’s people but nevertheless share their anonymity and are similarly bound in labour. She greatly respected Lowry, who mentored her informally and with whom she sometimes painted during summer visits to her family home.13 James Hyman has aptly summarised this delicately balanced situation: ‘[...] just as the abstraction of St Ives drew from the visual world, so the

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Fig 7 Peter Lanyon Soaring Flight, 1960 Arts Council Collection

Fig 8 Nicolas de Staël Composition 1950, 1950 Tate

realism of London was indebted to certain Modernist tropes, such as the prioritising of the artist’s marks and the use of thick paint’.14 Rather than trying to establish that one or other approach was dominant, it is more fruitful to consider subject matter, particularly why artists chose to paint what they did at a particular time. Many responded, albeit obliquely, to politics, daily life and events. The significance of industry and the urgent need for its conversion to a peacetime economy in a near-bankrupt country would be difficult to overstate, as

would the total dependence of the industrial infrastructure on coal and coal-mining. Herman was the most prominent of the artists who worked in south Wales when miners were heroic figures, living in poverty and labouring in conditions that brought most of them to early deaths. Moore, who grew up in a Yorkshire mining area, had drawn miners at work as a war artist, producing images that leave no doubt as to the inhumanity at the centre of coal production.

The smoking chimney stacks that populate Lowry’s images of the industrial north were by-products of mining Refiguring the 50s 15

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Fig 9 L. S. Lowry Industrial Landscape, 1953 The Lowry Collection, Salford

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which brought pollution on an almost unimaginable scale, with its corollary of endemic ill-health in a population rendered docile by poverty. Lowry has been described as ‘Labour Britain’s national artist’, a role he assumed in the 1950s and demonstrated in a commanding group of large canvases (figs. 9 and 12).15 It is suggested that he wished to reconcile a modern (northern) city with the evidence of its appalling past.16 These large works have helped to sustain Lowry’s long established identity as the artist who articulated the authentic image of the north, though ironically many of them are composite inventions in which prominent features, particularly Salford viaduct, appear in diverse locations.

Lowry’s vision of the north is nevertheless affirmative, even optimistic; it is extended by Eardley’s images of the graffiti that, far from being visual pollution, evidently acted as signs of vitality and defiance.

Clough, by inclination intensely urban, was led in the early 1950s by political awareness and curiosity to the East End where she made a series of paintings of the cranes that lined the docks (fig. 10). Idle or functioning, they evoked complex socio-political problems, just as Clough’s paintings recall both the technologies that predated container ships and the power – and extremely high profile – of dock workers. Essential to economic progress, they had been historically badly paid and, living in the most heavily bombed area of London, had suffered disproportionately. Well aware that the fragile national economy depended for its survival largely on their willingness to load and unload cargo, they made frequent use of their ability to strike, maintaining a situation of ‘vengeful industrial relations’.17 The docklands also attracted the young Eva Frankfurther, who took the radical step of moving from Hampstead to live in the East End where her subjects included the dockers, their families and the West Indian immigrants who were a new presence in London. She had first encountered them while working in a Lyons Corner House in the West End.18 Herself a refugee in the 1930s, she may have felt a particular sympathy for their deep impoverishment and the intense suspicion with which they were greeted.

The account given by this exhibition covers a period that saw the transformation of bomb-scarred cities and the introduction of a new social order. Profound changes in the visual arts stimulated diverse questions on, for instance, the relative status of new and conventional art forms; the

Fig 10 Prunella Clough Cranes, 1952 Tate

social role of art; critical assessment of the new; the future of patronage and the nature of art teaching. The artists shown here provide some possible answers. The ideological messages of Lowry’s and Herman’s work remain clear: their paintings are where the social and the aesthetic merge. At the same time they exemplify the dialectic between modernity and tradition which briefly took the form of a face-off between figuration and abstraction. Eardley enacted this dialectic in her own career: whereas her graffiti paintings indicate specific social activities, her dramatic seascapes, seen always in a process of transformation, convey their message through the vitality and texture of the paint surface. Fell retained her deep attachment to Cumbria, her homeland, throughout her career as she explored its dual farming and mining cultures, revealing her acute understanding of the way in which the harshness and scale of the working landscape was reflected in the bodies of her figures. Like Herman’s miners, Fell’s labourers are subsumed into a landscape of dense pigment. This was only possible at a time when art was no longer required to present a literal image, a role overtaken by photography.

Frankfurther’s sadly attenuated career sets her apart. Her

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Fig 11

Fig 12

Victor Pasmore Abstract in White, Black, Indian and Lilac, 1957

L. S. Lowry Industrial Landscape, 1955

Tate

Tate

life, with the work that she left, indicates that she was a social artist in the mould of Lowry and Herman. Her remaining paintings and drawings represent realism at its most uncompromising, recording the poorest of the London poor: West Indians, outcast by their colour as well as their poverty.

Poverty remains the theme that links the otherwise disparate work of these five artists, setting it firmly in its period and the places where they worked.

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Refiguring the 50s: Curatorial Introduction Sarah MacDougall

The historian David Kynaston offers us a snapshot of Britain in 1945: Shops on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street, red telephone boxes, Lyons Corner Houses, trams, trolleybuses, steam trains. […] Smoke, smog, […] wash day every Monday […]. Central heating rare […] Abortion illegal, homosexual relationships illegal, suicide illegal, capital punishment legal.

White faces everywhere. Back-to-backs, narrow cobbled streets, Victorian terraces […] Suits and hats, dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, […] Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, […] Meat rationed, butter rationed, lard rationed, margarine rationed, sugar rationed, tea rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, sweets rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed. Make do and mend.1

Refiguring the 50s explores the decade which followed (defined here as roughly 1945–64) through the work of five powerful, individual, figurative painters: Joan Eardley (1921–1963), Sheila Fell (1931–1979), Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959), Josef Herman (1911–2000), and L S Lowry (1887–1976). All worked within a broadly realist tradition to capture a Britain and her people exhausted by war yet on the cusp of change. Each of them identified strongly with a particular place and people among whom they chose to live and work and which formed, for a significant part of their careers, the primary focus of their practice.

For Eardley it was the Townhead area of Glasgow and its inhabitants, particularly its children. For Fell, the landscape and community of her native Aspatria in Cumberland (now part of Cumbria).2 For Frankfurther, London’s East End, as well as the new immigrant communities whom she worked alongside in the West End at Lyons Corner House, Piccadilly.

For Herman it was the indigenous mining community in Ystradgynlais, south Wales and for Lowry, the multi-peopled cityscapes of his hometown of Manchester – both received

extensive recognition for their work in this decade.

Despite often widely differing approaches to figuration and practice, each artist produced a concentrated and coherent body of work imbued with this strong sense of place, and of the largely working-class community associated with it. All were observers of the human condition; each (arguably) a pioneer in depicting their chosen community, but also exploring questions relating to their own identity – whether of class, ethnicity or sexuality – as well as notions of displacement and belonging. They presented their subjects sometimes with pathos, sometimes with humour; often with empathy; always with sensitivity and dignity. In bringing their work on these subjects together, this exhibition and publication seek to present a compelling alternative vision of postwar Britain in all its complexity.

As historian Dominic Sandbrook has noted of Britain in the mid-fifties: Perhaps the main impression that would have struck a foreign visitor […] was that of sheer clamour and commotion. Not only was Britain extremely crowded […]. Its population was more tightly packed into cities and towns than anywhere else on the Continent […] [;] eight out of ten Britons lived in urban communities.3

In addition, throughout this decade and well into the next the British class system – Upper, Middle and Lower – remained in place, effectively satirised and imprinted upon the popular imagination by the famous comedy sketch on the Frost Report in 1966. Lowry’s world exemplified this: the ‘city gents’ (cat. 2) in their three-piece suits with bowler hats and furled umbrellas at one end of the scale, men in flat caps and overalls at the other.

In this period roughly two-thirds of the population considered themselves working class.4 This classification included many categories of manual labourers – among them the miners, dockers and factory workers captured by

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Cat 1 Eva Frankfurther West Indian Porters, c. 1955 Private Collection

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Cat 2 L. S. Lowry City Gentlemen, 1963 Mason Owen Collection

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Herman and Fell, Frankfurther and Lowry, respectively. The land workers, by now a minority, also peopled Fell’s rural Cumbrian canvases.

The miners had a strong hold on the public imagination and Herman’s powerful depictions of them struck an emotional chord, particularly after he was commissioned to paint a large-scale mural (fig. 43) for the 1951 Festival of Britain. Their female equivalent is to be found in Frankfurther’s lined and careworn women in drab head-scarves or turbans (concealing curlers), who inhabit the old East End. The two groups exemplify what was still a largely conservative era. The cities were littered with bomb sites and children still played in the streets of Glasgow, Manchester and London trailing ‘pieces’ (of bread) or teddy bears, chalking the walls and pavements and poring over comics. The welfare state was in its infancy and the National Assistance Board (as experienced by and portrayed by Frankfurther) was still a reality for many. Although the pace of change and a new spirit of optimism began to sweep the country following the Queen’s coronation (which Lowry, among the crowds, captured from a ringside seat outside Buckingham Palace) in 1953;5 rationing only finally ended in 1954.6 Townhead, the East End, Manchester, the mining towns of Ystradgynlais and Aspatria and the surrounding hills of Cumbria all remained rooted in an earlier, less consumerist age. By contrast, in her portraits of Townhead life in Glasgow, Eardley captured the present in all its colourful, messy vitality. Similarly, in her pioneering portraits of the new immigrant populations – West Indian, Pakistani, Cypriot – who took up the largely menial, manual posts disdained by the new generation, Frankfurther also documented the changing landscape of an emerging multicultural Britain.

As well as a shared subject matter, a range of personal and professional relationships links all five Refiguring artists.

Herman and Lowry twice exhibited together in London in 19437 and in Wakefield in 1955.8 Both were fellow members of The London Group (Lowry elected 1948; Herman, elected 1953)9 and both were included in a number of important exhibitions in this decade including the Festival of Britain’s 60 Paintings for ’51 (cat. 50), dominated by the so-called realist painters,10 and John Berger’s 1952 exhibition, Looking Forward: an exhibition of realist pictures by contemporary British artists11 (a smaller version of which was then reprised by the Arts Council to tour the provinces

in 1953, with Berger’s own Herman drawing gracing the cover, cat. 48).12 Herman in particular, was championed by Berger, for whom his paintings represented the ‘oppression, endurance, the weight of labour’.13 ‘Realism,’ Herman himself remarked, not without humour, ‘is so much less than reality […] There is more to a miner or a peasant standing doing nothing than meets the eye’.14 As a newly arrived refugee living in Glasgow (1940– 43), Herman had created work that looked back to the lost working-class Warsaw of his youth. After he learned in 1942 that his entire family had been killed these pictures darkened to include desperate families: mothers and fathers saving children from flames and pogroms. It was during this period that Eardley met and was inspired by Herman (she helped ‘borrow’ him an easel from the Glasgow School of Art which he kept for the rest of his life).15 Her own preference for working-class life and urban themes conceivably stems from Herman’s influence in this period.16 In Ystradgynlais in south Wales in the mid-1940s and 1950s Herman found an alternative working-class community which, with its own language and customs, must have seemed much like the one he had lost.17 Herman also met a young Sheila Fell in London in the 50s,18 no doubt encouraging her to experiment with studies of her own mining community, such as the charcoal interior In a Mine (c. 1955) (cat. 29). Although these proved short-lived, Fell continued to make her native Cumbria her subject for the rest of her life, embedding her figures within the landscape so closely that it is impossible to separate them from it; they are unified with the natural environment.

Even though in Wedding in Aspatria (1958) (cat. 30) the newly-weds cling together at the base of a tempestuous landscape, they remain nevertheless at home in the fierce wild setting from which they have emerged. ‘I do not want to be thought of primarily as a landscape painter’, she wrote: I hope that the nearby community is implicit in my landscapes […]

A painter can be rooted in reality, but by his efforts transcend it. Or he can be rooted in his dream but lean out of it towards reality. The greatest artists have both these qualities.19

Fell’s timeless, labouring figures also inhabit similar ‘peasant’ landscapes (cat. 39) to those that Herman first developed in the 1950s and continued to (re)create for the rest of his

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Cat 3 L. S. Lowry Two Heads The Estate of L S Lowry on loan to The Lowry Collection, Salford

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life, both in Britain and on his travels abroad. In contrast to Fell’s integrated figures however Herman’s Ystradgynlais inhabitants stand out strongly against the landscape – their plain, working clothes offset by the blue, golden or twilight skies intended to celebrate and glorify their labours as they stop to rest or make their way home. They too belong to the landscape they inhabit and identify with it, but it has not conquered them; instead they return as heroes to the warm welcome of home (cat. 42).

In London Fell also met and was befriended by Lowry, who offered her crucial, lifelong support.20 Despite the differences in their approach, they both set their working class subjects within the land or city scape with which they each identified. Both experimented with the possibilities of the strong vertical format; Lowry sometimes subverting expectations by using a portrait format for a cityscape (fig. 16) and conversely, a landscape format for urban group portraits including the gangling forms of his City Gentlemen (1963) (cat. 2), now detached from the city they inhabit.

Frankfurther, as Margaret Garlake has noted,21 stands somewhat apart from these shared relationships. Although she and Fell were born within a year of each other, they came from very different backgrounds. Frankfurther born to an assimilated German-Jewish middle-class family forced to flee to England in 1939 and Fell to poor, working-class parents in a Cumbrian mining town. They overlapped by a year at St Martin’s between 1950 and 1951, where they must at least have passed one another on their way to class though there is no evidence that they ever met. Like Eardley, both were strong-minded, individual women seeking to establish their place as painters in what was largely still a male-dominated profession. Frankfurther was primarily interested in subject. Although she worked at developing her technique, it was always in the service of more truthfully rendering her subjects. ‘Style and technique’ she observed in a letter, ‘are only the vessel for the true content’, and although she allowed that the vessel was ‘essential to hold the contents together’, she insisted that ‘[…] content is what really matters and it should determine the form’.22 Fell however worked more holistically towards a synergy of ‘structure, form, colour, and the poetry or chemistry that comes from a unity of these things’.23 Apart from one rare moment, their work diverged along wholly separate lines.

Frankfurther also probably never met Herman, yet their

shared preference for humble subjects must have been apparent when their work was exhibited together as part of a large group show at Ben Uri in 1956.24 Between 1952 and 1956 Frankfurther showed regularly at the East End Academy exhibitions excerpts from her ‘Whitechapel Diary’ (cat. 36), comprising hundreds of swift, fluid sketches of characters from the East End streets, many observed; others drawn from memory. They bring to mind Herman’s earlier autobiographical cycle, ‘Memory of Memories’, executed in Glasgow and Lowry’s scribbled observations on scraps of paper made on his frequent tours of Manchester. He saw his subjects everywhere, from the waiting rooms of the pre and post-NHS hospitals to the streets of the city and its outlying areas; as did Frankfurther, who was both a hospital and prison visitor in this period.

When Lowry painted the first of his many portraits of ‘Ann’ (see cat. 45), he claimed that it was the first portrait he had painted for 30 years and that it had been painted at the model’s insistence.25 Although her beauty conforms to that of a 1950s screen idol, Ann’s chalk-white complexion also has all the eerie, iconic perfection of an Elizabethan portrait icon. After Lowry’s death, efforts to trace the model proved fruitless and most commentators concluded that she was in fact an imaginary, composite figure: some thought that he had conflated Sheila Fell’s dark-eyed good looks with those of ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn, whom Lowry admired and saw perform on several occasions. The smooth surface of this portrait contrasts with the rough-hewn surface of Lowry’s Two Heads (cat. 3) in profile. This is one of his most striking portraits (not least because of the subjects’ similarity) although in a later version this rough surface has been smoothed away. Similarly, Eardley’s Boy’s Head (cat. 4), also seen in profile, escapes sentimentality despite his schoolboy charm because of a strong individuality offset by the loosely worked, roughly churned paint applied with a palette knife.

Three portraits: Fell’s Clifford Rowan (c.1952) (cat. 5), Herman’s The Welsh Miner (1948) (cat. 6) and Frankfurther’s Portrait of a Woman (cat. 7), all set against muted backgrounds and sharing the gesture of emphatically folded arms, show a moment of unity. It is here, perhaps uniquely, we see their work at its closest. Herman’s miner fully occupies his frame with a decided physical presence though his black and fathomless stare is impassive. Frankfurther’s young woman avoids our gaze and her pose suggests a patient

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Cat 4 Joan Eardley Boy’s Head Lent from the UK Government Art Collection

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Cat 5

Cat 6

Sheila Fell Portrait of Clifford Rowan, c. 1952

Josef Herman The Welsh Miner, 1948

Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust

Arts Council Collection

stoicism, yet she also exhibits a quiet determination. Both can be read as archetypes of the male and female worker.

However, despite his imposing physique (which literally extends beyond the top of the frame), the eyes of Fell’s friend and fellow student Clifford Rowan are masked, occluded; his expression impossible to read. A similar occlusion occurs in some of Herman’s later portraits of miners including the central figure in the interior In the Canteen (1954) (cat. 41).

Although portraits are rare in Fell’s work she painted a series of highly accomplished studies of her mother Ann (cat. 27), to whom she was close, during the 1950s.26 Her commissioned portrait of crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin (1910–1994) (cat. 28)27 with its predominantly green palette and strongly planted figure seems a natural development from these. Fell successfully captured Hodgkin’s ‘otherworldly quality, with her slight figure, wavy […] hair, startlingly blue eyes, and preference for handmade clothes that made few concessions to fashion’.28 Frankfurther never painted her own family but often put family life at the centre of her compositions. Couple with

Infant (1956) (cat. 8) depicts her West Indian friend and co-worker at the Tate & Lyle refinery, Catherine Jones, who had just given birth to a daughter, together with the father of her child. The tired mother appears to only reluctantly release her child to the new father who embraces her with an awkward tenderness, but the couple are united by the warm, mellow palette which envelops the scene. This preference for a palette traditionally associated with the feminine indicates Frankfurther’s overriding sympathy for her female subjects has spilled over from her depiction of West Indian Waitresses (c. 1955) (cat. 31).29 Both Frankfurther (never a mother herself) and Herman (a loving father) repeatedly explored the mother and child motif; Eardley and Lowry almost never; Fell not at all.

Eardley, as her biographer Christopher Andreae makes clear, never included a mother and child among her Glasgow works. Venetian Beggar Woman No. 2 (c. 1949) (cat. 9), expressionistic and darkly moving, is atypical. The woman, seen by Eardley on her travels through Italy, cradles a child in an attitude reminiscent of a pietà (a subject also treated

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Cat 7 Eva Frankfurther Portrait of a Woman Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

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by Frankfurther. A sense of alienation links Lowry’s angular, disconnected mother and child (fig. 15) in stark contrast to Frankfurther’s empathetic studies, although she was also unafraid to portray the realities of motherhood as in Breastfeeding, a subject still considered daring in the 1950s (despite art-historical precedents).

Herman, for whom the mother and child pairing was particularly heartfelt and poignant, is uncharacteristic in his early Mother and Child (1945–47) (cat. 10), where the doll-like figures are not wholly connected. More typical are two later compositions, Mother and Child (1945–50) (fig. 13), where the mother supports the baby in her powerful working hands, and the late Mother and Child (1968–69) (fig. 14), dark in the spirit of Rouault, where she clasps the baby in a tight embrace. Parents and children people Herman’s compositions throughout his long career, often as vignettes amid larger scenes, sometimes at twilight as in Street Scene, Ystradgynlais (1945) (cat. 13) where amid a small group contentedly heading home an aproned-worker holds a small child by the hand. By contrast, Eardley’s Townhead series including Baby on Boy’s Knee (cat. 20) shows the substitute parenting that older siblings often provided for the younger and how reluctantly this role was sometimes performed.

Frankfurther, like Eardley, loved children and got on well with them. During her early years at St Martin’s she spent three summers working in a children’s camp in North Carolina teaching arts and crafts (among other subjects) to groups of adoring children. However, after staying on for two years at St Martin’s to complete a teacher-training course and a brief stint teaching in an East End school, she eventually decided that she was temperamentally unsuited to the profession.

Both women created highly successful portraits of children using a bold palette. Frankfurther’s Girl with a Teddy Bear (cat. 14) and Eardley’s Little Girl with a Squint (cat. 15) both suck their fingers – yet Frankfurther’s little girl is serious where Eardley’s is playful; her clenched fist perhaps conceals the chalk that created the graffiti on the wall behind her.

Eardley recreates the random expressiveness of this graffiti plastered across the dark tenement walls by collaging strips of newspapers or painted letters into the background of her works. Her Townhead studio was treated as ‘open house’ by her young neighbours and her vividly evoked studies

of them are empathetic but unsentimental. Boys and girls stare out at us unabashed from a series of portraits including Boy with Piece (cat. 18) and Girl in a Red Jumper (cat. 17).

Vital, scruffy, raw yet in the deeply moving Brother and Sister (1955) (cat. 22), they are also fragile, only fleetingly united.30 Deftly-captured postures also encapsulate both characters and attitudes: Girl in Blue, Winter (cat. 23), her hands deeply in her pockets to ward off the cold, Girl in a Red Dress (cat. 24), casually swinging her arms, and the boy in The Khaki Shirt (cat. 19) all display a cool insouciance.

This preference for a strong, Fauve palette marks Eardley out from the other painters with their general preference for muted colours, a decision probably at least partly economic.

Living off meagre earnings, Frankfurther worked mostly in oil on paper (a medium shared at least once by Lowry) and selected the palette that best represented the austere lives of her subjects. Fell, also impecunious, initially concentrated on more monochromatic forms, as she started to make money from teaching and to sell more work however, she was able to break out and experiment more freely with colour.31 Lowry famously restricted his palette to five colours, favouring a distinctive mist-white background but sometimes offsetting single subjects (cats. 11 and 44) against backdrops of striking blue. Herman sometimes picked out his subjects with streaks of jewel-like colour, but also frequently employed blue, a colour of emotional and nostalgic significance to him since childhood.32 In their depiction of urban life the artists’ focus moves from the macro to the micro. Lowry’s name is synonymous with street life, however the majority of Lowrys shown here are not the large-scale industrial works but smaller compositions, more intimate in scale, for by the 50s he was gradually leaving the larger landscape behind. Figures in a Street (1960) (cat. 43) painted at the close of the decade is a microcosm of his familiar world: chimneys smoke against a hazy background, children play in the streets, women carry shopping and in the background a man, woman and child – possibly a family (though not united) – peer over the railings behind them. Increasingly, in this decade, Lowry began to foreground small groups such as these and to reduce the details of their surroundings to a minimum (see cats. 16, 43, 46 and 47). They are observed with interest, sometimes humour, but Lowry remains a detached observer. Whereas Herman and Frankfurther achieve empathy for their subjects

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Cat 8 Eva Frankfurther Couple with Infant, 1956 Private Collection

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Cat 9 Joan Eardley Venetian Beggar Woman No. 2, c. 1949 On loan from Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow

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Fig 13

Fig 14

Josef Herman Mother and Child, 1945–50

Josef Herman Mother and Child, 1968–69

City & County of Swansea: Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Collection

National Museum of Wales

by a further narrowing of focus: Herman restricts his canvas to the streets of Ystradgynlais, often focusing on small groups or single individuals; Frankfurther restricts hers to the East End streets and to the individuals who people it. In solo portraits including Newspaper Seller (cat. 33) and Old Man in Brown Cap (cat. 35), perhaps drawing on her German expressionist roots, she foregrounds the harsh unrelenting struggle of their daily lives. Conversely, in small groups, such as the etching Street Conversation (cat. 34), her characters stopping to converse in the doorway capture the warmth and intimate rhythms of the old Jewish East End life.

The theme of the outsider pervades postwar culture from Sartre to Colin Wilson, whose non-fiction study of the same name exploring the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society, and society’s effect on him, was published to great controversy in 1956. Individual marginalised figures can also be found in many of the works on show including Eardley’s Venetian Beggar Woman No. 2 (c. 1949) (cat. 9) and Lowry’s Woman with a Shopping Bag (1956) (cat. 16), who appears to have become separated, unanchored from an earlier, large-scale composition. Her marginalisation is

literally represented here by the compressed, narrow format and unfinished background that encloses her curiously elongated figure. Yet the similarly compressed couple in The Assignation (cat. 47) do not belong in this category, instead their mismatched heights and (unusual) closeness evoke a humorous tenderness; as does the figure of the hunched professor (cat. 11) against a vibrant blue background. The Walking Woman (1936–64) (cat. 12) however is isolated in her intense self-absorption, and in Portrait of a Young Man (1955) (cat. 44) Lowry captures the existential angst of the age.

Lowry’s A Protest March (1959) (fig. 16) and Frankfurther’s Demonstration (cat. 21) show an artistic response to political events: Lowry’s protestors gain momentum and impact as they literally crowd into their vertical canvas facing us out as they move towards us in one body. Frankfurther’s crowd is broken up by the dramatic entrance of mounted policemen who sow fear among the troubled women pursing their lips with disapproval, lifting hands to their faces to shout out or crossing them over their heads for protection. Similar political concerns were also Refiguring the 50s 33

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Cat 10 Josef Herman Mother and Child, 1945–47 National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

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evidenced by Herman whose (lost) Aldermaston March (1963) commemorates the first London CND march in 1958.33 Frankfurther’s socially-aware work has strong resonances with Herman’s; contemporary commentators noted his warmth in contrast to Lowry’s detachment. Yet as Andrew Lambirth has commented, ‘more often than not,’ Herman’s figures are ‘anonymous, and represent the universal […] they stand for the dignity of labour, of the working man’; while Frankfurther concentrates on the particular. They shared a background as Jewish émigrés (Herman refuted the term ‘refugee’) forced to leave their native lands during the era of National Socialism and both chose to embed themselves in new communities. Both were strongly left-wing. Frankfurther applied to become a social worker before her death (her application was posthumously approved). Herman selected a community which was in many ways like that he left behind. Frankfurther, restlessly searching, lived among one established, but changing community, and worked among another newly-arrived. Closely affiliated to both, she was perhaps truly at home in neither. It could be observed of both artists (as has been suggested of Herman’s generation of Polish émigrés) that they were ‘rooted in a European culture more emotionally generous, more learned and more concerned with meaning than the one they found here’.34 It is not surprising to learn that the majority of artists shown here also shared a ‘pantheon’35 of favourite artists: Rembrandt, Daumier, Permeke, van Gogh and Käthe Kollwitz were variously admired by Eardley, Fell, Frankfurther and Herman and underpinned their appreciation of the working figure. As Sheila Fell put it, ‘One has one’s family of artists around one. The people whose work one loves. It’s like sitting in the kitchen at home, only instead of relatives one has the paintings of Cézanne, Daumier, van Gogh, Permeke’. Yet just as these historical figures ranged widely in their form, method and interpretation of their preferred subject matter, so too did the inheritors of this tradition working through their own concerns in a different age. The work brought together here indicates how, despite shared concerns these artists remained strong individualists each representing their own chosen communities through a particular focus which allows us to see this important decade through their eyes. They invite us to refigure the 50s.

Fig 15 L. S. Lowry Mother and Child Private Collection

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Cat 11 L. S. Lowry The Professor, 1960 Mason Owen Collection

Cat 12 L. S. Lowry Walking Woman, 1936–64 Mason Owen Collection

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Cat 13 Josef Herman Street Scene, Ystradgynlais, 1945 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

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Cat 14 Eva Frankfurther Girl with a Teddy Bear Private Collection

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Cat 15 Joan Eardley Little Girl with a Squint On loan from the Dumfriesshire Educational Trust, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

Cat 16 L. S. Lowry Woman with a Shopping Bag, 1956 Royal Academy of Arts, London

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Cat 17 Joan Eardley Girl in a Red Jumper On loan from Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow

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Cat 18 Joan Eardley Boy with Piece On loan from Dumfries and Galloway Council, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

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Cat 19 Joan Eardley The Khaki Shirt On loan from Dumfries and Galloway Council, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

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Cat 20 Joan Eardley Baby on Boy’s Knee, 1959 City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries

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Fig 16 L. S. Lowry A Protest March, 1959 Private Collection

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Cat 21 Eva Frankfurther Demonstration, c. 1956 Private Collection

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‘Partial, passionate and political’: art criticism in the 1950s Judith Walsh To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.1 In his 1952 essay ‘The Art of Art Criticism’, Herbert Read quoted Baudelaire to epitomise his own position on the nature of art writing, adding that Baudelaire and Ruskin were the two greatest art critics of modern times, not least because they were ­‘distinguished by the quality of ‘enthusiasm’ in their work’.2 To a large degree, Baudelaire and Read summarise the tenor and scope of art criticism in the 1950s, criticism which offered a vivid depiction of this quite diverse period in British art history. The review not only provided an opportunity for lyrical and expressive descriptions of artworks and discussions of the formal qualities of the art object but also acted as a forum for often intense philosophical and political debates about the nature and function of art. In the immediate postwar period and throughout the 1950s, these debates were commonly centred on the distinctive qualities of figurative and abstract art and how they were intimately connected to the particular social and political times in which they were produced. Such debates, played out in the broadsheet newspapers and art and cultural journals, were at times hostile and divisive and invariably ‘partial, passionate and political’. However, this was not always the case and many critics, constrained to one degree or another by editorial control and pressure on line space, concentrated only on describing formal qualities and reduced the content of a review to a ‘what’s on’ guide to art.

Many of the reviews discussed here were written by John Berger, but also by other key critics of the time including David Sylvester who often vehemently opposed Berger’s views, Herbert Read, John Rothenstein and Kenneth Clark, as well as other writers such as Nevile Wallis (the Observer),

Eric Newton (the Guardian and the Sunday Times), Quentin Bell (the Listener), Mervyn Levy (Art News and Review and the Times Educational Supplement), and Alan Clutton-Brock (the Times).

This was a relatively small pool of critics and writers who often worked for more than one publication. Berger, for example, was a prolific writer in the 1950s, contributing to at least 15 journals and newspapers as well as writing introductions and forwards to books and catalogues.3 A full account of all the reviews of the artists in Refiguring the 50s is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, extracts from some of the key journals and newspapers such as the New Statesman and Nation (a left-leaning cultural and political journal), the Listener (mouthpiece of the BBC), Encounter (an AngloAmerican cultural and political journal), the Burlington Magazine, the Times, and the Observer give a sense of the pressing artistic concerns and interests of this period.

Most of the paintings in this exhibition were originally shown in small private galleries but became more widely known through art reviews. By the mid-1950s, for instance, the work of Lowry and Herman – and to a lesser degree that of Fell (see figs. 18, 19 and 21)– had been seen and commented upon by many influential critics, cementing their place in the institutional artistic limelight. Reviews and catalogue texts therefore, made a significant contribution to the way in which their work was (and continued to be) received and understood.

Greatest attention was given to art which was exhibited in London, a fact bemoaned by John Berger, who noted in 1956 that there existed only half a dozen galleries showing contemporary work outside of London and ‘all of them ignored by the national press’.4 National newspapers and journals ran regular columns dedicated to galleries in London and many publications

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Cat 6 Josef Herman The Welsh Miner, 1948 Arts Council Collection

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Fig 17 L. S. Lowry Industrial City, 1945–48 British Council Collection

including the New Statesman and Nation and the Listener rarely profiled exhibitions beyond London. This explains why Joan Eardley (see fig. 23), who despite being elected as Associate Member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1955 and having enjoyed sterling praise in the Scottish press, only really started to attract attention in London after her work

was first shown in a group exhibition entitled Six Young Painters at Parsons Gallery in 1954. Reviews of her work therefore, need to be understood within the separate but equally significant locations of Edinburgh, alongside Glasgow and London. Eardley’s first solo exhibition of 37 paintings was held at St George’s Gallery, Cork Street in 1955. Quentin

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Bell and Nevile Wallis, writing reviews of the show for the Listener and the Observer, respectively, concurred that her painting was particularly and effectively suggestive of place.

‘I believed I knew Glasgow,’ wrote Wallis, ‘yet henceforth I shall see its shock headed children and forlorn outskirts through the eyes of this painter who can evoke the mood of a scene so disquietingly through her colour’.5 David Sylvester was one critic unconcerned that the main base for art production and its exhibition was London. In February 1954, he vented his exasperation in the Listener at the ‘invasion’ of paintings from beyond London: The miscellany at Tooth’s is drawn from the British Isles and includes an interesting group of new Spencers, an agreeably spontaneous and painterly Paul Nash and some fine examples of Sickert, Sutherland, and Matthew Smith, as well as certain exports from Ireland whose journey was not really necessary. The same peevish reflection is inspired by the presence in the Arts Council Gallery of thirty amateurish efforts lately produced in Wales: Are we not enough fraught with provincialism already that we have to invite these invasions from the meta-provinces?6

The letters page of the following week saw several outraged responses including that of the President of the Student Union at Leeds College of Art who asked: Is the work of a painter like L.S. Lowry whose painting contains much that is parochial, inferior to that of a painter whose formal means are more obviously universal? Surely Lowry’s provincialism has widened the visual experience of many, with his intimate paintings of Pendlebury?7

Hugh Scrutton, Director of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, rejected the notion that the subject matter of Lowry’s paintings denoted provincialism. ‘His paintings of course depict Lancashire […] the result is painting which is sensitive and sympathetic to its place of birth, but not boringly parochial’.8 But at this point in his career Lowry had little need for extra support from his friends in the north as his position as a respected painter was already firmly established. By 1964, his reputation was such that many of the leading establishment figures of the art world contributed to an exhibition entitled A Tribute to L.S. Lowry held at Monks Hall Museum,

Eccles, Salford. The catalogue comprised 13 personal and appreciative tributes by some of the leading critics, artists and museum directors of the postwar period including Kenneth Clark, E H Gombrich, John Rothenstein and Herbert Read, all of whom had previously written favourably about Lowry’s paintings in the 1950s. The visual counterpart to this tribute was the exhibition of artworks submitted by 25 ‘distinguished’ artists who contributed one work each as an expression of their admiration for Lowry. Amongst those who exhibited were Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Duncan Grant as well as Sheila Fell and Josef Herman, confirming their continued success and status throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. Fell showed Winter Landscape (c. 1960) and Herman, Study of a Miner (1951) (see cat. 6 The Welsh Miner (1948) for a similar work).

The exhibition was conceived as a homage to Lowry but as there was no coherent thematic structure (a rather eclectic mix of figurative and abstract landscapes, figure studies, sculptures and drawings) it would seem that the prestige of the contributors rather than the coherence of the exhibition attracted most attention.

Reviewers of Lowry’s paintings in the 1950s generally described his work as meaningful and as sensitively drawn evocations of a particular place and the people who lived and worked there. David Baxandall, the Director of Manchester City Art Galleries, wrote a typical review when describing Lowry’s submission, Industrial Landscape: River Scene (1950) (see fig. 17 for an earlier example), for the Festival of Britain’s exhibition 60 Paintings for ’51(cat. 50): The feeling for proportion, for a lovely sequence of intervals between the dark accents formed by the many mill chimneys, for example, is as strong as always.9

It is interesting to note that Josef Herman was also commissioned to produce a work for the Festival and submitted a mural in six panels entitled Miners (1950, fig. 43) shown in the ‘Minerals of the Island’ pavilion.

Many reviewers in the 1950s homed in on Lowry’s ability to portray the figures in his crowd scenes as individuals. John Berger, in his review of Lowry’s industrial town scenes at the Lefevre Gallery in 1951, described how Lowry depicted ‘each person as particular and emphatic as a note on a sheet of music’.10 Berger’s later review of Lowry in 1953 at the same Refiguring the 50s 49

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gallery praised Lowry’s ‘sincerity’ as a painter, noting how the artist showed ‘the same understanding of the fact that in an odd way, a crowd emphasise the uniqueness of each individual’.11 Alan Clutton-Brock, writing for the Listener, noted that ‘Lowry’s small, sad world of back streets is as touching and as acutely observed as ever’.12 David Sylvester, however, determined that it was the ‘whimsical’ quality of Lowry’s paintings which was appealing.

In two reviews of exhibitions at the Royal Academy in 1956 and 1957, he praised the paintings of Lowry, John Bratby, Stanley Spencer, Henry Lamb and Ruskin Spear, for their characteristic ‘Anglo-Saxon eccentricity’13 and as having an ‘attractive oddity’ about them.14 But it was John Rothenstein who confirmed Lowry’s status as one of Britain’s foremost painters by including him in the second of his three volumes Modern English Painters, written in 1956. His lengthy essay offered an admiring critique of Lowry’s paintings.

His early landscapes, instinct with a kind of gloomy lyricism, put one very much in mind of Corot. Lowry’s colours are smoky instead of limpid or silvery like Corot’s but there is the same reticent candour, the extraordinarily precise perception of values, the refinement in colour, and something too of the same humanity of spirit.15

Like all of the artists in this exhibition, Lowry’s commercial success (or not) was dependent on several factors: representation by a reputable gallery, publicity gained through the medium of the art review and the championing of one’s work by particular critic or critics. The status and location of the gallery, the prestige of the critic and circulation figures for publications were also all important to the dissemination and profile of an artist’s works.

For Sheila Fell, David Sylvester’s support proved invaluable. He reviewed her work positively, reporting that she was an artist of ‘power and imagination’, a comment, it must be said, tempered by his hope that she would ‘get that greasy look out of her paint’.16 In 1955 he introduced her to Helen Lessore, the owner of the Beaux Arts Gallery in Bruton Street. The gallery, noted by the critic of the Times to be ‘a stronghold of today’s “inventive realism”’17 contributed to the success of Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud (see fig. 6), all of whom exhibited works there in the 1950s. Fell first exhibited at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1955

and was given four further exhibitions until 1964. The gallery finally closed in 1965. Reviews of her work invariably foregrounded the way in which she interpreted the ‘murky, sad, mysterious’ 18 Cumbrian landscape as ‘gloomy and brooding’. 19As Eric Newton pointed out for the Observer: She is not concerned with ‘scenery.’ Daffodils and cataracts are not her ingredients. What interest her are the bones of the mountains, their dark skylines, their bulk, the clouds above always threatening rain, the fields at their feet with just enough earth among the stone to grow potatoes in and just enough people in the scattered cottages to dig them up, and sometimes a sprinkling of snow on the upper slopes. 20

He ended his review by proclaiming her to be a ‘devoted realist’. Discussions of realism were often embedded into reviews of art and revealed, at times, critical bias to realist art.

This bias was also evident in prizes awarded in competitions for art. For example, all four panellists for the inaugural Liverpool John Moores Painting Prize in 1957, Professor Lawrence Gowing, Eric Newton, Sir John Rothenstein and Hugh Scrutton, while maintaining separate and distinct roles within the cultural field, tended to favour art which was descriptive, figurative and ultimately realist. First prize was awarded to Jack Smith for Creation and Crucifixion (1956), a large scale scene of an interior domestic space. Sheila Fell won second prize in the Junior Section for Houses Near Number Five Pit (1955) (fig. 21) and of the 23 prizes awarded only two were for abstract works.

Approaches to interpretations of painting in the immediate postwar period were often bound up with questions of quality and moral dogma. Kenneth Clark’s essay of 1945, for example, ‘Art in a Distracted World’ (subtitled ‘The Good and Bad in Art’) urged his fellow critics to strive for a discriminating approach when evaluating art. Clark was one of the key figures in constructing the way in which the arts were disseminated to the public in any one of his many roles as art collector, editor, patron, Director of the National Gallery (1934–45) and Chairman of the Arts Council (1953–60).

He believed that the qualities of ‘good’ art could be perceived by those who intuitively comprehend artistic intention and ‘real and distinguishable’ artistic values through patient and extensive study of original artworks. According to Clark, the critic’s role was self-evident: ‘He must not only

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Fig 18 Sheila Fell Seagulls Over a Ploughed Field Castlegate House Gallery

be able to say ‘Look; don’t miss that, and look at it in this way’: he must also be able to say loudly and clearly and with authority, ‘This is good and that is bad’’. His words set the tone for the ‘partial’ art criticism of the 1950s. Eric Newton, for example, was forthright in his opinion that the pictures he saw at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1958 were far ‘better’ than those at Burlington House: ‘In London, alas, they tend to be the worst, the biggest, and the most superficial’.21 His list of the most ‘eloquent’ painters in Scotland included Joan Eardley.

John Berger was also concerned with value judgements and artistic intention but sought to conflate ‘good’ art with the moral conviction of the artist and his/her ability to raise awareness of social inequality. He believed he could ascertain artistic intention through a study of the formal qualities of a painting and argued that ‘ordinary’ lives were always worthy of depiction. Of the many painters of ‘ordinary lives’ that Berger championed, Josef Herman (fig. 48) was perhaps the one closest to his heart and ideals. Berger reviewed and analysed his work many times in the 1950s, extending

many of these reviews into longer essays which spoke as much of Herman’s integrity as of his brilliant technical skills.

An extract from 1953 in the New Statesman and Nation exemplifies Berger’s admiration of his character: I take it for granted that Herman is one of the most important painters working here. His statement that ‘For me art and morality are not far apart’ goes a long way to explaining why this is so.22

In a later review of Herman’s paintings at the Whitechapel in 1956 (cat. 49), he asserted that Herman has a ‘remarkably strong and undeviating character as an artist […] we are forced to see all that he paints according to his own scale of values’.23 Herman’s pictures of the miners of Ystradgynlais are, wrote Berger, ‘stark, sombre, and luminous, and of an uncompromising truth’.24 Berger’s analysis of Herman’s technical skills and artistic intentions remain some of the most insightful written to date, documenting Berger’s own political convictions and views that art and politics are inextricable from each other. And whilst Refiguring the 50s 51

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Fig 19 Sheila Fell Autumn Cumberland (Farm towards Dusk), 1958 Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust

Berger criticised Herman’s tendency to depict all his manual workers, whatever their trade or locale with the same general characteristics, he never lost his conviction that Herman, ‘by his genuine humility, by a deep rooted intimacy with his subject matter has arrived at forms which are entirely his own’.

Berger’s reviews of the 1950s were often bound up with his concerns that art should be socially relevant and accessible to all, seen and understood by those outside of the art establishment and art institutions, particularly the working class. The issues concerning the power relations of what deserves to be represented was of great interest to Berger and underpinned his responses to the challenge of

depicting ‘ordinary’ lives to as broad an audience as possible.

Berger curated two exhibitions with this aim, the first at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1952 and the second at the South London Arts Gallery in 1956, both entitled Looking Forward.25 Berger was particularly concerned with representations of workers, industrial and domestic landscapes and communal gatherings. Both Herman and Lowry were invited to show in the 1952 exhibition and exhibited five works each. Furthermore, Herman designed the front cover of the exhibition catalogue for the Looking Forward (cat. 48) tour of 1952. Responses to the shows were mixed, some critics unconvinced that the selection of

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Fig 20 Josef Herman The Road Gang, 1953 British Council Collection

paintings really did indicate that realism was the progressive force as claimed by Berger.

Frankfurther, in many ways, subscribed to Berger’s agenda for a realist art sensitive to the lives of the working class. Given that she was based in East London and exhibited her work with the East End Academy at the Whitechapel Gallery on five occasions between 1952 and 1957, a gallery very familiar to Berger, it is surprising not to see her mentioned in his reviews. One can only speculate the reasons why this was the case but perhaps the large number of exhibits in these East End Academy shows may have resulted in her works being overlooked by Berger. However, reviews

by other writers including Mervyn Levy, invariably express their admiration for her ‘powerful’ and ‘distinguished’ 26 portraits of the people with whom she worked and lived. A vivid description of her painting Barrow Boy is steeped in colourful metaphor: It is moving and trenchant, brimming with a sense of that stark struggle for existence which, as the ocean gnaws the land, exfoliates the living flesh from the bone, tossing back, like a well-worn pebble, a sallow husk with only a fag end, and great eyes like sunken black jewels, to meet the challenge of the jungle in the streets. 27

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Fig 21 Sheila Fell Houses near Number Five Pit, 1957 Courtesy National Museums Liverpool (Walker Art Gallery)

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Fig 22 Sheila Fell Snow on the Mountains Castlegate House Gallery

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Fig 23 Joan Eardley A Carter and His Horse, 1952 UK Government Art Collection

An analysis of critical responses to art in the 1950s exposes how writers were attentive not only to aesthetic considerations of the formal qualities of these paintings but to the social and political conditions of their production. All the artists in this exhibition describe particular individual and collective experiences of men, women and children living through changing and challenging times. The critic was tasked with formulating an adequate response to these experiences, an endeavour perhaps best expressed by Herbert Read in 1952: The first qualification for the criticism of modern art is perhaps a realisation of the tragic situation of modern man. From that basis the critic can proceed to speak with authority, with feeling and with simplicity.28

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Cat 48 Josef Herman Design for cover of Looking Forward exhibition catalogue, 1952

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Joan Eardley (1921–1963)

Fig 24 Audrey Walker Joan Eardley at Work, Catterline Dumfriesshire Educational Trust, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

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IN FOCUS

Joan Eardley Ann Steed Joan Eardley’s painting Brother and Sister (c. 1955) is a fine example of her mid-50s’ realist style in which she marries acute observation with an expressive painterly surface. There is an honesty and intimacy in this depiction which comes from the artist’s close connection with her subject. She had occupied the same studio in Townhead, Glasgow, since 1952 and in a letter she gave a rare insight into her relationship with the tenement children who spilled into her working space. Offered a comic or a ‘jam piece’, they might sit still just long enough to pose for a drawing: ‘They usually come and say “Will you paint me?”. In fact I am always having knocks at the door and this question. Some of them I don’t feel particularly interested in and so just send them away, but the ones I want to paint, I try to get to sit still. It is not usually possible to get a child to sit still, so mostly I just watch them moving around and do the best I can’.1 Some of these children were latchkey kids and for them Eardley’s studio was a place of refuge. Alan, the boy in this picture, remembered the overwhelming responsibility of caring for his sister. Soon after the painting was completed his sister was adopted and lost touch with her family but years later when they traced one another Alan wrote to her: Margaret how to begin? After the passing of 27 years your arrival has shaken me to the very core of my being. I have never forgotten you since the time of your birth when, as a child of only 7 years, I

first beheld you, a stranger, newly arrived in a strange new world.

The family whose name we share (your mother’s name) was a highly respected family in Townhead (the oldest district in Glasgow).

When you started school it became my duty to take you back and forward to school, mornings, dinner-times and afternoons. I worried and fretted and ran away from one school to the other every day and I was never easy in my mind until I could see you. That was the reason I took you to Joan Eardley’s studio, so that I could keep an eye on you. Joan had already painted me twice, but the Saturday she first saw you with me she decided to embark on a major work, the same being a portrait of you and I.

He concluded, ‘Of its present whereabouts I have no knowledge’.2 Surely this is the painting he was looking for. It conveys the same heartrending tenderness expressed in his account.

It tells us everything about their particular story and also about the broader picture of life of children in the Glasgow slums. The boy grasps the arm of his sister protectively. The two children pose in front of a blackened and chalk-scribbled wall. Photographs in Eardley’s collection suggest she was recording the graffiti on the tenement walls to incorporate it more accurately into her paintings but here amongst the graffiti she includes the initials M L – Margaret Livingstone – a playful secret dedication to her model.

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Cat 22 Joan Eardley Brother and Sister, 1955 Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

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The Living Part of Glasgow: Joan Eardley Christopher Andreae During a prolonged trip to the south of France in 1951 with her close friend Dorothy Steel, Joan Eardley said in a letter home there was no shortage of wonderful things to paint where they were, but that she was ‘missing’ her ‘wee boys’.

Eardley’s ‘wee boys’ were not her own; she never had children. They were the children she knew and drew in Townhead in the north-east part of Glasgow. This area was a hangover from a Victorian slum, poor, overcrowded and neglected. Undoubtedly it had not been improved during two world wars, and was ripe for demolition. Yet it was a community, and when the civic bulldozers arrived in the 1960s, it wasn’t just buildings that were destroyed; many of the communities were also broken up. There were some attempts to keep members of the communities together in the outlying new towns. But many people were nevertheless dispersed. By the time this dispersal kicked in, Eardley’s career had ended: she died aged 42 in 1963.

Even when Eardley was still a student at Glasgow School of Art during the war (arriving in the Scottish city from London in early 1940), she found such districts, with their dark, crowded and crumbling tenements, appealing.

It was here, she felt, the real character (‘the living part’ in her words) of Glasgow could be found. And it was for her drawings (often pastels, see fig. 24) and paintings of the Townhead children that she was to achieve her first recognition as a remarkable artist. They were not all boys, of course, but boys and girls (cat. 23) of all ages (see fig. 25). In one particular family, the Samsons, there were as many as 12 children by 1963, and although Eardley was selective, she depicted them from babyhood to teenhood. Her depictions were understanding, sympathetic and (if contemporary photographs are to be believed) uncompromisingly accurate – squints and sucked fingers (cat. 15) and hand-me-down clothes and all.

Eardley was never an abstract painter. Like Josef Herman, who had arrived in Glasgow from Poland at almost exactly the same date, she was an observer of working-class life, with

the emphasis on ‘working’. Herman had a powerful effect on Eardley. He was not, as has been erroneously claimed, a communist, but politically he was firmly on the left, and his art was all about workers. It was figurative and realistic, and, as suited the times, dark and serious. Herman must have shown Eardley a reproduction of the first work of art that really moved him – a poster by Käthe Kollwitz of Germany’s starving children (fig. 26). In Glasgow, he also organised an exhibition of Jewish art, which Eardley is bound to have seen and registered in her pictorial memory – work by Chagall, Soutine, Modigliani and others.

When Eardley started to concentrate on ‘her’ children as her main subject, she couldn’t have helped being conscious of their social status – yet paradoxically she never admitted that her art was any kind of social commentary. She always described it as a matter of colour and expression. Her interest in the children, she maintained, was purely the interest of an observant artist. The art itself strongly suggests otherwise.

Without pretention she recorded children who were certainly deprived. The fact is that she was comfortable with them. She found them unknowingly sympathetic, just as she did on her scholarship tour of Italy in 1949 when she felt the landscape too beautiful to paint, but made studies of country peasants, working men and women, and city beggars (cat. 9).

In a rare interview, in 1963, she talked about her rapport with the children. She said the Samsons ‘amused’ her: ‘just the fact that they perhaps hardly notice me when they come in […]. They are completely uninhibited. They don’t expect me to be any different from what I am and therefore they are not any different – they just behave as they would behave among themselves. They almost seem not to notice that I am there’. They would come up to her studio, knock on the door, and ask to be painted. They were boisterous and talkative, just let out of school. They were very unlikely to sit still. From their point of view they were there not really to be drawn, but for hide and seek, comics to read, pieces to eat – exploration of this exciting treasure trove, Eardley’s studio.

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Cat 15 Joan Eardley Little Girl with a Squint On loan from the Dumfriesshire Educational Trust, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

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Fig 25 Audrey Walker Joan Eardley’s Townhead studio Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

When they spilled out onto the street she followed them, drawing and taking snapshots. She recorded their environment and behaviour, the black stone tenements, the sash windows, the closes (fig. 27), the clutter of washing lines, girls pushing prams, skipping, loitering, dropping litter.

She sketched the shop fronts with their signs haphazardly repainted. She was more than intrigued by the way old shop signs were not obliterated by the new signs badly painted over them. This multiple layering, sometimes opaque, sometimes revealingly translucent, was actually the way she chose (very competently) to paint. She was the kind of artist who didn’t know how she was going to tackle a new subject

until she did it. An artist of intense spontaneity. A pursuer of moving objects, whether grubby children or heaving waves.

In 1950, she first encountered Catterline, a remote fishing village on the north-east coast, south of Aberdeen and Stonehaven. Later, in the mid-1950s, she rented a fisherman’s cottage (‘No. 1, Catterline’) intending to work there for a month or two, a needed change from Glasgow.

She stayed for about nine years, though she did keep her Glasgow studio and periodically continued to use it after spending some time considering how she could find a new way of drawing and painting the children. This was when she made images consisting of two small children affectionately

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Fig 26 Käthe Kollwitz Deutschlands Kinder hungern! (Germany’s Children are starving!), 1923 Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum, Berlin

linked together in front of graffiti covered walls (cat. 15).

They were poignant, even tragic paintings but unsentimental. The children, head and shoulders at the foot of the canvas, were almost part of the graffiti themselves, and hardly recognisable as portraits of specific individuals (fig. 30). She showed herself aware of nascent so-called ‘Pop Art’ as well as of New York Abstract Expressionism. She had a large book of 20th-century American art. She made a synthesis in her own paintings of recent modern art in Britain (Peter Blake and David Hockney, for example) and America ( Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning). She was also aware of French Tachisme. The nearest thing to her original way of mixing

the figurative and the abstract might be works by artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. It is no coincidence that she started to introduce collage elements into both her sea paintings and the paintings of children. She intelligently assimilated other art throughout her short career, remaking it on her own terms, absolutely true to herself. The pairs of children against the graffiti were, I believe, reflections of her own adult feelings, her affections and loneliness. Some of the real children thought she was angry when she was painting. I suspect just fiercely concentrated comes closer.

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Cat 23 Joan Eardley Girl in Blue, Winter Private Collection, London

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Cat 24 Joan Eardley Girl in a Red Dress On loan from Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow

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Fig 27 Joan Eardley Glasgow Close, 1960 The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow

that included No. 1. At first she didn’t know, by her own admission, how she was going to paint the sea. In the end her approach – powerfully different from such notable predecessors as Courbet, Turner or the elder William McTaggart – came from very close encounters. The sea, like the Townhead children, was of course unaware of her. And like them it was ‘completely uninhibited’. It never stopped moving. She wanted it to be stormy when she painted it because its subjection to ferocious forces was how she wanted her painting action to be. A distant observation of phenomena was not her way. Her sea washed over her boots. Some of the most potent portraits of the children she made were when the children themselves were actually defiant or sullen. One of her pastels of a child has even been described, not unreasonably, as ‘feral’. The winter sea at Catterline (fig. 31) could sometimes be so tempestuous that it lifted up the steep cliff and right

over the roofs of the cottages. She described this in one of her almost daily letters to her close friend Audrey Walker. The sea was confrontational, and so was Eardley. She would be down on the shore facing it head on. Audrey justifiably described her as ‘noble and heroic out of this world’, particularly when a gale threw over her half painted board face down, ruining her work. ‘You have to be tough for this game’ Eardley once said.

She was tough and proud of it.

She was not ashamed of being a lesbian. Nevertheless, at a time when such an admission could be socially upsetting to close relations and friends, and even ruin a reputation, Eardley was not only secretive, but also felt she was out on a limb. In this respect, as in her choice of subject matter and preference for remoter communities in which to paint, she was a rebel against her middle class background. She was humorously teasing about her mother’s bridge playing.

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Fig 28 Joan Eardley Girl with Bag and Paper, 1959 Private Collection

Fig 29 Joan Eardley Two Girls with Shopping Bag, 1959 Private Collection

But her mother remained throughout friendly and proudly supportive of her daughter’s achievements, and her daughter appreciated this.

She was, however, caustic about those ‘lady artists’ who decoratively painted flowers or embroidered pretty fabrics – or for that matter made charming pictures of delightful, well-washed children. Her sister Pat had a good and conventional marriage and family. But Eardley never painted Pat’s children. And when she was commissioned by her Edinburgh dealer, William Macaulay, to paint his children (puzzlingly since he knew and admired the character of her work) Eardley was unsurprisingly unsure. But she couldn’t bring herself to refuse. In the event she took great trouble and painted them enchantingly; but it just wasn’t her scene at all.

Much more to her liking was a commission in 1959 for drawings of refugee children to illustrate an article in the

University of Edinburgh Gazette marking World Refugee Year. Her sensitive pen and ink drawings depict the children (figs. 28 and 29) almost as little old people of five or six years, clutching their few possessions; isolated beings washed up on an unfamiliar shore. She felt for them authentically, I believe, because as an artist and a woman she was herself ‘on the edge’. Her father (though she and Pat didn’t learn this until years after the event) had committed suicide when they were children, unable to put behind him his First World War experiences. When the Second World War began, the now all-female family escaped the blitz in London by moving to Scotland (which ironically was to receive its own quota of bombs). They had relatives in Scotland with whom they at first lived, but in effect they were themselves evacuees.

Eardley’s arrival at Glasgow School of Art was heralded with something of a fanfare. The other students were told this Refiguring the 50s 69

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Fig 30 Joan Eardley Philip the Fat Boy, c. 1949–50 City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries

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Fig 31 Joan Eardley Catterline in Winter, 1963 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

exceptional talent was joining them from the south. Eardley (who according to Herman blushed every time she opened her mouth to speak) would surely have been embarrassed by such a prelude. She was modest about her work. She was also, however, decisive and sure of herself with a brush or pastel or stick of charcoal in her hand.

It was her art school friend, Margot Sandeman, who was first to draw crouched street children playing marbles on the pavement. Sandeman later recorded that her treatment of the subject ‘set off Joan on that theme. She started doing it a lot better than me of course’.

To Sandeman this was a matter of history. Her own vision developed quite differently from Eardley’s, each doing what they did best. Contrasting one artist with another often helps

to appreciate their individual contribution. The main body of Eardley’s work emerged in the 1950s. Sandeman had a very long career after that. To what extent Eardley must be judged by the period in which she lived and worked is ‘one of those questions.’ Her work stands up well, still as fraught with energy and infused with confrontational daring and exuberance as when it was first made. She was by no means a follower; much more of a pioneer. She was arguably part of a renewal of confidence in art and individualism in the postwar period. But her principal, universal themes can hardly be limited to one distant decade. The power of her works has not faded. It remains elemental in drive and purpose: childhood unrestrained and the sea without ceasing.

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Sheila Fell (1931–1979)

Fig 32 Jorge Lewinski Sheila Fell, 1964 The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth

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IN FOCUS

Sheila Fell Steve Swallow Women by a Stile struck me the first time I saw it, despite its then dusty glass and broken frame. An early Fell, and a completely captivating one, it feels almost transitional, with elements of her youthful work from the early 50s, but also anticipating the work of the coming decade. It was included in Fell’s second solo exhibition in 1958 at the Beaux Arts Gallery, and occupies a commanding position among the small number of charcoals within a correspondingly small body of work, completed before her untimely death in 1979, aged just 48.

The drawing’s relatively large size ensures its visual impact. This is no small, apologetic work, but one produced on a scale designed to equal that of her paintings. The skeletal trees in both fore- and mid-ground are immediately striking; the former effectively framing the two women. Such skeletal forms were a regular feature of Fell’s early painting and here, rather than being stark and dominating, they are integral, complementing the composition.

Women by a Stile is a drawing I have found myself coming back to time and time again, always seeing new elements within it. A showcase of Fell’s post-St Martin’s abilities, it is perfectly balanced, driven in large part by the regularity of the vertical lines. Working from the right, we have the trees, then the outline of the women, then the gable-ends flowing directly down to the far right hand side of the stile leading to the mid-ground trees. It’s clever; it’s darn clever.

Then there’s the link between the outline of the first woman and that of the gable-ends; a softened, elongated triangular form which links the figure inexorably with the landscape. This triangular form is repeated within the space between the trees to the left, again mirroring the outlines of the women. Fell was driven to explore and depict how the community she grew up among was shaped by the surrounding landscape. In Women by a Stile the link between the two is integral to the composition.

It would also be amiss to ignore the medium. The use of charcoal (rather than oil paint) to construct the picture allows for an emphasis on form without the ‘distraction’ of a more complex colour palette. It is, I am sure, a deliberate choice. That said, it can hardly be defined as a traditional monochrome, given the amount of charcoal used together with sparing, yet effective chalk-white highlights towards the foreground. A heavier use of charcoal, applied in a stronger, firmer manner, is used to emphasise the verticals; the trees, the figures outlined, the stile, all reinforced by the strength of application.

It’s easy, as a viewer, to miss the subtleties that make this drawing what it is, or to even discount them as ‘happy coincidence’, but to do so would be to take away from Sheila the inherent skill in both her composition and in its execution.

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Cat 25 Sheila Fell Women by a Stile, 1956 Private Collection, courtesy of Castlegate House Gallery

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The Poetry of Place: Sheila Fell Cate Haste Sheila Fell was deeply rooted in place. Though she lived her adult life in London, she returned regularly to Cumberland for visits and for her raw material. Born in 1931 the only daughter of a miner and a seamstress, she grew up in the small mining community of Aspatria, West Cumberland, tethered between the Lake District mountains and the flat windblown Solway Plain, where the rhythm of life was dictated by work underground in the pits or above in the fields of barley or potatoes which stretched to the sea.

Uncertainty shadowed their lives, as the pits closed one by one. And always present was the capricious weather, the sudden shifts of light and cloud, the transformations from calm to storm which could alter the very contours of the earth. It was the place where her imagination had been formed, and that inner store of images exercised an intense power over her.

Sensitive and acutely observant, Fell perceived the world in contrasts of dark and light. She often trembled on the edge of dread – at ‘the moaning of the wind blowing from the sea across to the mountains’, the trees ‘soughing all night and the warning cry of a bird being chased by a terrifying enemy’. Her first sight returning from a school trip in 1946 of the majestic Westmoreland mountains haunted her imagination: ‘[They] seemed to force themselves, black and hostile almost through the window of the carriage. Slab over slab they rose up and enveloped us like a gigantic frightening wall nearly touching the glass and shutting out the sky. They hung over the train like great forlorn prehistoric animals’.1 The overpowering image informed the mood of her early paintings. Massive, menacing mountain shapes reach to the top of the canvas, a thin gleam of light rims the horizon, cottages and farms crouch beneath, battered by the driving elements. There is an uncompromising absence of sentimentality or romanticism and nothing picturesque about Fell’s work. Though working in a figurative tradition, her interest was not in ‘copying’ the landscape but in conveying her inner experience and emotional response to its drama – the forms,

shapes and colours, the light falling on the organic contours of the land and the place of people on it.

She studied at Carlisle College of Art, then, undeterred by warnings that there was no future for women painters, she moved to London and St Martin’s School of Art. It was here in her last year that she discovered in Cumberland her inspiration and her ‘alphabet’. Within that narrow focus on place – rarely more than 20 miles from her birthplace – she found the poetic language to express with eloquence and intense feeling the profound interdependence of land, people, work and nature as well as the precariousness of the patient struggle for survival in a forbidding landscape. It had universal resonance. She saw in Cumberland ‘a cross-section of life. All the landscape is lived in, modulated, worked on and used by man’. The world ‘is the sum of its parts and the parts are all local’, she declared.

When she arrived in a state of excitement mixed with apprehension in 1950, London was still in the chaotic aftermath of the Second World War, gaping bomb-sites scarred the landscape and grey austerity marked everyone’s lives. In a period of uncertainty and transition, there was a powerful drive towards regeneration of the nation’s cultural vitality as much as of its industrial and social fabric.

A generation of artists had been put on hold, diverted to employment as war artists or service in the armed forces.

Then ‘the tap was opened’, Frank Auerbach, Fell’s friend and contemporary, observes. Artists sought a new animus: ‘Faced with an art that had become rather mannered, with a curious ‘modernistic’, late-Cubist vocabulary’, artists ‘would hope to strike through to something more essential, less uniform, less armoured with chic, and try to get back to some kind of raw impulse […] a very serious longing to get back into a profound contact with the natural world’.2 Fell was part of that mood. She had ‘a very clear instinct as to what she wanted,’ Auerbach recalls, ‘there’s no pathos on her paintings. There’s nothing false in them. They have an absolute authenticity. I think she was genuinely attached

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Fig 33 Sheila Fell Woman in a Cornfield, c. 1960 Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust , Carlisle

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Cat 26 Sheila Fell Woman in the Snow, 1955 Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

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Cat 27 Sheila Fell Portrait of Ann Fell I, c. 1955 Anna Fell

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Cat 28

Cat 5

Sheila Fell Dorothy Hodgkin (1910–1994), Fellow and Member of Council (1936), Professorial Fellow, Nobel Prize, OM, 1962

Sheila Fell Portrait of Clifford Rowan, c. 1952 Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust, Carlisle

Somerville College, University of Oxford

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Cat 29 Sheila Fell (Attributed) In a Mine, c. 1955 Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust , Carlisle

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to and loyal to and immersed in her subject’.3 In common with her figurative contemporaries she was untouched by the rapid developments in the art world during the 1950s and 1960s, the debates that raged around abstraction versus realism, the influence of American Abstract Expressionism or the emergence of Pop Art, minimalism or other fashionable ‘isms’ of the period. Her steadfastness was due not to ignorance of those developments, but rather to ‘the rate and requirements of her inner growth’ as Helen Lessore, who gave Fell her first exhibitions at the Beaux Arts Gallery, observed.4 Fell’s true influences were not current but past masters – Cézanne, Daumier, van Gogh (she kept a leaf of ivy from his grave in her passport) and the Belgian Expressionists: she discovered Belgian painter Constant Permeke ‘with the same joy with which suddenly greets a kindred spirit’, and drew on their work when it served her idea. She retained her integrity, and assumed neither fame nor fortune but ‘persistence, obscurity and the making of a chef-d’oeuvre inconnu.’

She was also aligned with a movement, begun in the 1950s, to give voice to the experience of northern working class life which was articulated across the cultural spectrum – in film, theatre, poetry and fiction as well as the visual arts.

In the beginning Fell worked in different genres. Her few portraits include one of fellow student Clifford Rowan (cat. 5), who was devoted to her. They lived together during and after college and retained a deep lifelong friendship. The painting was her Diploma submission in 1952 and is striking for the curious high framing of the figure, the rugged, almost hewn angularity of the face, and the atmospheric use of paint and brushwork.

Later she painted with a clear eye several portraits of her mother (including cat. 27) which convey a woman of dignity and resolve. There is a depth of feeling and a sense of darkness and mystery in the sharp outlines, shadowed background and controlled layering of paint. They are unflinchingly honest. To Helen Lessore they were ‘as sculptural as if carved out of stone, quite extraordinary in their pure severity, and utterly devoid of the slightest sentimentality’. Few young painters, she noted ‘are able to exert such self control’ in portraits of those close to them.5 Fell had a complex, nuanced relationship with her mother. Constantly supportive, loving, and her fiercest defender, Ann Fell ‘gave an intensity to Sheila’s emotional life’

which was ‘all-embracing, emotionally, and Sheila found it difficult to escape that’, her cousin Daniel McDowell recalls.6 Fell found ways to skirt her disapproval, compartmentalised her life, and went her own way. But she showed her mother’s portrait, like a talisman, at every exhibition.

When Somerville College, Oxford, commissioned her to paint the eminent crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin (cat. 28), Fell insisted she get to know her first. In a palette of warm earth colours, with a soft halo-like glow around the head, the portrait captures a calm thoughtfulness and alert determination.

Fell did several drawings of miners at work (see cat. 29), probably influenced by Josef Herman, who seems to have been a valued mentor; she put off a longed-for visit abroad to her friend Nicholas Mosley to see Herman when he was in London. Though it was on the land rather than in the pits that she found her stride, there was an affinity. She admired his use of colour and texture and the intense humanism and carved monumentality of his figures of south-Wales miners (cat. 42). She shared his declared concern ‘to make images of silence and dignity of the ordinary and everyday which transcend that reality’, and his view of the visual process as ‘an inward tunnel towards feeling and not as a way of gathering data’, for ‘the object of art is to remind reality of its poetic roots’.7 L S Lowry was a lasting influence. He went to her first Beaux Arts exhibition in 1955 and was profoundly impressed. Lowry thought Fell the greatest landscape painter of the age and responded instinctively to the poetry in her work: ‘She’s lived amongst it, was born amongst it. The quality is so poetic, it attracts me very much – more than anybody else today. I think she’s a very sincere artist’. He became her lifelong patron and supporter, gave her a small allowance and took his holidays with her parents in Aspatria, where he and Sheila went on all-day painting expeditions.

Lowry reinforced her own conviction that one ‘could only paint the place one really knew, where one belongs’. Beyond some practical hints – such as lightening her palette – she denied he had influenced her painting, but she learnt from his attitude. ‘Nobody ever asked us to paint’, he’d say, which was chastening. She found his companionship and erudition enriching and was grateful that he kept buying her paintings: ‘Had it not been for him, I think I would have just gone down’, she said.8 Refiguring the 50s 83

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With increasing assurance she evolved the language of her landscapes – the dominant high horizons, houses clinging to the slopes, the turbulent elements in which figures go about their work. Woman in the Snow (1955) (cat. 26) contains several reiterated motifs: the verticals of trees slicing through the canvas; the dreamlike quality of the habitations; the path leading upwards through the picture plane; and the calm steadiness of the woman concentrating on her task. There is a distinctive expressionist vitality in the heightened earth colours, vibrant shapes and rhythmic brushwork.

She experimented in different mediums. Her charcoal drawings show a strength of design and composition and a confident draughtsmanship which Lowry thought had ‘a weight and eloquence and dramatic intensity equal to her paintings’. She used more flowing designs and rhythmic forms and a tighter focus on the anchored everyday relationship between the people and the land, which she then developed in her paintings. Near-abstract vertical shapes stabilise the design, staunch upright figures in stylised aprons and headscarves are locked into the rhythms of the topography. She captures a dignified authenticity in the skilfully honed figures of Women by a Stile (1956) (cat. 26).

These are simple narratives of ordinary life and metaphors of endurance and survival.

In Woman in a Cornfield (fig. 33), the figure is integrated within the rich earth colours of her surroundings and the gleam of eerie white around the mountain rim. The pigment conveys melancholy and entrapment. The small figure eking out a frugal existence in the harsh landscape is lonely and

poignant, suspended within the upward movement of the painting towards the looming mountain and threatening sky.

In a different interpretation of the community’s relation with nature, Wedding in Aspatria (1958) (cat. 30) is a fierce imaginative construct and a disturbing image of wedding in a place of decay. The diminutive figures of the bride, in startling white, and the groom cling together before the gravestones, shadowed by the dominating, sombre sandstone-brown architecture of the church which merges with the brooding mountain behind. At its rim gleams a thin line of white light which seems to eerily illuminate the bridal dress.

Charismatic, petite and beautiful, with a well-stocked mind and an inner determination, Fell found her place in 1950s London. She returned to Cumberland for visits three times a year. But at her core was a dislocation, an unresolved split between her Cumberland roots and her London life.

Fell had left the secure world which had nourished her and continued to feed her imagination, but she could not go back to it. ‘Her paintings were a mourning for the loss of Cumbria’, her daughter Anna thinks: ‘It was to do with disinheritance, her sense of loss at being cut off from roots which were very deep and stable’.9 Out of that unease Fell produced paintings of extraordinary lyricism and expressive power. Working in a figurative style she metamorphosed landscape through the prism of her imagination and her original vision. She re-interpreted and celebrated with poetic intensity the dignity and patient endurance of working people, and humanity’s precarious relationship with the earth, nature and the elements.

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Cat 30 Sheila Fell Wedding in Aspatria, 1958 Lent from the UK Government Art Collection

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Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959)

Fig 34 Unknown photographer Eva Frankfurther in Florence 1951 Private Collection

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IN FOCUS

Eva Frankfurther Jörg Garbrecht The staff cafeteria is seldom spectacular, yet this one is: in character, colour and composition. Eva Frankfurther has so carefully arranged her two waitresses that each appears to mirror the other from their tilted heads angled toward one another, outstretched arms and even the inverted folds of the crossover tops of their uniforms. Yet as our eyes move back and forth between them, we discover fine differences in their ages, features and hairstyles.

Set in silhouette, the mauve-charcoal complexion of the mature woman on the right, contrasts with the softer bronze of the younger woman on the left. Her pointed, sharp profile emphasizes the other’s sensuous face. Her beauty is quite startling as eyes averted, lost in thought, she allows us to contemplate her high cheekbones, shapely eyebrows and curled lashes. A small nose above well-rounded lips and an elegant neck all reveal a natural beauty carefully groomed.

Her opulent wavy hair is cut fashionably short in the ‘Italian style’, just like in the movies. On top of her upcurled fringe, her white scalloped waitresses’ cap becomes a chic accessory.

The two women in their gleaming white uniforms are set against a backdrop of pure rose. Frankfurther’s palette relates to the body: the bronze radiance of cared-for skin, the greys and pinks of calluses, the purple of veins, the red of blood and the maple-brown shades of hair. Bodily hues saturate the entire scene with warmth, calming the pulse: we feel comfortable in these women’s presence and instinctively relax. Yet to prevent this solemn, feminine scene from slipping into sentimentality, Frankfurther employs loose brushwork with an almost dry brush allowing a vibrant undercurrent to shine through the friable paint.

The well-balanced interplay of calm colour and agitated brushwork is echoed by the composition. The heavy-set verticals of the two sturdy women and the three solid horizontals of their beam-like arms form a static framework.

Frankfurther subtly enlivens this motionless tableau by

introducing diagonals in the tilt of their heads, the receding ridges of the counter top and the angled arm holding the ladle. Movement is implied, yet all gestures, stilled, appear to unfold with a grand air.

This harmonious scene probably differed profoundly from the reality. A Lyons Corner House teemed with life and Frankfurther had first-hand experience of it. Spread over four levels, the Piccadilly branch cafeteria never closed, serving the eternal hungry queue around the clock. It employed some 400 staff – Frankfurther among them as between 1951 and 1956 she pegged away as counter-hand and washer-up. The noise would have been tremendous: a cacophony of rattling trays, plates screeching on steel, repeatedly pierced by shouts from staff and regulars, a never-ending jangle of knives and forks as customers rummaged through the cutlery boxes, punctured by the recurrent ‘clank, clunk, ca-ching’ of the cash register.

Frankfurther’s work reflects the fundamental changes Lyons introduced post-war: self-serving cafeterias, where counter staff portioned out standardized food from open bains-marie – the only red dishes according to a historic menu were baked beans and spaghetti with tomato sauce for a couple of shillings each.

Yet Frankfurther has lifted the scene from the noisy bustle and hectic frenzy of the everyday, suspending it for our contemplation. She has muted it, slowed it down and imbued it with a calm solemnity so that the fast paced counter-hands’ move as a harmonious entity; serving food turns into a slow-flowing ritual.

Although the painting now invites various readings from social, cultural or post-colonial angles, it also invites our participation. What will SHE do, the lunch lady still lost in thought? Will she make eye contact, flash a radiant smile and pass the dish with her carefully manicured hand and a heartwarming ‘Enjoy your meal’? Or is she going to slap the food onto the plate and shove it across the functional steel counter without even raising her eyes?

Me – I hope for her smile.

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Cat 31 Eva Frankfurther West Indian Waitresses, c. 1955 Private Collection

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The Lives of Others: Eva Frankfurther Sarah MacDougall Two contexts inform the life and work of Eva Frankfurther: the decade through which she lived and worked in 1950s’ Britain and its concern with the realist tradition, and the German heritage from which as an exile she was forcibly separated at a young age but to which she was instinct­ ively drawn.1 Reviewing an exhibition of her work at Clare Hall, Cambridge in 1979, the art historian and critic Frank Whitford observed, ‘The work on show is so good that I wondered why I had not heard of Eva Frankfurther before.

It did not surprise me to find that she was a refugee from Germany, coming to Britain at the age of nine, for her style of portraiture belongs so clearly to a German tradition’.2 Eva Frankfurther was born on 10 February 1930 in Dahlem, Berlin, into an assimilated, educated Jewish family, the third and youngest child of Paul, a businessman, and Henriette, an economics graduate. The family had strong cultural leanings towards music, literature and the visual arts.3 Henriette, already diagnosed as suffering from cancer during her pregnancy, died 18 months later. In 1934 Eva’s father remarried and his new wife, Nina, became a caring stepmother (‘Mutti’) to the children. Despite the shadow of rising National Socialism, they were fortunate to live surrounded by a large close-knit family and friends whose protection allowed them to enjoy a relatively untroubled early childhood.4 With the advent of Kristallnacht in November 1938 however, ‘all hell broke loose’,5 and it was no longer possible to disguise the social and political chaos that surrounded them. Six months later on the eve of war, the Frankfurthers fled to England. The children, sent on alone in April, were housed in a school in Haslemere, Surrey, set up by a group of refugee teachers for refugee children, where they stayed for a year.6 Their parents followed on one of the last flights out of Germany in August 1939, three days before the outbreak of hostilities.

In Blitz-torn London, the Frankfurthers became just one among many families struggling to make ends meet, enduring rationing and the penetrating cold of the English winter. In

December 1941 they were able to rent a flat in a large, shared house in Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead, owned by the Freud family, which also housed other mainly GermanJewish refugees.7 To escape the worst of the air-raids Eva and her sister Beate (two years her senior) were evacuated to Hertfordshire for four years – a further disruption in their young lives.

In 1946, aged 16, Frankfurther began her artistic training at St Martin’s School of Art. Few works survive from this early period, but a Self-portrait with Plait (1946) shows a wistfulness soon ruthlessly expunged from her work and from her later, more expressionistic self-portraits. In this transformative phase, even her handwriting changed from a clear, rounded, schoolgirl hand to a looser, more sprawling style. Under the ‘semi-academic’ regime at St Martin’s she studied anatomy, life drawing (under Roland Vivian Pitchforth) and painting from the model underpinned by a rigid exam framework unpopular with many of the students. Among them were Frankfurther’s fellow Jewish classmates Frank Auerbach (also a refugee from Berlin) and Leon Kossoff, who both found more satisfaction at David Bomberg’s less restrictive Borough classes.

Auerbach recalled Frankfurther’s work, even then, as ‘full of feeling for people’ and contemptuous of ‘professional tricks or gloss’,8 a fact recognised and encouraged by their tutor Bateson Mason, who believed that she thought of her art ‘primarily as a means of establishing contact with people, and not as an end in itself ’.9 Certainly the concentration on people and on portraiture that afterwards became central to her practice was honed during this formative period.

Never without a sketchbook, both at home and abroad, she made hundreds of vivid life sketches (cat. 36). She had an ‘astonishing memory for people’s faces and the unspoken language of their bodily attitudes’10 and this was often economically captured in a few telling lines. By contrast her paintings are more concentrated in focus and her etchings, in particular, have a pronounced quality of stillness.

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Cat 32 Eva Frankfurther Woman with Two Children Private Collection

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Cat 33 Eva Frankfurther Newspaper Seller, c. 1955 Private Collection

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Cat 34

Cat 35

Eva Frankfurther Street Conversation

Eva Frankfurther Old Man in Brown Cap

Private Collection

Private Collection

As a student, ‘Frankfurter’ (as she was listed in the catalogue) exhibited at least once in a group showing of St Martin’s students at the short-lived Coffee House gallery, near Trafalgar Square:11 exhibiting Harlem (£10) alongside Auerbach’s Music Hall (£10), Doig Simmond’s After Work (£5) and Joseph Tilson’s Trafalgar Square (£10), among others.12 The change from a more agitated to a looser style of brushwork in this period demonstrates that she was not uninterested in technique. However she quickly tired

of the endless debates over figuration versus abstraction.

‘My colleagues and teachers were painters concerned with form and colour, while to me these were only means to an end, the understanding of and commenting on people,’ she later explained.

After leaving St Martin’s, Frankfurther embarked on her first visit to Italy in the summer of 1951.13 There she painted pilgrims, beggars and children; and on her way home stopping off in Paris sought local colour in the working-class Refiguring the 50s 93

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Cat 36 Eva Frankfurther Series of 8 Sketches from ‘Whitechapel Diary’ Private Collection

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districts. On an earlier trip to the United States,14 she had made a point of visiting the black American population of Harlem,15 laying the foundation for her interest in depicting ethnic minorities.16 But these were merely refinements of a subject that she had already fixed upon: ‘Always, wherever she was, she drew and painted […] people: ordinary, working people’,17 putting the lives of others at the centre of her art.

Upon her return to London, Frankfurther, already disillusioned by the London art scene, was determined to earn her living by other means. In the autumn of 1951, she became a counter hand and washer-up at Lyons Corner House working the evening shift in order to concentrate on painting during the day. In a letter to a friend she wrote that ‘It was a good arrangement’ for the physical work, long hours and noisy, busy atmosphere provided a helpful contrast to the solitary, searching, introspective experience of working in a studio.

Even more importantly, Lyons provided her with ‘boundless material in the way of human beings’18 – enough to people her work for the next five years.

Many of her fellow workers had been recruited from the new immigrant populations, so that this body of Frankfurther’s work has a documentary value recording the changing face of a new multicultural Britain. ‘West Indian, Irish, Cypriot and Pakistani immigrants, English whom the Welfare State had passed by, these were the people amongst whom I lived and made some of my best friends,’ she wrote.

Employing loose brushwork and dry paint in a restricted palette, sparingly applied, she focuses on faces and postures in both single and small group portraits of chefs, waitresses, porters, cleaners and ‘characters’: playing cards, reading the paper, eating dinner, drinking tea, grasping mops, wringing out cloths; resting, or simply sleeping from exhaustion.

They are observed with empathy and afforded dignity, but rarely smile or engage with the viewer simply allowing us to observe them. Although clearly individuals, they also serve as archetypes.

Frankfurther made particular friends among the West Indian ‘Windrush’ generation, and there are many studies of her friend Catherine Jones, often depicted with her young daughter, Helen, in mother and child tableau including Family Group, which uses the distinctive blue and pink palette associated with a Raphael Madonna. The affirmative warm, feminine interiors of Couple with Infant (cat. 8) and Woman and Child however contrast to that in Black Man

Seated (fig. 35), where we view the ‘Lonely Londoner’19 for whom the walls of his bedsit are a prison. In West Indian Porters (c. 1955) (cat. 1), based on fellow Lyons workers, Frankfurther shows her great admiration for Rembrandt, whose Two Moors (1661, Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague) clearly inspired the composition although she reverses the position of the two men.20 Pencil marks and a faint outline around the porter on the left (facing the viewer) suggest alterations during the painting’s execution, but both the background and the lower half of the picture are deliberately unresolved. Instead Frankfurther again concentrates on the faces and expressions of her subjects; their heads placed close to one another, their bodies merging, they exhibit a graceful exhaustion.

In 1952 Frankfurther moved from the comfort of the family home in Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead to a damp basement lodging in Whitechapel, determined to live independently and off her own meagre earnings. She stayed there for the next six years. When the unhealthy surroundings were condemned by the hygiene inspector, she simply moved to another room in the same house. Her simply-furnished room also housed her studio and painting materials. Though personally clean and fastidious, she preferred an unregimented environment in which to paint, writing to a friend in 1956 when abroad in Berlin that though she longed to paint the pension in which she was staying was far too ‘CLEAN & bourgeois to think of such a messy past-time [sic]’.

From 1952–57 Frankfurther exhibited regularly at the East End Academy at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.21 These exhibitions were open, ‘without selection, to all from teen-agers to pensioners, who live or work in the East End,’ and unsurprisingly, as the Times Educational Supplement noted in 1956, ‘pictures of glaringly contrasting talent […] jostled each other on the gallery’s crowded walls’ lending the exhibition ‘unusual zest and piquancy’. Nevertheless, owing to the ‘ruthless weeding’ of exhibits by highly regarded Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery Bryan Robertson, the standard was judged to be ‘extraordinarily high’.22 Frankfurther’s work as a trained painter stood out among the amateurs and reviewers began to look out for her regular exhibits.

The art critic Mervyn Levy a friend of and authority on L S Lowry and a BBC broadcaster,23 consistently devoted

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Cat 37 Eva Frankfurther Woman holding Baby in White Cap Private Collection

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reviewing space to her work, picking out her ‘Whitechapel Diary’ as displaying ‘remarkable insight into the character and destiny of her fellow men’. In it she brings the East End to life: mothers and children, market-stall holders and traders, barrow boys and old men queue, barter, buy and sell flowers, newspapers, fish and bread. In cramped interiors in the back streets workers iron, sew, roll pastry, empty ovens, mop floors; young boxers fight their way out of the ghetto.

Similarly, Frankfurther’s Whitechapel paintings also portray a cast of stoical characters, observed without sentiment against a spare background in a muted palette that conjures up the drab, grimy atmosphere of postwar London.

Her social conscience is notable in compositions including Homeless; and Old Man in Brown Cap (cat. 35) – his haggard, dark-eyed face closely framed against a mustard sky tells of a poverty-stricken old age. Her female Newspaper Seller (cat. 33) waiting patiently with her bundle is heroic in her endurance. Yet unlike Josef Herman’s workers, Frankfurther’s are not glorified by their labours but defined by them and by the ‘stark struggle’ of their daily lives.24 In this, her work was instinctively more in keeping with the German Expressionist tradition prevalent among many German émigré painters of an older generation25 (it is no surprise to learn that Käthe Kollwitz was one of her favourite artists; van Gogh was another). Her portraits, as Frank Whitford later observed, are ‘concerned more with the inner lives of their sitters than with their physical appearance. Their inner lives have been shaped by pain, changed by dark circumstances’.26 The Hackney Gazette, though impressed by her East End studies viewed them as nostalgic, ‘recreat[ing] the past of Whitechapel’.27 Yet for Frankfurther this was not the past but part of the everyday, ongoing, marginal lives of Whitechapel, left behind as the world moved on, timeless scenes and characters from East End Jewish life, such as cloth merchants, Rabbis, Jewish bakers, kosher butchers and a ‘Yiddishe momma’. By the 1950s however the East End was no longer a predominantly Jewish area but home to a mixed population, including an historic Irish community. One unidentified, striking Irish woman with red hair and pale skin28 became the focus of several paintings including Woman with Two Children (cat. 32), standing in patient profile shouldering her baby with one arm, a toddler dressed in red clinging to the other, her clothes and her mother’s hair providing vivid streaks of colour against the drab background of their presumably

straitened lives. As the Tablet noted, Frankfurther’s portraits, ‘always penetrating’, could be ‘both ruthless and delicate’.29 For Levy they marked her out, as ‘a painter of real distinction. […] She has insight, considerable technical ability, and the power to fire empathy in the spectator’.30 In contrast there are lighter studies of ‘characters’, such as the ubiquitous East End ‘spivs’, and Frankfurther’s keen sense of humour comes through in sketches such as Grandmother and Child and Old Age Pensioner, enclosed in letters to a friend. A series of etchings (probably printed at St Martin’s),31 is among the most atmospheric and accomplished of all Frankfurther’s works. Perhaps the careful process required her to slow down and distil the ‘never ending impressions that’, she once wrote to her father, ‘race through my mind. I feel as though in my head, or you would probably correctly say in my heart, there is a long queue of human beings, who all insist upon being painted. As soon as I have finished with one of them […] the next one is standing in his place’.32 Frankfurther sold regularly from these local exhibitions and visitors often came to her studio to view and purchase work, which was, however, never signed (she also frequently gave it away as gifts to friends, family and sitters). By removing herself from the reach of a mainstream artistic audience however, she also limited the public and critical reception of her work and (despite individual artist friends) also worked without the support of a peer group or artistic network.

In 1956 Frankfurther left Lyons and joined the Tate & Lyle Sugar Factory in Victoria Dock as a shift-worker.

‘The work is fairly heavy, but no-one to shout at you and rush you like at Lyons’, she explained.33 Here she found further material among the dockers (cat. 36), distinct male presences including fathers and sons with strong bodies and lined-faces; brickies, hod-carriers and Trade Unionists.

Instinctively left-wing, she joined the union, but at the first meeting, finding that nothing more subversive than the state of ‘the gents’ was discussed, characteristically spent her time filling a sketchbook. In 1957, however, wanting a complete break from her present life and not wanting to be ‘comfortably settled as a “type”’, she left London to seek ‘new hunting grounds’.34 Attracted by the sunny climate and lifestyle, she accepted invitations from friends and several family members (also

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Fig 35 Eva Frankfurther Black Man Seated Private Collection

Fig 36 Eva Frankfurther Waitress Resting, c. 1955 Private Collection

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German refugees) to spend eight months in Israel. There she experienced conflicting emotions. She loved the light, open landscape, the blue skies and ‘feeling of peace and unreality’, but strongly disliked its militarism. Although she appreciated the hospitality of friends and family, she longed for privacy and time alone with her work, much of which was stolen despite being misunderstood. The locals, she told her father, disliked her work because it was ‘sad’; the German expressionism which characterised it was then highly unfashionable, perhaps seen as a throwback to an earlier age and, her sister believes, at odds with the then current ethos to symbolise a strong, hopeful, youthful nation.35 She had already planned to return to London, though dreading its ‘dirty grey’ skies. Once there, faced with another cold, drab winter and completely uncertain of her future (she had applied to become a social worker at LSE), she succumbed to a deep depression. She took her own life in January 1959.

Acute, sensitive, intelligent, observant and compassionate, Frankfurther was also stubborn, single-minded, focused and above all, independent. Though far from a recluse,36 she was ‘driven’, often having to fight against an over-absorption in

her work and a hermit-like tendency.37 Her moods swung between ‘highs’ when she was ‘150% happy’ and correspondingly dramatic ‘lows’. To a close friend, Sari Stolow, she wrote that she often ‘felt like a tight-rope walker at a circus, trying to keep the balance between going on and plunging down’ (fig. 37).38 At such times she was highly self-critical, often destroying work believing that she would create something more worthwhile ‘tomorrow’; very easily the promise of the white page and its ‘possibilities’ could become tyrannous and disappoint. Yet she was always compelled to paint.

Upon her death Frankfurther left not only a collection comprising over 200 paintings (all on paper), a handful of etchings, and numerous drawings, but a portrait of the decade of austerity through which she lived and of the people of the old and new communities who inhabited it.

Her instinctive sympathy for workers, immigrants and other people on the margins was probably due at least in part to her own experience as a German-Jewish exile and an outsider, but also allowed her a remarkable insight into their inner lives, in which she revealed herself to be above all an artist ‘of vision and compassion’.39

Fig 37 Eva Frankfurther Tightrope Walker Private Collection

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Fig 38 Eva Frankfurther Self-portrait in Red Dress Private Collection

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Josef Herman (1911–2000)

Fig 39 Jorge Lewinski Josef Herman, 1964 Private Collection

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IN FOCUS

Josef Herman Agi Katz The image is reminiscent of a stained glass window with its bold outlines and brilliant colours. The central figure is the miner – angular arms, outsized shoulders, eyes deep set and small, accustomed to focusing on the black coal seam; the nose flat and angular. The figure is positioned in front of a mine in Ystradgynlais and its fairytale-like houses. There is no attempt at creating an idealised figure – yet, we know, he is a hero.

Negotiating between observation and geometrical simplification is typical of Herman’s style in the early 1950s, developed through repetition and ‘a condensation’ of thousands of observations. This is how the miner evolved as an image of monumentality – almost sculptural. In his mural at the Festival of Britain in 1951, the miners are archetypes rather than individuals, all the more powerful as a result.

These monuments to heroes of labour were something that attracted Herman from his early years. His immediate surroundings, the poverty-stricken childhood in Warsaw, where his father was a cobbler, introduced him to hardship.

Later on, still in Poland, with other members of the ‘Phrygian Bonnet’, an avant-garde, left-wing group of young artists, he pursued the subject of workers, going to the Carpathian Mountains to draw and paint peasants at their tasks.

Throughout his career he concentrated on the eternal rhythm of labour, from grape-pickers in France and stone-breakers at Mexican quarries, to fishermen in Scotland, Suffolk and the Mediterranean.

Ystradgynlais, a small mining town, supplied him with the artistic material he needed; after living in Glasgow for over three years from 1940 onwards, he felt isolated. When

visiting Wales for the first time in 1944, he was arrested by the vision of labourers emerging from the mines. He was immediately accepted by the mining community which sensed his deep-felt empathy for them. It was ‘Reality beyond realism’. He lived there for 11 years.

He worked from memory, having repeatedly drawn the subject from life.

It was the process of digesting the image, eliminating the inessentials and distilling the essence, that led to simplicity and solemnity. This was further enhanced by his knowledge of the African tribal wood figures that he collected from 1946 onwards, a subject on which he wrote a book.

Among the artists he admired was the Belgian Permeke whose paintings featured ‘monumental forms imbued with a deep humanity’. Herman always sought the guidance of Bruegel too, ‘the peasant Bruegel – though he was not so much a peasant but rather a highly erudite man – for whom the peasant represented a gateway to humanity’. He adored the work of Rouault – for the colours and composition and its affinity with stained glass. Equally important to him, because of his commitment to art, was Munch, who said: ‘I will paint a series of pictures before which people will bare their heads as though in church’. Herman shared these sentiments: Looking at pictures is serious business; it is a strenuous activity […]

The picture that has chosen you, demands isolation of the spirit.

Miner in Landscape encapsulates everything Herman was about. As he said: ‘The heroic is a form but also a metaphor’.

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Cat 38 Josef Herman Miner in Landscape, 1952 Boundary Gallery

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As Though From Nowhere: Josef Herman David Herman The 1950s were a breakthrough decade for my father, Josef Herman (1911–2000). Starting with his mural of coal miners for the Festival of Britain in 1951 (figs. 43 and 44), he went on to reach the height of his career over the next decade and a half. He had joint exhibitions with Henry Moore and L S Lowry and in 1956 had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (cat. 49). The influential art critic John Berger (cat. 48) admired his work and, most important of all, he found his voice as an artist after a crucial decade of experimenting with pen and ink drawings, pastels and later oil painting.

None of this was conceivable when Herman arrived in Liverpool in 1940, a Jewish refugee who had managed to escape from France after the Nazi invasion. He arrived in Britain penniless, unable to speak English and a complete artistic outsider. Born in Warsaw in 1911, he was the son of an illiterate Jewish cobbler. He never went to university and had little in the way of formal education. However, he always had a voracious appetite for reading and in later years returned again and again to the classics of modern European and Yiddish literature, the Marxist canon and, perhaps above all, the writings and letters of his favourite artists, perhaps especially van Gogh and Delacroix.

That generation of Jewish refugees, especially those from central and eastern Europe, divided into those who were by temperament insiders (for example, G R Elton and Isaiah Berlin) and those who were permanent outsiders. Herman was in every sense an outsider: he was from eastern Europe, passionately involved with Jewish culture and soaked in Yiddish writing, politically on the Left. Above all, his artistic formation could hardly have been more remote from the central British traditions. His pantheon of favourite artists included Rembrandt, Goya, Munch, Rouault, Belgian Expressionists like Permeke and de Smet and the great tradition of European realists who painted the working poor, from Courbet, Millet and van Gogh to Meunier, Frans Masereel and Käthe Kollwitz (fig. 26) and, later, the great

Fig 40 Josef Herman Musicians (from A Memory of Memories), c. 1940–43 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

Mexican mural painters, especially Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros. This is a world away from Alfred Munnings or Landseer. Though Herman moved in the early 1960s near to Sudbury, Gainsborough’s home town located in Constable’s beloved Stour Valley, neither artist was among his favourite.

The only British artists he was close to were all outsiders: Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg and European refugees such as Martin Bloch, Henryk Gotlib and Ludwig Meidner. You only had to hear him pronounce the name ‘Bomberg’, and you knew you were in a different world from that of Kenneth Clark.

Herman started out as an artist in pre-war Warsaw. He joined a group of left-wing artists called the Phrygian Bonnet (the red caps worn by French revolutionaries). 1930s Poland was not a safe place for a socialist Jewish artist and in 1938 he left for Brussels. The choice is significant. Many of his fellow east-European artists chose Paris: Mané-Katz, Soutine and, of course, Chagall. Herman was never drawn to what

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Fig 41 Josef Herman Refugees, c. 1941 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

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Delacroix called ‘le charme et le goût’ of modern French art. The French artists who mattered to him were the then unfashionable mid-19th century trio Delacroix, Courbet and Millet, as well as Degas and Rodin, of course. Rouault and Gromaire were the only French 20th-century artists whose work he collected.

The Low Countries were very different. Amsterdam was ‘the city I love most’. Rembrandt was a great influence, perhaps especially on his drawing: ‘Angst and sadness were innate in him, and he painted the reality of his emotions’.

‘How crucially important eyes and hands are to Rembrandt’, Herman told the critic Andrew Lambirth – Rembrandt, but also ‘Peasant’ Bruegel of ‘the big peasants and the low farms and the dark skies of Flanders’. Then he encountered the Belgian Expressionists. He found in them ‘a moral depth, and this is more than painting for aesthetic ends, more than painting just for taste and for pleasure’.

Herman left Belgium for France and then in 1940 escaped to Britain. He didn’t even have a suitcase (cat. 41).

But the artistic baggage he brought with him was more enduring: east-European Jewishness, Socialism and his European artistic canon – hardly helpful calling cards in wartime Britain.

Herman settled in Glasgow where he met two Jews: the Estonian-born sculptor Benno Schotz, who became a lifelong friend, and Jankel Adler. It is worth noting that like all his artist-friends in these crucial years, they were 20 or 30 years older. During his years in Glasgow (1940–44), his imagination returned to the Jewish world of his childhood, a distinctive mix of observation and fantasy, which he pictured in a series of drawings that he called Memory of Memories.

The subjects were the stories of Sholem Aleichem and Peretz, peddlers, street musicians (fig. 40) and rabbis; Jews fleeing pogroms. He painted Sabbatai Zvi, Purim Players and in two portraits his father and his family. He was still in Glasgow when he learned that his entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. Adler gave him a painting, Two Orphans. For the rest of his life, it had pride of place wherever Herman lived, along with a menorah given to him by Mané-Katz and a Jewish prayer-shawl also given to him by Adler. Herman was not obviously a Jewish artist in the way that Chagall was but these three objects were at the centre of his life.

Not immediately, but over a very short period of time, he stopped painting and drawing Jewish subjects. They became

impossible. In 1944 he moved to Wales and completely reinvented himself as an artist. There is an element of the mythical about his account of how he came to Ystradgynlais, the small mining village where he lived on and off for over a decade, from 1944–55. He often quoted the story of his first sighting of the miners, one summer evening: Then, unexpectedly, as though from nowhere, a group of miners stepped onto the bridge. For a split second their heads appeared against the full body of the sun, as against a yellow disc – the whole image was not unlike an icon depicting the saints with their haloes. With the light around them, the silhouettes of the miners were almost black. […] The magnificence of this scene overwhelmed me.1

What is immediately striking about this passage is the exhilaration. Here, you feel, is an artist who has found his subject (working men, and, in particular, coal miners) and a refugee who has found a place where he belongs, a close-knit working-class community that brought back memories of the Warsaw of his childhood.

There is, however, something else going on in this passage: that word ‘nowhere’; that intense image of the sun (cat. 40), so similar to his early descriptions of Warsaw. In his memoirs, the chapter on his childhood is called ‘The Years of the Sun’. An early passage reads: ‘There it is: my street, the street of my childhood. The whole of it in a blaze of light. A tremendous sun, incredibly bright and sharply contoured – a clear circle of fire.’2 What is the relationship between that word ‘nowhere’ and this image of brilliant gold? Can one argue that it is not the miners who have come ‘as though from nowhere’ but Herman himself? From the nowhere of Poland, far away, but also from a Warsaw which no longer existed but had been burnt to ash. There are two kinds of exile: those like Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann who could return to their homeland and those like Herman, for whom no home existed any longer.

The gold sun is perhaps a way of saying this was a new home of some kind, where this ‘Strange Son of the Valley’ could belong. Or, maybe, it stands for a sense that there was something here that could keep at bay an inner darkness with which he fought all his life and which overwhelmed him, almost totally, after the death of his daughter Sara, in the mid-1960s. His work was never the same again after that

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Cat 39 Josef Herman Peasant Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

Fig 42 Josef Herman Burgundian Peasants Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

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Fig 43 Josef Herman Miners, 1951 City and County of Swansea: Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Collection

Fig 44 Josef Herman Miners (Study for Festival of Britain Mural), 1950 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

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Cat 40 Josef Herman Miners Southampton City Art Gallery

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period, and for Herman, the years of achievement and of recognition were from 1944–65.

Finally, there is something else in that image. What Herman discovered in Wales was a distinctive palette – gold copper-red, orange, bright cobalt blue (cat. 42) – and, above all, a golden sunset which recurs throughout his best paintings. There are two things which are striking about this image of sunset: the first is the colour; the second is the subject.

Herman often spoke of his ‘family tree’ as an artist. One branch was that group of artists whose subject was the working man and woman. Another branch was those who taught him most about colour: Degas, Rouault, the Belgian Expressionists and – think of that scene of the saints with their haloes – the icon painters of Byzantium. As he experimented with pastels, he immersed himself in Degas. ‘He wanted an exactness of texture and a richness of colour that painters hitherto had got from oil paintings and thought impossible to obtain from pastels,’ Herman writes in Related Twilights:3 [H]e prepared his papers with water-colour, gouache, even with thick but lean oil paint; [...] These various methods gave him results no other pastel painter had achieved. [...] It seemed to me to be possible to get from each colour a richness sin itself, independent of its neighbouring colours. Thus I used Degas’ method of underpainting in a different way: for instance, for a full-blooded cadmium red I would underpaint with a burnt sienna, and for a vermilion, with a yellow. In this way I could get from pastel a red as luminous as a flame4

Then Herman moved to oil painting. This time, the influences were different: Rouault, Gromaire and the Belgian Expressionists he had encountered in the late 1930s, especially Permeke; and, again, and perhaps most surprisingly, the Byzantine icon painters. In his Journals, he writes in September 1948: Have recently been steered by a new passion – a love for icon painters. Their styles, their inventions are characterised by an extraordinary vigour – a surprising grandeur in the smallest works, theirs is altogether a model of expressionistic art of all times. Their colours are often a triumph of limited schemes. With but basic reference to the phenomenal world, they succeed pretty well in establishing pathos, drama and mortal anguish.5

Several things came together in Wales to form this new artistic voice, so different from what had preceded it. First, a new subject: he moved from the specific to the universal, from the local (Polish Jews so recognisable and unmistakable in the Glasgow drawings) to a universal subject, working men and women with no distinguishing features. In 1998, two years before he died, Herman was asked: ‘You’re famous for your paintings of Welsh miners. What do they represent to you?’ He answered: ‘A human presence – a general humanity.’6 From the mid-1940s on, whether he painted miners, peasants in Mexico or farm workers in Burgundy (see cat. 39 and fig. 42), they are all recognisably the same family.

Edwin Mullins described it best: ‘the shapeless, block-like nose, the empty eyes, the heavy jut of the chin. And the meaty hands, the slump of the shoulders, the clog-like feet: no detail is fully realistic’.7 What brings these figures to life, though, is the radiant, glowing palette of colours against which they stand. This, too, was completely new. He spent years finding a technique that would allow him to reproduce that moment on that summer’s day in 1944. Nothing in his work before Wales prepares us for these colours.

In Wales he found his subject and he found the colours and the techniques that enabled him to paint the sunsets and twilight skies he wanted. But why twilight? Again and again, Herman’s monumental figures – men resting after a day’s work, women talking on a street corner, a mother and child – are painted against the setting sun, that glowing copper-red, a deep gold. He made his name painting working men, and yet his best-known paintings are not of men at work, but of men resting after the day’s work is done (cat. 42).

This isn’t simply an odd paradox. Twilight always fascinated him. It is partly the appeal of the sky’s colours, but just as important is the mood and atmosphere (key words for him), the sense of introspection and contemplation. It is the nearest we get to a sense of the interiority of these monumental, brooding figures. They don’t smile, they don’t express tenderness or excitement, or indeed any emotion.

There is a sense of weariness and exhaustion at the end of the day, but more than that there is a sense of absorption, of withdrawing within themselves.

The contrast with the Glasgow drawings is revealing. They are about contact: someone telling a story, or playing music together, women gossiping. There is a sense of a social world.

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Fig 45 Josef Herman Miners Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

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Cat 41 Josef Herman In the Canteen, 1954 Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Collections

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The figures in Wales are intensely solitary, withdrawn from the world. What seem to be his most social works are, in fact, deeply private and could only have been painted by someone who felt an outsider, even in his beloved Ystradgynlais.

Herman came to Wales with his first wife, Catriona Macleod. After the break-up of their marriage he returned to London where he soon met his second wife, Nini Ettlinger, with whom he lived, with one short break, for the rest of his life.

His life after Glasgow was a strange mix of continuity and discontinuity. In the late 1940s and 1950s he found his artistic voice. His distinctive subject, palette and the mood of twilight continued throughout that period. He also found his daily routine as an artist and with only a few later additions, his canon was firmly fixed. He remained outside the artistic establishment and his closest friends were Jewish (often refugees), mainly artists, writers and intellectuals. He stayed with his dealers, Roland, Browse and Delbanco on Cork Street, for 30 years.

But there were discontinuities too. He moved from Glasgow to South Wales to London to Suffolk and back to London, where he lived in his West Kensington studio house from 1972. More importantly, he fell out of fashion. His work had struck a chord in postwar Britain. His humanism and Left-leaning politics together with his figurative style all fitted in the 1950s. In the 1960s, however, figurative art fell out of fashion. There was always something old-fashioned about his artistic tradition – he seemed more at home in the long

19th century than the late 20th – and his work didn’t seem to belong to the new British art of the late 1960s and 1970s or, indeed, to a new Britain which had no place for coal miners or an industrial working class. There was, however, a revival of interest in his later years. In 1980 there was a retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre. The following year he was awarded an OBE. In 1990 he became a Royal Academician and the Tate Gallery celebrated his 80th birthday with a small exhibition. In 1998 there were major exhibitions in London, at the Boundary Gallery and at Flowers East. He died in 2000. A Welsh miners’ choir sang at his memorial service.

Herman’s career tells us some interesting things about British culture in the 1950s. It was open to refugees who had a huge impact on almost every aspect of postwar Britain. It was less London-centric than today. An artist could make their reputation in Glasgow and south Wales. Despite a succession of Conservative governments, it had a vibrant left-wing culture, from the miners Herman painted to CND and Aldermaston, the subject of one of his best paintings, to the New Statesman, then widely read, where John Berger reviewed his work. And it was much closer to the 19th century than we are today. Herman’s figures belong to the same family as those of Millet and Courbet in the mid-19th century and to those of Kollwitz and Permeke in the 1920s.

The miners, the men and women working in the fields, the homes they return to at the end of their working day, all seem to belong to a vanished world, just as surely as the Jewish subjects in Memory of Memories.

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Cat 42 Josef Herman Miner Returning Home, 1957 Flowers Gallery

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L S Lowry (1887–1976)

Fig 46 Ida Kar L. S. Lowry, 1954 National Portrait Gallery, London

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IN FOCUS

L S Lowry Andrew Kalman L S Lowry’s Figures in a Street (1960) exemplifies a shift in the artist’s work that in kind is representative of a changing British society. Simultaneously, the picture reflects a continuation of Lowry’s passion for realising the life and times of his native Manchester.

Before and during the Second World War, Lowry’s subject-matter illustrated the hardships and strife of postindustrial (northern) Britain; existential images that mirrored the artist’s own frustrations, working during the day as a rent collector, painting at night, while also caring for his ailing parents. Works such as The Eviction (1924), Doctor’s Surgery (1936), The Funeral, A Sudden Illness (1920), The Fire and many more, all painted in a darker palette and with a thicker, more heavily layered paint surface, emphasise the travails of many of the artist’s fellow Mancunians. This is after all a society still coming to terms with near bankruptcy following the end of the First World War: a nascent but not fully enfranchised and restless Labour Movement; a fading Empire; and an embryonic ‘financial system’ that had just experienced a calamitous collapse, wreaking devastating economic instability and panic. This too is a country without the safety net of an NHS or welfare – a class-ridden society, unsure whether it had truly emerged from nineteenthcentury Victorian Britain.

Lowry, although not in a parasitic way – far from it in fact, he was quite altruistic – thrived on such desperation, or at least did so in his body of work. Much of his painted imagery took place in the glare of the public gaze: witnessed by many but recorded only by one – Lowry. The clamour and brouhaha of a fight, an accident, an arrest or any such commotion, drew a crowd of any onlookers who cared to

take notice, just as a normal, soot-saturated Manchester day was chatted about and perhaps then quickly ignored. Pre-War and in the early 1940s, this was Lowry’s visual palette – one he committed to canvas with the honesty of a documentary cameraman: a genuine social historian.

By 1960, the year Figures in a Street was painted, much had changed in society and so too for the artist.

Lowry, retired from work, his parents deceased, buoyed by art market success and growing popular acclaim, was rejuvenated. Although still forgoing many accoutrements of postwar ‘modernity’ – television, the telephone, a motor car (Lowry preferred to take taxis to his favourite destinations, a bit like me) – the ageing painter (he was 73 when he completed this picture) adopted a lighter feel, a brighter, broader range of colours, gaiety even. He still painted great and complex scenes of public record including Good Friday, Daisy Nook (1946), Going to the Match (1953) and The Queen’s Coronation (1953), but these were joyous, jubilant pictures, anticipating the nation’s increasingly expectant hope for a more stable, healthier and wealthier future.

Stylistically, Lowry’s work also changed after 1945. As in Figures in a Street, it became less rigid, more informal – the figures in this picture are almost caricatures, satires of his fellow citizens, yet still, in their own way, illustrative of the people and the city that surrounded him – faster, changing more quickly, less rooted.

Lowry’s greatest skill – one that lasted throughout his career and his importance as an artist, was as an independent and non-judgemental observer of the life and times in which he lived. Lowry didn’t so much refigure the 50s, it was just that the 50s refigured him.

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Cat 43 L. S. Lowry, R. A. Figures in a Street, 1960 Lent by the Royal Academy of Arts, London

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Going Deeper into Life: L S Lowry Claire H Stewart Throughout his life, Lowry travelled the length and breadth of the British Isles. From Thurso in the north of Scotland to Cornwall, he recorded the people and places which attracted his interest. Nonetheless, Lowry’s art remains inextricably linked in people’s minds with the industrial landscapes and people of Salford and Manchester.

This subject matter did not initially appeal to him. For years, indeed, he had disliked the area in which he lived.

Born in Trafford in Manchester, Lowry had spent most of his childhood in the middle-class suburb of Victoria Park.

The rent (for what was one of the smallest properties on the edges of this gated community) stretched the family’s resources to the limit and in 1909 they were forced to move to Pendlebury, an industrial, working class area between Manchester and Bolton. His mother hated it there and the circumstances which caused the family to move did nothing to endear the area to her son. At first Lowry chose to paint the surrounding countryside, which was within walking distance, rather than the streets and mills on his doorstep. He recounted several different versions of how this landscape first came to be the focus of his inspiration but all of them centred on a sudden realisation that it held artistic possibilities unexplored by other artists. Throughout the 1920s, probably his most prolific decade, he was experimenting with the best means of representing industrial scenes. An early pastel, The Lodging House (1921) (fig. 47), which he recalled as being the first picture he ever sold, shares the darker tones of some of his early oil paintings on this new theme, and his figures are less assured at this stage. By 1930 however he had completed what he considered to be his most characteristic mill scene, Coming from the Mill (1930) (fig. 50), a classic composition showing workers streaming out of the factory gates at the end of the day, dominated by the towering forms of the mill buildings around them.

Throughout these years Lowry attended life drawing classes in the evenings, first at Manchester School of Art and then at Salford School of Art. By his own admission

he found that when he drew from the life model his figures looked realistic, but when he drew them from imagination they looked more like automata. Finally he made a conscious decision which resulted in the characteristic, unique and confident figure style now associated with his work: ‘I wanted to paint myself into what absorbed me. Natural figures would have broken the spell of it, so I made them half unreal […] had I drawn them as they are it would not have looked like a vision’.1 A second important decision he made in the 1920s was to adopt a white ground for his paintings. Prompted by the critical comments of his tutor at Salford, Bernard Taylor (also art critic for the Manchester Guardian), who told him that his paintings were far too dark, Lowry went to the opposite extreme and began his next pictures with a layer of flake white over the whole canvas. When Taylor approved, Lowry decided to continue with this technique and this white ground became the distinctive undercurrent beneath all of his paintings. Of all the artists represented in this exhibition, Lowry’s palette was perhaps the most consistently restrained, limited to only five colours – yellow ochre, vermilion and Prussian blue, alongside ivory black and flake white. These muted shades provided an expressive and subtle range of colours, with vermilion often providing local accents in hats, bags and other items of clothing to create a unifying rhythm across the disparate individuals in his crowd scenes.

A third key factor in the development of Lowry’s subject matter was his knowledge of the people and the places he painted. Some of his early pictures, the ‘incident’ paintings, have a dramatic, sometimes tragic, event at their heart; a house move which is actually an eviction or an accident which is in fact a suicide. These were scenes with which Lowry was familiar, through local news stories or at first hand. Since 1910 he had worked as a rent collector and clerk for the Pall Mall Property Company and was to remain with them until his retirement in 1952. Collecting rents in various working class areas of Manchester and Salford gave him an

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Fig 47 L. S. Lowry The Lodging House, 1921 The Lowry Collection, Salford

intimate knowledge of the streets on his rounds, the people who lived there and how they lived their lives.

Lowry claimed that he was no social commentator – ‘Don’t you start thinking I was trying to put over some message [...] I just painted what I saw’2 – and when pushed, declared himself politically a Conservative. Although his family had moved down in the world, and the tenants he visited were little different to some of his near neighbours in Pendlebury, he was not one of them. He went into their

houses (or glimpsed the interiors from the doorstep), he knew when they had financial difficulties, where they worked and how they spent their time, but all this was observed from a slight distance.

As an observer, Lowry drew constantly while walking around the back streets of Manchester, Salford and other towns he chose to explore. These sketches, sometimes little more than a few scribbled lines, were made on the backs of torn envelopes, private-view invitation cards or bank statements – whatever happened to be in his pocket at the time. In his finished compositions a sense of detachment and distance from his subject matter is often implicit.

Frequently there is an actual or suggested barrier between the viewer and the scene observed, subtly emphasising the distance between the two. A fence, some gate posts or even simply an elevated viewpoint achieve this in both his more topographical drawings and his imagined scenes. Peel Park in Salford for example, the city’s largest green space, was a subject he returned to frequently. Salford School of Art was based in the Royal Technical College which overlooked the park and afforded a high viewpoint which appealed to Lowry.

In Band Stand, Peel Park, Salford (1925) (fig. 49), he shows the concentric circles of observers, dancers and the band itself with affection and humour (the miniscule bandmaster flinging his arms in the air energetically as he conducts) but they remain at a distance, below him and further separated from him by the rows of greenhouses in the foreground.

Lowry’s affection for the places and the people in his work is often clear and he depicts them sympathetically. Like Joan Eardley he often included children in his compositions but, at this date especially, they are rarely the subject of individual portraits. More often they appear as part of a larger crowd or as a group playing in the street, such as in Houses in Broughton (1937) (fig. 48). Their characters may be generalised but Lowry did not intend them to represent a romanticised vision of childhood. He was fully aware of the likely reality of their lives commenting: ‘Poor little things, Refiguring the 50s 123

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Fig 48 L. S. Lowry Houses in Broughton, 1937 The Lowry Collection, Salford

they don’t know what they have to go through’.3 Equally, though there is often humour in his work, he did not intend his vision of the industrial landscape to be one of romantic nostalgia. He was quite clear that ‘[…] the thing about painting is there should be no sentiment. No sentiment’.4 The figures that populate his landscapes are often shown at their leisure, crowding around the sideshows at the annual Easter fair at Daisy Nook, celebrating at a street party or pausing to watch a Punch and Judy show, but they are rarely seen in the privacy of their own homes. When Lowry does show a domestic interior it is often to hint at hardship and

dysfunction. Titles such as Discord (1943) make this explicit, though the exact nature of the problem is never specified.

Lowry frequently leaves a cloud of ambiguity over the causes and results of the incidents he depicts. Similarly (and in contrast to Josef Herman), Lowry never shows his characters at work. There are no interior views of the mills, only the coming and going of workers to and from the buildings at the start and end of each shift.

Lowry and Herman’s careers interlink to a degree. Both were represented by Alex Reid & Lefevre Ltd, the gallery which played a key role in Lowry’s career, offering him his

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Fig 50 L. S. Lowry Coming from the Mill, 1930 The Lowry Collection, Salford

Fig 49 L. S. Lowry Band Stand, Peel Park, Salford, 1925 The Lowry Collection, Salford

first solo London exhibition in 1939. Lowry was by that time in his early 50s and although he had been exhibiting widely his works rarely sold. On this occasion the exhibition was a success and sales were good. Only a few months later, however, Lowry’s mother died, and her loss had a profound effect on him. With the outbreak of the Second World War, his career as well as his personal life suffered as Lefevre suspended plans for any follow-up exhibitions. It was 1943 before he exhibited there again, in a joint exhibition with Herman. Herman showed 25 works, Lowry 31, including Rival Candidate (1942), After a Fire (1933, later known as

After the Fire) and Discord (1943). Hearing that his own work was selling while Herman’s was not, Lowry continued what had by that time become a habit of supporting other artists and purchased examples of Herman’s work himself.

Having waited until the mid-1940s before seeing a small profit from sales of his own pictures, Lowry was well aware of how important a sale was, both financially and as a boost to an artist’s confidence. In her catalogue essay for their joint exhibition at Wakefield City Art Gallery in 1955, Helen Knapp, the Gallery’s Director, commented that it would be ‘difficult to find two artists more dissimilar in their vision’ Refiguring the 50s 125

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Cat 44 L. S. Lowry Portrait of a Young Man, 1955 The Frank Cohen Collection

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Cat 45 L. S. Lowry Portrait of Ann, 1957 The Lowry Collection, Salford

Cat 46 L. S. Lowry Group of People, 1959 The Lowry Collection, Salford

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Fig 51 L. S. Lowry Man Lying on a Wall, 1957 The Lowry Collection, Salford

though they displayed ‘a common spirit’ in their observation of the industrial scene.5 Though they shared common interests and both of them, independently, encouraged Sheila Fell, there is little evidence to suggest that on a personal level they were more than acquaintances.

This was in marked contrast to Lowry’s relationship with Fell, whom he met in the same year as the Wakefield exhibition took place. Having purchased work from her first exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery, he asked to meet the artist and at that first meeting offered (with the proviso that her parents approved) to provide her with some financial assistance until her career was established. An enduring friendship began. Lowry made regular visits with Fell to her parents’ home in Aspatria, purchased further examples of her work and frequently recommended her in conversations with gallery owners and others, one result of which was that she exhibited at the Stone Gallery in Newcastle, run by Lowry’s friends Micky and Tilly Marshall.

Lowry had always been a frequent visitor to London and together he and Fell visited the theatre or attended concerts.

Her character (‘Shy and quiet-spoken, she is often withdrawn […] the telephone and the doorbell disconnected […] playing Mozart at the upright piano, not dealing with bills or correspondence’6) has echoes of Lowry’s own habits

and temperament – listening to Bellini and Donizetti while painting and famously throwing all his mail, including uncashed cheques, into a forgotten heap in a bowl on his living room table. He commented in a 1968 television documentary: ‘If you asked me seriously what artist did I like best of artists painting today, I would say Sheila Fell […] I think she’s a very sincere artist’,7and of Lowry, after his death, she wrote: ‘Without the friendship of LS Lowry, my life would have been infinitely poorer […] My admiration of his work was, and is, enormous […] he had great shrewdness and understanding. In short, he was unique’.8 Although Fell described with amusement how Lowry could not resist drawing an industrial scene, even when they were both working under the shadow of Skiddaw in Cumbria, landscape had in fact always been a major subject in his work. His empty, lonely views of land and sea are among the most evocative and enigmatic of his paintings, for instance A Landmark (1936) and Seascape (1952). Although (like his industrial views) these scenes are imagined, their starting point was often the Cumbrian hills, and despite the fact that Lowry is still best known for those industrial views, the sea was probably his most constant subject matter. His earliest drawings were of yachts off the coasts of Lytham St Annes and north Wales, where family holidays were

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spent, and it was a subject he returned to repeatedly later in life when he spent considerable time in the north east of England, in and around Sunderland, where he could watch the sea from his hotel room.

By the 1950s Lowry had tired of painting the industrial scene, though he was never quite able to abandon the subject completely. A trip to the mining valleys of south Wales with Monty Bloom, a friend and major collector of Lowry’s work, refreshed his interest and led to several major, large scale works including Bargoed (1965) and Hillside in Wales (1962), but his preferred subjects at this time left viewers (including sometimes his dealers) baffled and wanting more mill scenes.

Lowry was now concentrating more on individual figures and small groups (see Figures in a Street, cat. 43), singled out from the crowd and set against a plain white background. Even in his earliest work his humour had often expressed itself as caricature and paintings such as Man Lying on a Wall (1957) (fig. 51) – derived from an incident he observed from a bus – appealed to his sense of the absurd. In his studies of downand-outs however, people who struggled with what Lowry called ‘the battle of life’, his representations move towards the grotesque (see Woman with Shopping Bag, cat. 16), leaving any traces of sentiment which may have lingered far behind.

These are powerful images of people at the margins of society, individuals Lowry had often engaged in conversation in Manchester city centre. Although he claimed sympathy with them (‘I feel more strongly about these people than I ever did about the industrial scene […] There but for the grace of God go I.’)9 at times his depictions of them are ambiguous.

One of the most challenging examples for today’s viewers is The Cripples (1949) (fig. 52). On one level it shows the results of social deprivation and post-war trauma, but there is also perhaps an element of cruel humour in his observations.

Whether Lowry pioneered the urban landscape of Manchester can be debated (his tutor at Manchester School of Art – French artist Adolphe Valette – painted views of the city and its canals before him) but Lowry pursued its possibilities with an unrivalled consistency. His subject matter is broad – from landscape to portraiture and seascapes – and his figures can crowd his compositions or simply be an implied presence in a lonely landscape, but at the heart of all his work is a fascination with human beings, our characters and foibles, our weaknesses and strengths.

Cat 47 L. S. Lowry The Assignation, 1960 Mason Owen Collection

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Fig 52 L. S. Lowry The Cripples, 1949 The Lowry Collection, Salford

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Timeline with selected exhibitions 1887

1 November

Laurence Stephen Lowry is born in Stretford, Lancashire to middle-class parents Robert Lowry, an estate agent, and his wife Elizabeth

1909

Lowry’s family move to Pendlebury; he begins part-time art classes at Salford School of Art

1910

Lowry starts working as a rent collector and clerk for Pall Mall Property Company, continuing until his retirement in 1952

1911

1914

3 January

Josef Herman is born in Warsaw, Poland to working-class parents, David Herman, a cobbler, and his wife Sarah Malkah

22 June

Coronation of George V

28 July

First World War begins

1915

Lowry attends life-drawing classes at Salford School of Art

1918

Lowry begins life classes at the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts; his work is exhibited there the following year 11 November

First World War ends

1919

The Annual Manchester City Gallery features three paintings

by Lowry

1920s

Prompted by his Salford tutor, Bernard Taylor, Lowry adopts a white ground for his paintings

1921

18 May

Joan Eardley is born in Warnham, Sussex to an English father, Captain William Eardley, and a Scottish mother, Irene Lowry’s first public exhibition; no works are sold but he attracts local press attention

1926

Lowry’s An Accident (1926) is bought by the Manchester City Art Gallery – his first publicly acquired work May

The Trade Union Congress calls a general strike in reaction to the worsening conditions for miners

1928

Lowry leaves art school The Wall Street Crash is followed by the onset of the Great Depression

1929

1930

10 February

Eardley’s father, who suffers from shell shock, commits suicide Eva Frankfurther is born in Dahlem, Berlin into a cultured and assimilated, middle-class Jewish family. Her father, Paul, is a business man and amateur musician; her mother, Henriette, an economics graduate Herman enrols at Warsaw School of Art and Decoration, leaving after 18 months and working initially as a freelance graphic artist

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1931

20 July

Sheila Fell is born in Aspatria, West Cumberland to workingclass parents; her father, John, is a miner; her mother, Ann, a seamstress Eva Frankfurther’s mother dies from cancer

1932 1933

Herman’s first exhibition in Warsaw at gallery of his dealer, Koterba January

Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor in Germany

1934

Herman is a founding member of the Warsaw-based group of artists ‘The Phrygian Bonnet’ Lowry is elected to the Royal Society of British Artists and Manchester Academy Eva Frankfurther’s father remarries

1935

September

Nuremberg Laws are enforced in Germany which leads to wave of forced emigration

1938

9–10 November

A number of coordinated attacks against Jewish homes and businesses, known as Kristallnacht, take place in Germany and Austria Herman leaves Poland for Belgium; he never sees his family or homeland again

1939

April

1 September

Eva Frankfurther and her siblings are sent on alone to England and housed in a school in Haslemere, Surrey, set up by refugees for refugee children Germany invades Poland Eva Frankfurther’s parents flee for England on one of the final aeroplanes to leave Germany

3 September

Britain and France declare war on Germany Herman exhibitions in Brussels and Namur Lowry’s first solo London exhibition, Paintings of the Midlands at Alex Reid & Lefevre gallery; his mother dies, which has a profound effect on him; during the war he works as a fire watcher

2 December

First arrival of 200 Jewish refugee children in Harwich as part of the Refugee Children’s Movement (RCM)

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1940

June

Herman flees through France to La Rochelle following the Nazi invasion of Belgium; he sails to England, arriving in Liverpool and from there is sent to the Polish consulate in Glasgow and settles in the city. He produces his ‘Memory of Memory’ series commemorating the lost Warsaw of his youth Eardley is accepted on the four-year diploma course in drawing and painting at the Glasgow School of Art; during this period she meets Herman

1941

Eva Frankfurther and her sister, Beate, are evacuated to Hertfordshire Solo exhibition, Paintings and Drawings by Laurence S Lowry, Art Gallery, Salford Herman’s first exhibition in Glasgow at James Connell & Sons

1942

Through the Red Cross, Herman hears news that his entire family has been killed; following exhibition at Aitken Dott & Son, Edinburgh; assists Benno Schotz in organising Jewish Art Exhibition at Glasgow Jewish Institute (Dec–Jan 1943) Lowry is appointed an official war artist Eardley wins the Guthrie prize for her one and only self-portrait

1943

February – March

Herman moves to London Herman and Lowry exhibit jointly with Alex Reid and Lefevre, London; Lowry purchases some of Herman’s work

1944 1945

Herman moves to South Wales and settles in the coal mining town of Ystradgynlais 8 May

VE Day marks the end of the Second World War; thousands of ex-service personnel begin to return home Lowry is awarded an honorary Master of Arts by Manchester University

July

Clement Attlee wins a landslide victory for the Labour Party at the general election, setting in place new social reforms based on William Beveridge’s plans for a welfare state and social security

August

The Atomic age begins when America drops two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan

December 1946

British Council facilitated Picasso-Matisse exhibition opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London Herman’s first solo show, Welsh Miners, at Roland, Browse & Delbanco, Cork Street, London, leads to the first sale of his work to British public collection Frankfurther enrolls at St Martin’s School of Art aged 16

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The National Health Service is founded

1948

Herman becomes a naturalised British subject Lowry moves to Mottram, Cheshire; he is elected a member of The London Group Frankfurther spends summers 1948–50 working and travelling in the USA Fell studies (until 1950) at Carlisle School of Art and is encouraged to take up textile design Empire Windrush brings 493 (492 passengers and one stowaway) West Indian immigrants to the UK from Jamaica, the start of the socalled ‘Windrush generation’ 1949

Eardley goes travelling to Italy as part of her scholarship tour Frankfurther passes Intermediate Examination in Art and Crafts at St Martin’s

1950

Eardley’s first visit to Catterline, a remote fishing village south of Aberdeen In America, Senator Joseph McCarthy begins his witch‑hunt for Communists U.S. President Truman orders the construction of the hydrogen bomb Fell moves to London and enrolls at Saint Martin’s School of Art (until 1953), returning to Cumberland only for visits; she meets Herman during this period

1951

26 October

Winston Churchill becomes the prime minister of Britain for the second time

3 May

King George VI opens the Festival of Britain to commemorate 100 years since the Great Exhibition in 1851 Work by Lowry and Herman is included in 60 Paintings for ’51; Herman is commissioned to produce a mural of coal miners for Minerals of the Island pavilion Eardley makes long visit to the south of France Frankfurther leaves St Martin’s with National Diploma in Design (Painting) and visits Italy; on her return in the autumn she starts working at Lyons Corner House in the evenings (until 1956) in order to paint during the day

1952

The Scottish Arts Council chooses Eardley’s work for inclusion in the group shows Eight Young Contemporary British Painters and Scottish Genre Paintings 1700-1952: an Exhibition of Scenes from Everyday Life

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John Berger’s exhibition: Looking Forward: an exhibition of realist pictures by contemporary British artists at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London includes five works each by Lowry and Herman Eardley moves into her Townhead studio in Glasgow Fell’s portrait of fellow student Clifford Rowan is entered as her Diploma submission Between 1952 and 1957 Frankfurther’s work, particularly from her ‘Whitechapel Diary’, is included in group exhibitions of the East End Academy at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Bethnal Green Museum Frankfurther moves out from her family home into lodgings in Whitechapel Lowry retires from his position at Pall Mall Property Company 1953

2 June

Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II Lowry is one of a number of artists commissioned by the Ministry of Works to commemorate the coronation; Berger’s Looking Forward exhibition is reprised (in a smaller version) as a touring exhibition by the Arts Council including work

by Lowry and Herman; Herman’s Man with a Rake is on the catalogue cover Herman helps to found the Jewish Quarterly; he is elected a member of The London Group

1954

4 July

Food rationing ends in the UK after 14 years Eardley exhibits 17 paintings in An Exhibition of Paintings

by Six Young Artists: Joan Eardley, Alastair Flattely, Lewin Bassingthwaite, Abert Irvin, Patrick Symons, Jeffery Nuttall, Parson’s Gallery, London

1955

Eardley is elected an Associate Member of the Royal Scottish Academy; solo exhibition of 37 paintings at St George’s Gallery, Cork Street, London Herman has a joint exhibition with Lowry and Nehemiah Azaz at the Wakefield City Art Gallery Herman returns to Britain after travelling abroad and moves to London David Sylvester introduces Fell to Helen Lessore, owner of the Beaux Arts Gallery, Bruton Street, London, resulting in Fell’s first solo show; Lowry buys three pictures and becomes a lifelong friend

1956

The exhibition Modern Art in the United States opens at the Tate Gallery introducing Abstract Expressionism Herman retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; John Berger’s second exhibition entitled Looking Forward, subtitled An Exhibition of Realist Pictures at the South London Gallery again includes work by Lowry and Herman May

Colin Wilson’s The Outsider is published to great controversy

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Frankfurther leaves Lyons Corner House and starts working at Tate & Lyle sugar refinery in Victoria Docks, E16, as a shift-worker October– November

The Suez crisis

November– December

Herman and Frankfurther are included in Ben Uri Art Gallery’s Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists comprising 86 works by 86 artists Herman has joint exhibitions with Henry Moore and L S Lowry The Clean Air Act is passed following the great smog of 1955 in London

1957

Fell wins second prize in the Junior Section of the John Moores Painting Prize for Houses Near Number Five Pit (1955) A BBC documentary on Lowry is aired with two million viewers July

Fell is awarded Boise scholarship and travels through Europe to Greece

1958

January Frankfurther travels via Italy and Greece to live in Jerusalem for eight months August– September

The Notting Hill race riots

4–7 April

The first Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march is held shortly after the formation of group. Activists march for four days from Trafalgar Square in London to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston in Berkshire to voice their opposition to nuclear weapons A permanent Lowry Gallery is established at Salford Art Gallery Fell’s second solo exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery; begins teaching part-time at Chelsea College of Art

1959

October

Frankfurther returns to London

December

Frankfurther applies to study Social Science and Administration at the London School of Economics

January

Frankfurther commits suicide, aged 28 Eardley receives a commission for drawings of refugee children to illustrate an article in the University of Edinburgh Gazette marking World Refugee Year Fell included in Six Young Painters, an Arts Council touring exhibition with Trevor Bell, Sandra Blow, Michael Fussell, Henry Inlander and Frank Avray Wilson

1960

March

Fell’s third Beaux Arts Gallery exhibition

July

Lowry and Fell included in Arts Council’s touring group exhibition, Northern Artists

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1961

Eardley has a large one-person exhibition at the Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh comprising 55 oils and 13 pastels Lowry is awarded Doctor of Letters by the University of Manchester

1962

January

Fourth Fell Beaux Arts Gallery exhibition: work bought by Tate, Middlesbrough and Liverpool city galleries Lowry is elected a Royal Academician Solo Frankfurther exhibition at Ben Uri Art Society, London.

Publication of a small memorial volume of Frankfurther’s drawings entitled People, with an Appreciation by Mervyn Levy

1963

Eardley is elected an Academician of the Royal Scottish Academy Easter

Fell filmed for Huw Weldon’s BBC2 TV arts programme, Monitor, directed by Melvyn Bragg; accepts commission from Somerville College, Oxford to paint Dorothy Hodgkin, Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry in 1964

16 August

Eardley dies of cancer in Killearn Hospital near Glasgow, aged 42

1964

Leading critics, artists and museum directors organise A Tribute to L S Lowry held at Monks Hall Museum, Eccles, Salford, securing Lowry’s reputation as a distinguished artist; work by Fell and Herman is included Joan Eardley RSA (1921–1963) A Memorial Exhibition, Edinburgh, RSA Diploma Galleries; and Dundee Museums and Art Galleries Final Fell exhibition at Beaux Arts Gallery

1966

7 April

Frost Report broadcasts Class sketch featuring John Cleese, Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker satirising the British class system

1967

Prime Minister Harold Wilson proposes a knighthood to Lowry but he refuses it Fell becomes guest lecturer at Royal College of Art, London; receives Arts Council Purchase award; begins exhibiting at Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions (until 1980) New Paintings by Sheila Fell opens at Stone Gallery, Newcastle

1969

20 July

Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to land on the moon Further New Paintings by Sheila Fell at Stone Gallery, Newcastle

1972

Herman moves into his West Kensington studio house

1974

Fell is elected Royal Academician and sits on the RA Council

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1976

23 February

Lowry dies from pneumonia at Woods Hospital, Glossop, Derbyshire, aged 88 Fell is made Fellow of Royal Society of Artists (FRSA); contributes essay to Royal Academy exhibition catalogue L S Lowry 1886–1976

1979

Frankfurther exhibition at Clare Hall, Cambridge 15 December

1980

Fell dies, aged 48, after a fall at her London home Herman retrospective, Camden Arts Centre, London Frankfurther exhibition at Central Library, Bedford

1981

Herman awarded OBE for services to British art Frankfurther exhibition at Margaret Fisher Gallery, London A Tribute to Sheila Fell (with L S Lowry), Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria

1986

Frankfurther included in Kunst im Exil in Grossbritannien 1933– 1945, Berlin

1987

Frankfurther included in Émigré Artists, John Denham Gallery, London

1990

Southbank Centre touring exhibition of 76 Fell paintings Herman elected Honorary Senior Royal Academician and the Tate Gallery celebrates his 80th birthday with a small exhibition

1998 2000

Herman exhibitions at Boundary Gallery and Flowers East 19 February

Herman dies at his home in London, aged 89 Frankfurther included in Labour Intensive, the City Gallery, Leicester

2001

Frankfurther exhibition at Boundary Gallery, London

2005

Josef Herman Art Foundation established in Ystradgynlais

2009

Herman and Frankfurther included in Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain, c. 1933–45, at Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

2013

26 June –20 October

Tate Britain retrospective Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life

2014

14 November –22 February 2015

Refiguring the 50s: Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and L S Lowry at Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

Compiled by Katie Wilson, Ngaio Hitti, Kirsty Donald and Jenny Foot

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Notes Representing the postwar world 1 Margaret Garlake New Art, New World: British Art in Postwar Society (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 17.

2 Lord Keynes ‘The Arts Council: its policy and hopes’, The Listener, 12 July 1945.

3 Frances Donaldson The British Council: the First Fifty Years (London: Cape, 1984), p. 7.

4 Garlake, op. cit., pp. 38-39.

5 Conversation with Doig Simmonds, 7 March, 2014.

6 For Glasgow during the war, see Monica Bohm-Duchen The Art and Life of Josef Herman (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2009), pp. 59-61.

7 Quoted in Elizabeth Knowles, ed., Terry Frost (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), p. 32.

8 Ibid., p. 44.

9 James Hyman The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain during the Cold War 1945–1960, (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 4, 7-9.

10 Ibid., pp. 2-4.

11 Ibid., p. 133.

12 Ibid., p. 4. The name ‘Beaux Arts Quartet’ derived from the Beaux Arts Gallery where they exhibited.

13 Cate Haste Sheila Fell: a Passion for Paint (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2010), pp. 34–35.

14 James Hyman The Challenge of Post-war Painting: New Paths for Modernist Art in Britain 1950-1965, exh. Cat; (London: James Hyman Fine Art, 2004), p. 6.

15 Anne M Wagner, ‘Lowry, repetition and change’, in T J Clark & Anne M Wagner, eds., Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, exh. cat., (London: Tate, 2013), p. 110.

16 Ibid., p. 114.

17 David Kynaston Austerity Britain 1945-51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), reprinted 2008, p. 480.

18 Monica Bohm-Duchen ‘Eva Frankfurther’ in Beate Planskoy, ed., Eva Frankfurther 1930-1959 (London: Peter Halban, 2001), pp. 12-13. The life of West Indian immigrants, many of whom lived in Notting Hill in extreme poverty, is described in Sam Selvon The Lonely Londoners (Harlow: Longman, 1956), reprinted, London: Penguin, 2006.

Refiguring the 50s: Curatorial Introduction

8 Paintings and Drawings by L. S. Lowry and Josef Herman, Pottery by Nehemiah Azaz (Wakefield: Wakefield City Art Gallery, 1955).

9 They were also later shown together posthumously as part of the group exhibition Twentieth century painting & sculpture: L. S. Lowry, Henry Moore, Laura Knight, Alberto Morrocco, Beatrice How, Sheila Fell, Alan Lowndes, John Piper, Mary Fedden, Josef Herman, Vincent Bennett, John Bratby, Elisabeth Frink, Jack Knox, Anthony Eyton, Derek Hill, Gwen John, William Crosbie (London: John Martin Gallery, 2002) and at The London Group exhibition in Southampton, 2014.

10 It also included Julian Trevelyan, Frances MacDonald and Leonard Applebee, and fellow émigrés Martin Bloch, Peter Peri, Siegfried Charoux and Lucian Freud.

11 Herman showed (38) Tired Miner, Lent by Dr. H. Roland; (39) Mother and Child, charcoal drawing, private collection; (40) Tapping the Barrel, ink drawing, collection of Dr. H. Roland; (41) The Little Harbour, collection of Dr. H. Roland; Man with a Rake, pen and ink, lent by John Berger, esq; and Lowry (56) Family Group; (57) A Procession; (58) Portrait of a Woman;(59) The Gateway (60) Beach Scene, Lancashire, all courtesy of the Lefevre Gallery.

12 A smaller selection of works from the exhibition made by John Berger was then shown under the auspices of The Arts Council in 1953 as a touring exhibition ‘in the provincial galleries’. It included (9) Josef Herman, Tired Miner, oil 183/4 x 20 ins, Lent by Dr. H. Roland; (13) L S Lowry, A Procession, oil, 14 ½ x 20 ¼ ins, lent by the Lefevre Gallery; and (40 ) Josef Herman, Man with a Rake, pen and ink, 9 x 73/4 ins, lent by John Berger, esq.’ (none of these works was for sale).

13 Cited Tate label to Herman’s Evening, Ystradgynlais, 1948, oil on canvas, Presented by the Roland Collection 1992 Reference T06523; see also Judith Walsh’s essay in this volume for a discussion of Berger’s criticism.

14 Douglas Hall, Josef Herman National Art Library File, accessed 4.12.13.

15 It was only returned by his widow after Herman’s death (see Monica Bohm-Duchen, The Art and Life of Josef Herman (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2009), p. 49.

16 The Scottish painter and stage designer Tom Macdonald recalled her as one of ‘a small group of artists’, himself included, who came under Herman’s influence. See Bohm-Duchen, op. cit., p. 59.

17 Both artists would also be represented by the London dealers Roland, Browse & Delbanco.

18 See Cate Haste’s essay on Sheila Fell in this volume.

19 Sheila Fell, exhibition catalogue: London South Bank Centre, 1990 (and touring locations).

1 David Kynaston Austerity Britain 1945-51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007; reprinted 2008), p. 19.

20 See the essays of Cate Haste and Claire Stewart in this volume.

2 Cumberland is a historic county of North West England, which had an administrative function from the 12th until the late twentieth-century. Bordered

by Northumberland to the east, County Durham to the southeast, Westmoreland and Lancashire to the south, and Dumfriesshire in Scotland to the north, it formed an administrative county from 1889 to 1974 (excluding Carlisle from 1914) and now forms part of Cumbria.

22 Cited Monica Bohm-Duchen in Beate Planskoy, ed., Eva Frankfurther 1930-1959 (London: Peter Halban, 2001), p. 12.

3 Dominic Sandbrook Never Had It So Good (London: Little Brown, 2005; this edition, Abacus, 2013), pp. 31-32.

4 Sandbrook, op. cit., p. 34.

5 L S Lowry The Procession Passing the Queen Victoria Memorial, 1953, UK Government Art Collection.

21 See Margaret Garlake’s essay in this volume.

23 Sheila Fell, op. cit., p. 25.

24 Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists This was a group show of 86 exhibits by 86 artists. Herman showed (4) Peasant and Horse Cart; Frankfurther (42) Stateless Person. Frank Auerbach (39) also exhibited City Building Site within the same exhibition.

25 According to Lowry’s biographer, Shelley Rohde, it also caused a ‘predictable stir’ when shown at the Royal Academy’s Spring Exhibition, ‘both in the press and with a public more accustomed to works of industrial desolation from L S Lowry.

Shelley Rohde L S Lowry: A Life (London: Haus Publishing Ltd, 2007), p. 138.

6 Sandbrook, op. cit., p. 48.

26 See Cate Haste’s essay on Sheila Fell in this volume.

7 The exhibition took place at Alex Reid & Lefevre (St James’s, London, SW1) from late February to 10 March 1943, where Lowry had held his first solo exhibition in 1939. They were probably united as fellow observers of working-class life.

27 The Festival Pattern Group brought together design, science and industry by commissioning textiles, wallpaper, domestic objects and Festival exhibits based on x-ray crystallography after Dr Helen Megaw, a leading Cambridge University

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crystallographer, suggested using the surface molecular patterns revealed in x-ray crystallography. After hearing a presentation by Dorothy Hodgkin to the Society of Industrial Artists, Mark Hartland Thomas, chief industrial officer, formed the Festival Pattern Group.

28 In the late 1930s and early 1940s Hodgkin’s future husband, Thomas, taught history to unemployed miners in Cumberland. See Dictionary of National Biography: Georgina Ferry.

29 For a fuller discussion of this work see Jörg Garbrecht in this volume.

30 See Ann Steed’s essay in this volume.

31 Sheila Fell, interviewed in 1965 for her Abbot Hall, Kendal exhibition by Border-ITV news: youtube.

32 See essays by Monica Bohm-Duchen, Sarah MacDougall and David Herman, in Sarah MacDougall, ed., Josef Herman: Warsaw, Brussels, Glasgow, London (London: Ben Uri, 2011) for a discussion of the significance of this colour in Herman’s early work.

33 See Monica Bohm-Duchen, The Art and Life of Josef Herman, op. cit., p. 129.

34 Douglas Hall, Art in Exile: Polish Painters in Post-War Britain (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2008), p. 11.

35 See David Herman’s essay on Josef Herman in this volume.

17 Anonymous critic, ‘Young Artists’ Works: Grim and Brooding’ Times (6 December 1955), p. 3.

18 Quentin Bell, ‘Round the London Galleries’, Listener (1 December 1955), p. 934.

19 D. L.A. Farr, ‘Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions’, Burlington Magazine (February 1956), p. 63.

20 Eric Newton, ‘Melancholy Mountains’, Guardian (11 March 1960), p. 9.

21 Eric Newton, ‘Un-English Painting in Edinburgh’, Listener (15 May 1958), p. 805.

22 John Berger, ‘Paintings by Joseph Herman at Roland, Browse and Delbanco’, New Statesman and Nation (3 October 1953), p.375.

23 John Berger, ‘Dusk and Dawn’, New Statesman and Nation (31 March 1956), p. 303.

24 John Berger, ‘Josef Herman’, Burlington Magazine (June 1955), p. 183.

25 The full title of the 1952 exhibition was Looking Forward: British Realist Pictures’ and that of the 1956 exhibition, Looking Forward: An exhibition of realist pictures’.

For a comprehensive and compelling account of the Looking Forward exhibitions see James Hyman, The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold War 1945–1960 (London: Yale University Press, 2001).

26 Mervyn Levy, ‘The East End Academy’, Art News and Review (24 December, 1955), p. 4.

27 Mervyn Levy, ‘The East End Academy’, Times Educational Supplement (6 January, 1956).

‘Partial, passionate and political’: art criticism in the 1950s

28 Herbert Read, ‘the Art of Art Criticism’, Listener (15 May 1952), p. 797.

1 Charles Baudelaire, ‘What is the good of criticism?’, in Art in Paris: 1845–1862,Salons and other Exhibitions, Charles Baudelaire and Jonathan Mayne eds., (London: Phaidon, 1981), p. 44.

In Focus: Joan Eardley Brother and Sister

2 Herbert Read, ‘The Art of Art Criticism’, Listener (15 May 1952), p. 797.

3 John Berger contributed to all of the following journals and newspapers in the 1950s: Art News and Review, Burlington Magazine, Daily Worker, Evening Standard, Mainstream, Manchester Guardian, New Reasoner, New Statesman and Nation, Observer, Realism, Times, Tribune, Twentieth Century, Universities and Left Review, Vogue.

4 John Berger, ‘The Unrecognised’, New Statesman and Nation (7 January 7 1956) p. 11–13.

1 Quoted in exhibition catalogue, Joan Eardley R.S.A. (1921-1963): A Memorial Exhibition (Edinburgh: The Scottish Committee of the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1964), p. 9.

2 From email correspondence from member of sitters’ family, 2003, archived in artist’s docket in Aberdeen Art Gallery.

The Poetry of Place: Sheila Fell

5 Nevile Wallis, ‘At the Galleries’, Observer (3 July 1955), p. 12.

1 Sheila Fell in Ronald Goldman, ed., Breakthrough (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).

6 David Sylvester, ‘Round the London Galleries’ Listener (18 February 1954), p. 1303.

2 Cited Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), p. 28.

7 Ronald A. Lowe, President of the Students Union, Leeds College of Art, ‘Round the London Galleries’, Listener (24 February 1954), p. 349.

3 Author interview with Frank Auerbach.

8 Hugh Scrutton, ‘A Tribute to L. S. Lowry’ in the exhibition catalogue for A Tribute to L. S. Lowry’, Monks Hall Gallery, Eccles, Salford, 1964, p. 16.

4 Helen Lessore, ‘The Work of Sheila Fell,’ Sheila Fell, exh cat (London: South Bank Centre, 1990).

5 Ibid.

9 David Baxendall, ‘Patronage of Art and the Festival’, Listener (17 May 1951), p. 788.

6 Author interview Daniel McDowell.

10 John Berger, ‘L. S. Lowry at the Lefevre Gallery’, New Statesman and Nation (5 May 1951), p. 342.

8 Shelley Rohde A Private View of L S Lowry (London: Collins, 1979), pp. 177–178.

11 John Berger, ‘Four Painters’, New Statesman and Nation (17 October 1953), p. 447.

12 Alan Clutton-Brock, ‘Round the London Art Galleries’, Listener (9 October 1958), p. 570.

13 David Sylvester, ‘Abstracts Italian and English’, New Statesman and Nation (11 May 1957), p. 606.

14 David Sylvester, ‘Round the London Galleries’, Listener (17 May 1956), p. 648.

15 John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters: Lewis to Moore (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode 1956), pp. 78-91.

16 David Sylvester, ‘Round the London Galleries’, Listener (2 August 1956), p. 166,

7 Nini Herman, ed., The Journals of Josef Herman (London: Peter Halban, 2003).

9 Author interview Anna Fell.

The Lives of Others: Eva Frankfurther 1 I would like to thank the artist’s sister, Beate Planskoy, for sharing information with me and for providing access to material in the family archives, as well as kindly reading through and commenting on the text.

2 Frank Whitford, ‘Art Reviews: Paintings, Drawings and Lithographs by Eva Frankfurther’, Clare Hall, Cambridge, 1979, Cambridge Evening News, Tuesday, 27 November 1979.

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3 Her father was a talented amateur musician and composer; her mother had leanings towards the visual arts.

4 They were thus confined to an entirely Jewish environment after the Nazis began a policy of segregating and isolating Jewish children from state schools prompting the establishment of many Jewish schools.

interviewing artists for the BBC archives. He published three books on Lowry (1963, 1973 and 1975), as well as on other artists, and wrote Lowry’s original Dictionary of National Biography entry.

24 Mervyn Levy, ‘The East End Academy’, Times Educational Supplement (6 January, 1956); also cited in Levy, op. cit., p. 4.

5 Susan Einzig, Transcript of Interview by Association of Jewish Refugees, conducted

by Marian Malet.

25 Including Ludwig Meidner, Else Meidner and Henry Inlander.

6 The children were forced to pick up English quickly, soon becoming bilingual.

Although they often later spoke (and wrote) German to their parents, they never did so during the war.

27 Hackney Gazette (4.13.1953).

7 Lucie Freud had been a school friend of Eva’s mother and she and her husband, Ernst, were very helpful to the Frankfurther family in a number of ways after their arrival in London. The other inhabitants also included a Norwegian sea captain.

Paul Frankfurther remained living here for the rest of his life.

8 Monica Bohm-Duchen interview with Frank Auerbach, cited in Beate Planskoy, ed., Eva Frankfurther 1930-1959 (London: Peter Halban, 2001), op. cit., p. 11.

9 Bateson Mason cited by Mervyn Levy, People (London: Gilchrist Studios, 1962), p. 4. Bohm-Duchen believes that ‘on the evidence of the rather mannered, romantic work’ he produced, ‘it was as much the emphasis on a decorative illustrative urbanity as any formalist direction that made St Martin’s an uncongenial training ground for the young woman artist.’ (Eva Frankfurther 1930-1959, op. cit. p. 12). Nevertheless, in works like Sleeping Fishermen (Nottingham Castle Museum and Gallery), Bateson Mason shows an awareness of working people that may have resonated with Frankfurther.

10 Beate Planskoy, “Remembering Eva, my sister”, in Eva Frankfurther 1930-1959, p. 7.

11 Exhibition pamphlet: The Coffee House, 3, Northumberland Avenue, Trafalgar Square, London WC2, from 25 Jan – 23 Feb [no year given, c. 1949-51], priced 4d; private archive. Works ranged in price from lithographs at £1.1s to paintings, the most expensive of which was £15. The clientele comprised students, ‘arty types’ and Bohemians. For an account see Jack Chernin, Johburg to London: A Journey (Lulu publishing: www.lulu.com, 2007), p. 166.

12 The other exhibitors included Stella Margarshak, a friend of Sheila Fell’s (see The Coffee House, op. cit.).

13 This was not however her first trip abroad: she had already visited the United States three times, always self-funding her trips and making all the travel arrangements herself. See Sarah MacDougall, Curatorial Introduction in this volume.

14 Ibid.

15 Learning the blues and so-called ‘negro spirituals’, together with Yiddish songs and American folk songs picked up in the camp, all of which she taught to her sister on her return and they sang them together over the washing up.

16 Beate Planskoy, op. cit., p. 8.

17 Levy, op. cit, p. 5.

18 Letter from Eva Frankfurther to Vera [Lachmann], 3.4.1956 from 20 Mount Terrace, London E.1., family archive.

19 See Sam Selvon The Lonely Londoners (London: Allan Wingate, 1956; Penguin books, 2006), the classic account of West Indian postwar migration to London.

26 Frank Whitford, op. cit.

28 See also Red-haired Woman in Profile (private collection).

29 The Tablet, 12.1.57.

30 Arts and News and Reviews, 5.1.57.

31 Information from Beate Planskoy 32 Eva Frankfurther, letter to her father (in German – translated by Beate Planskoy), 17 September 1952, cited Eva Frankfurther 1930-1959, op. cit., p. 117.

33 Cited ibid., p. 55.

34 Eva Frankfurther, letter to Vera, dated 3.4.1956 from 20 Mount Terrace, London E.1., family archive.

35 Beate Planskoy in conversation with the author.

36 From Jerusalem, in February 1958 she wrote that she was leading ‘a very lazy life with just a few hours of work in the morning and the rest of the time just being social’, Eva Frankfurther, letter to her parents, February 1958, Eva Frankfurther archive.

37 See letter to Eva Lachmann, not dated, family archive.

38 The subject of the tightrope walker was also a subject much treated by one of her favourite artists, Daumier.

39 Mervyn Levy (appreciation) People (London: Gilchrist Studios, 1962).

As Though From Nowhere: Josef Herman 1 Josef Herman Related Twilights: Notes from an Artist’s Diary (London: Robson Books, 1975), p. 91.

2 Ibid., p. 11.

3 Ibid., p. 92.

4 Ibid., pp. 92–93.

5 Nini Herman, ed., Josef Herman: The Journals (London: Peter Halban, 2003), pp. 16-17.

6 Virginia Boston, ‘Labour of Love’, Artists & Illustrators, August 1998: 15-17, in Josef Herman Remembered (London: Quartet, 2009), p. 58.

7 Edwin Mullins Josef Herman: Paintings and Drawings (London: Evelyn, Adams & Mackay, 1967), p. 12.

Going Deeper into Life: L S Lowry 1 Maurice Collis The Discovery of L. S. Lowry (London: Alex Reid & Lefevre, 1951), p. 20.

2 Noel Barber Conversations with Painters (London: Collins, 1964), p. 18

20 There were other art historical precedents such as Rubens Four Studies of the Head of a Negro (c. 1615-20), Musées Royaux Des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, although there is no reason to believe this influenced Frankfurther’s composition.

3 Hugh Maitland ‘Conversations with L.S. Lowry’, [c. 1970-1], The Lowry Collection, Salford.

21 As well as occasionally at the Bethnal Green Museum.

5 Paintings and Drawings: LS Lowry Josef Herman (Wakefield: Wakefield City Art Gallery, 1955), p. 2.

22 He was assisted by Bethnal Green Museum’s curator Charles Weekley and Head of Oxford House Alan Jarvis Hackney Gazette (4.13.1953). Other professional artists did exhibit, among them Rose L Henriques (1889–1972), known for her Stepney scenes, and David Fireman (dates unk.), a former fellow St Martin’s student of Frankfurther’s.

23 A schoolfriend of the poet Dylan Thomas, Levy studied at the Royal College of Art, and in 1935 won the Sir Herbert Read Prize for Drawing. During the Second World he served as a Captain in the Royal Army Educational Corps, afterwards teaching and writing on art. During the 1950s he worked for the BBC, presenting the television series, ‘Painting for Housewives’, broadcasting on the radio and

4 Shelley Rohde, L. S. Lowry: A Biography (Salford: The Lowry Press, 1999), p. 364.

6 Tatler, vol.260, no. 3363, September 1969, quoted in Cate Haste Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2010), p. 96.

7 Mister Lowry, Robert Tyrell, Tyne Tees Television, Newcastle upon Tyne 1968.

8 L. S. Lowry RA 1887-1976, exh. cat., (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1976), p. 39.

9 Mister Lowry, op. cit.

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Select bibliography Books and Exhibition Catalogues Arts Council, Contemporary British Landscape: An Arts Council Exhibition (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1960) Charles Baudelaire and Jonathan Mayne, eds., Art in Paris: 1845-1862, Salons and Other Exhibitions (London: Phaidon, 1981) John Berger, ‘Introduction’ in Looking Forward: British Realist Pictures (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1952) Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (London: Oldbourne Press, 1964) Frances Donaldson, The British Council: The First Fifty Years (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984) Margaret Garlake, New Art, New World: British Art in Postwar Society (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) James Hyman, The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold War 1945-1960 (London: Yale University Press, 2001) —The Challenge of Post-War Painting: New Paths for Modernist Art in Britain 1950-1965 (London: James Hyman Fine Art, 2004) Helen Kapp, Paintings and Drawings by L. S. Lowry, Josef Herman, Pottery by Nehemiah Azaz (Wakefield: City Art Gallery, 1955) Elizabeth Knowles, ed., Terry Frost: A Personal Narrative (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1994) David Kynaston, Austerity Britain: 1945-51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007) Lefevre Gallery, Paintings by Josef Herman and L. S. Lowry (London: Alexander Reid & Lefevre Ltd., 1943) Articles

John Berger, ‘The Unrecognised’, New Statesman and Nation 51, no.

1296 (7 January 1956), pp. 11-13 Lord Keynes, ‘The Arts Council: Its Policy and Hopes’, The Listener 34, no. 861 (12 July 1945), pp. 31-32 Herbert Read, ‘The Art of Art Criticism’, The Listener 47, no. 1211 (15 May 1952), pp. 797-800 David Sylvester, ‘Round the London Galleries’, The Listener 51, no.

1303 (18 February 1954), p. 303

BIBLIOGRAPHY BY ARTIST Joan Eardley Christopher Andreae, Joan Eardley (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2013) Arts Council, Eight Young Contemporary British Painters: Michael Ayrton, R. Henderson Blyth, William Crosbie, Joan Eardley, John Minton, Robin Philipson, Julian Trevelyan, Keith Vaughan (Edinburgh: Arts Council, Scottish Committee, 1952) Scottish Genre Paintings: An Exhibition of Scenes from Everyday Life (Edinburgh: Arts Council, Scottish Committee, 1952) Joan Eardley R.S.A . (1921-1963): A Memorial Exhibition (Edinburgh: Arts Council, Scottish Committee, 1964) Ashmolean Museum, Four Contemporary Scottish Painters: Eardley, Haig, Philipson, Pulsford (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1977) William Buchanan, Joan Eardley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976) Eric Newton, ‘Un-English Painting in Edinburgh’, The Listener 59, no. 1520 (15 May 1958), p. 806 Cordelia Oliver, ‘Joan Eardley and Glasgow’, Scottish Art Review 14, no. 3 (1974), pp. 16–19 Joan Eardley, RSA (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1988) Parsons Gallery, An Exhibition of Paintings by Six Young Artists: Joan Eardley, Alastair Flattely, Lewin Bassingthwaighte, Albert Irvin, Patrick Symons, Jeffrey Nuttall (London: Parsons Gallery, 1954) Fiona Pearson, Joan Eardley (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2007) St. George’s Gallery, Eardley: First One-Man Exhibition (London: St. George’s Gallery, 1955) Nevile Wallis, ‘At the Galleries’, The Observer (3 July 1955), p. 12 Archives

Aberdeen Art Gallery, correspondence with artist’s family, 2003 National Gallery of Scotland National Library of Scotland, correspondence with Audrey Walker Film

Three Scottish Painters (Maxwell, Eardley and Philipson), Templar Film Studios, Scottish Committee of the Arts Council and British Council, Scottish Screen Archive, 1963 Weathering the Storm ( June Redfern and Joan Eardley), directed by Eleanor Yule, BBC Scotland, BBC 2, 1996 Joan Eardley on BBC Coast: BBC1, 2010

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Free Spirits, produced and directed by John Archer, Hopscotch Films, BBC1 Scotland, 2011

Sheila Fell Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Sheila Fell: Paintings (Kendal: Abbot Hall Art Gallery, 1965) Beaux Arts Gallery, Sheila Fell (London: Beaux Arts Gallery, 1955) Quentin Bell, ‘Round the London Galleries’, The Listener 54, no.

1396 (1 December 1955), p. 934 Hunter Davies, ‘Life’s Illusions’, The Sunday Times (16 December 1979), p. 36 D. L. A. Farr, ‘Current and Forthcoming Exhibitions’, Burlington Magazine 98, no. 635 (February 1956), pp. 60-63 Ronald Goldman, ed., Breakthrough: Autobiographical Accounts of the Education of Some Socially Disadvantaged Children (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1968) Cate Haste, Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2010) Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989) W. E. Johnson, A Tribute to Sheila Fell: An Exhibition of Her Work and that of L. S. Lowry (Kendal: Abbot Hall Art Gallery, 1981) Paddy Kitchen, ‘The Arts in London’, Country Life 184, no. 42 (18 October 1990), p. 144 Helen Lessore, ‘The Work of Sheila Fell,’ Sheila Fell, exhibition catalogue (London: South Bank Centre, 1990) Terence Mullaly, ‘Swing Away From Abstracts at the Royal Academy’, Daily Telegraph (3 May 1974), p. 7 New Grafton Gallery, Sheila Fell (London: New Grafton Gallery, 1979) Eric Newton, ‘Melancholy Mountains’, The Guardian (11 March 1960), p. 9 John Rose and Margaret Dunglinson, Aspatria: A Cumbrian Town (Chichester: Phillimore, 1987) The South Bank Centre, Sheila Fell (London: The South Bank Centre, 1990) David Sylvester, ‘Round the London Galleries’, The Listener 56, no.

1427 (2 August 1956), p. 166 John Russell Taylor, ‘Galleries: A Tribute to Sheila Fell, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal’, the Times (8 September 1981), p. 8 Archives

Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria Royal Academy, London The Settlement, Maryport, Cumbria Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria Victoria & Albert Museum Archive

Film

Sheila Fell interview (with Melvyn Bragg), Monitor, BBC2 Television, 23 June 1963 Sheila Fell interview (with Maurice Lindsay), Border Television, 11 May 1964 Sheila Fell interview (at Abbot Hall, Kendal exhibition), Border Television, 6 July 1965 Sheila Fell interview, Radio Carlisle, 14 August 1979 Sheila Fell, BBC North, 4 April 1991

Eva Frankfurther Ben Uri Gallery, Tercentenary Exhibition of Contemporary Anglo-Jewish Artists (London: Ben Uri, 1956) Ben Uri Gallery, Eva Frankfurther 1930-1959: Retrospective Exhibition (London: Ben Uri, 1962) Monica Bohm-Duchen, ‘Eva Frankfurther’, in Beate Planskoy, ed., Eva Frankfurther: 1930-1959 (London: Peter Halban, 2001) John Denham, Émigré Artists: Bildende Künstler im Exil (London: John Denham Gallery, 1987) Gen Doy, Labour Intensive: Contemporary Painting Commemorating Working Lives (Leicester: City Gallery, 2000) Kunst im Exil in Großbritainnien 1933-1945 (Berlin: Frölich and Kaufmann, 1986) Margaret Fisher Gallery, Eva Frankfurther: 1930-1959 (London: Margaret Fisher, 1981) Mervyn Levy, ‘The East End Academy’, Art News and Review (24 December 1955) Mervyn Levy (introduction), Eva Frankfurther: People (London: Gilchrist Studios, 1962) Beate Planskoy, ‘Remembering Eva, my sister’, in Beate Planskoy, ed., Eva Frankfurther: 1930-1959 (London: Peter Halban, 2001) Powell, Jennifer and Vinzent, Jutta Art and Migration: Art Works by Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (Birmingham: George Bell Institute, 2005) Seventh Exhibition of Paintings, Lithographs and Sculpture by Students of St Martin’s School of Art (London: The Coffee House, not dated, c. 1949-51) Jutta Vinzent, ‘The Other of the Other’ in Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall, eds., Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain, c. 1933-45 (London: Ben Uri, 2009) Archive

Eva Frankfurther family archive, the Estate of Eva Frankfurther

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Josef Herman Ben Uri Gallery, Martin Bloch, Josef Herman: Paintings and Drawings (London: Ben Uri, 1949) John Berger, ‘Dusk and Dawn’, New Statesman and Nation 51, no.

1307 (31 March 1956), p. 303 John Berger, ‘Josef Herman’, Burlington Magazine 97, no. 627 ( June 1955), pp. 182-184 John Berger, ‘Paintings by Joseph Herman at Roland, Browse and Delbanco’, New Statesman and Nation 46, no. 1178 (3 October 1953), p. 375 Monica Bohm-Duchen, The Art and Life of Josef Herman: ‘In Labour My Spirit Finds Itself’ (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2009) Virginia Boston, ‘Labour of Love’, Artists & Illustrators, August 1998: 15-17, in Josef Herman Remembered (London: Quartet, 2009), p. 58.

Camden Arts Centre, Josef Herman: Retrospective Exhibition (London: Camden Arts Centre, 1980) Peter Davies, Josef Herman’s Drawings and Studies (Bristol: Redcliffe Press, 1990) Glasgow Museums & Art Galleries, Josef Herman Paintings & Drawings: Retrospective Exhibition (Glasgow: Glasgow Museums & Art Galleries, 1975) Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Josef Herman (Swansea: Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, 1963) Robert Heller, Josef Herman: The Work is the Life (London: Flowers East, 1998) Josef Herman, Notes From a Welsh Diary: 1944-1955 (London: Free Association Books, 1988) Josef Herman, Related Twilights: Notes From an Artist’s Diary (London: Robson Books, 1975) Josef Herman, The Early Years in Scotland and Wales (Llandybïe, Dyfed: Christopher Davies, 1984) Nini Herman, Josef Herman: A Working Life (London: Quartet Books, 1996) Nini Herman, ed., Josef Herman Remembered (London: Quartet Books, 2009) Nini Herman, ed., Josef Herman: The Journals (London: Peter Halban, 2003) Agi Katz, ‘Josef Herman’, The Guardian (22 February 2000): p. 26 Agi Katz, Josef Herman: 1911-2000 (London: Boundary Gallery, 2004) Andrew Lambirth, ‘Herman, Josef (1911–2000)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) <www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/60571> (accessed 3 September 2014) Andrew Lambirth, ed., Josef Herman OBE RA (London: Boundary Gallery, 1998)

Sarah MacDougall, ed., Josef Herman: Warsaw, Brussels, Glasgow, London: 1938-1944 (London: Ben Uri, 2011) Manchester City Art Gallery, L. S. Lowry: Retrospective Exhibition (Manchester: Manchester City Art Gallery, 1959) Edwin Mullins, Josef Herman: Paintings and Drawings (London: Evelyn, Adams & Mackay, 1967) Roland, Browse & Delbanco, Welsh Miners: Pastels and Drawings by Josef Herman & Oil Paintings by William Ratcliffe (London: Roland, Browse & Delbanco, 1946) Basil Taylor, Josef Herman: Drawings (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956) Third Eye Centre, Josef Herman: ‘Memory of Memories’, the Glasgow Drawings 1940-43 (Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1985) Whitechapel Art Gallery, Josef Herman: Paintings and Drawings 1940-56 (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956) Archives

Josef Herman Art Foundation Cymru Tate Britain Film

The Artist Speaks 3: Josef Herman, John Read, BBC TV, 1960 Josef Herman Drawings, Anthony Roland: the Roland Collection, 1962 Josef Herman, Denis Mitchell, Granada TV, 1975 A Day Eleven Years Long, John Ormand, BBC Cardiff, 12 September 1975 Josef Herman, The Redwing Film Co., March 1981 A Brush with Fate, BBC Wales/The Slate, 1996 Painting the Dragon 3: Welsh Artists ( Josef Herman, Rhondda Group, Heinz Koppel, Charles Burton), BBC Wales, 2000 Archives & Access project: Josef Herman – an artist in search of a home, 19 June 2014, Tate Britain

L S Lowry Allen Andrews, The Life of L. S. Lowry, 1887-1976 (London: Jupiter Books, 1977) Arts Council, L. S. Lowry R.A.: Retrospective Exhibition (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1966) Noel Barber, Conversations with Painters (London: Collins, 1964) David Baxendall, ‘Patronage of Art and the Festival’, The Listener 45, no. 1159 (17 May 1951): pp. 788-790 John Berger, ‘Four Painters’, New Statesman and Nation 46, no.

1180 (17 October 1953): p. 447 John Berger, ‘L. S. Lowry at the Lefevre Gallery’, New Statesman and Nation 41 no. 1046 (24 March 1951): p. 342 Refiguring the 50s 145

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Timothy J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life (London: Tate Publishing, 2013) Alan Clutton-Brock, ‘Round the London Art Galleries’, The Listener 60, no. 1541 (9 October 1958): p. 570 Maurice Collis, The Discovery of L.S. Lowry (London: Alex Reid & Lefevre, 1951) Graves Art Gallery, L. S. Lowry A.R.A: An Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolours and Drawings (Sheffield: Graves Art Gallery, 1962) Michael Leber and Judith Sandling, eds., L. S. Lowry: The Centenary Exhibition (Salford: Salford Museums and Art Galleries, 1987) Lefevre Gallery, Paintings of the Midlands by L. S. Lowry (London: Alexander Reid & Lefevre Ltd., 1939) Mervyn Levy, The Paintings of L. S. Lowry: Oils and Watercolours (London: Jupiter Books, 1975) Hugh Maitland, ‘Conversations with L.S. Lowry’, [c. 1970-1], The Lowry Collection, Salford Tilly Marshall, Life with Lowry (London: Hutchinson, 1981) Monks Hall Museum, A Tribute to L. S. Lowry (Eccles: Monks Hall Museum, 1965) Frank Mullineux and Stanley Shaw, Laurence Stephen Lowry, 1887–1976: A Catalogue of the Salford Collection (Salford: City of Salford Cultural Services Department, 1977) Shelly Rohde, A Private View of L. S. Lowry (London: Methuen, 1979) Shelly Rohde, L.S. Lowry: A Biography (Salford: The Lowry Press, 1999)

John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters: Lewis to Moore (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956) Royal Academy, L. S. Lowry RA: 1887-1976 (London: Royal Academy, 1976) Salford City Art Gallery: Retrospective Exhibition of the Work of L. S. Lowry M.A., R.B.A (Salford: City Art Gallery, 1951) The South Bank Centre, Lowry (London: Herbert Press, 1987) Julian Spalding, Lowry (Oxford: Phaidon, 1979) David Sylvester, ‘Abstracts Italian and English’, New Statesman and Nation 53, no. 1365 (11 May 1957), pp. 605-606 David Sylvester, ‘Round the London Galleries’, The Listener 55, no.

1416 (17 May 1956): p. 648 Wakefield City Art Gallery, Paintings and Drawings: LS Lowry Josef Herman (Wakefield: Wakefield City Art Gallery, 1955) Archives

National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London Salford Museum and Art Gallery Film

L S Lowry, John Read, BBC, 1957 Mister Lowry, Robert Tyrell, Tyne Tees Television, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1968 Looking for Lowry (with Ian McKellen), Foxtrot Films, 2008 Compiled by Ngaio Hitti, Katie Wilson and Katie Young

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Contributors’ biographies CHRISTOPHER ANDREAE has written about art since the early 1960s. He is the author of Mary Newcomb (Lund Humphries, 1996; 2006); the essay collection A Word or Two (2004); Mary Fedden (2007); Winifred Nicholson (2009); and Joan Eardley (2013). He is currently working on a book about Philip Reeves, due out midsummer 2015.

DR JÖRG GARBRECHT studied art history at St. Andrews and Oxford University. Being equally passionate about art and museum brand management, he has completed projects for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Tate Modern and the State Museums Berlin. He curated four solo-exhibitions on Emil Nolde at the Nolde Foundation in Seebüll and in Berlin, and contributed to several others. Currently head of PR-Marketing at Kunsthalle Mannheim, he is also curating an exhibition on Art Nouveau, opening autumn 2015.

DR MARGARET GARLAKE studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art where she taught in the 1990s. She was Assistant Editor at Art Monthly in the 1980s and Editor of the Sculpture Journal (2001–2004). She is an authority on mid twentiethcentury British art and her publications include New Art New World, British Art in Postwar Society (Yale University Press, 1998); and The Sculpture of Reg Butler (Lund Humphries, 2006).

CATE HASTE is a biographer and author of historical non-fiction, whose work includes the first comprehensive study of the life and work of Sheila Fell, Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint (2010), winner of the 2011 Lakeland Book of the Year Award. Her most recent book, Craigie Aitchison: A Life in Colour (2014), will be published this November.

DAVID HERMAN is the son of the artist Josef Herman. A TV arts and talks producer for 20 years, he has written regularly for Prospect, Standpoint, the New Statesman, The Jewish Chronicle, The Jewish Quarterly and Jewish Renaissance.

AGI KATZ ran the Boundary Gallery for over 25 years, championing work by émigré artists including David Bomberg, Horace Brodzky, Jacob Epstein, Josef Herman, Jacob Kramer and Bernard Meninsky. She now acts as an art advisor and continues to exhibit at art fairs.

SARAH MACDOUGALL is the Eva Frankfurther Research and Curatorial Fellow for the Study of Émigré Artists and Head of Collections at Ben Uri. Her recent exhibitions include from Russia to Paris: Chaïm Soutine and his Contemporaries (2012), (with Rachel Dickson) Uproar! The First 50 Years of The London Group, 1913-63 (2013); and (with Anna Gruetzner Robins) Max Weber: An American Cubist in Paris and London, 1905-15 (2014).

ANN STEED is a Fine Art Curator and Loans Officer at Aberdeen Art Gallery.

CLAIRE STEWART is Curator of The Lowry Collection at The Lowry in Salford, home to the largest public collection and archive of L S Lowry’s work. She has curated exhibitions including A Lowry Summer and Unseen Lowry and is responsible for the permanent displays of L S Lowry’s work at The Lowry.

STEVE SWALLOW is co-owner of the Castlegate Gallery, Cockermouth, Cumbria and specializes in work by Contemporary British and Twentieth Century artists including Sheila Fell.

DR JUDITH WALSH studied art history at the University of Liverpool and Winchester School of Art. She is currently lecturer in the history of art at the University of Liverpool and Hope University and her research interests include post war realism and art criticism. Her PhD and subsequent publications give a critique of John Berger’s writings during the 1950s.

ANDREW KALMAN has worked for 25 years at Crane Kalman Gallery in Knightsbridge, London. Founded by his late father Andras Kalman (1919–2007) in Manchester in 1949, the gallery focuses on twentieth-century British art including that of local artist L S Lowry. Andrew Kalman is currently organizing the first Lowry exhibition in China, at the Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts, opening November 2014.

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Catalogue of works Dimensions are given in centimetres, height before width

Catalogue 1 page 21 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) West Indian Porters c. 1955

8 page 31 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Couple with Infant 1956

14 page 38 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Girl with a Teddy Bear Oil on paper

21 page 45 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Demonstration c. 1956

Oil on paper 76 x 55 Private Collection

Oil on paper 75 x 56 Private Collection

28 x 19 Private Collection

Lithograph 46 x 38 Private Collection

2 page 23 L S Lowry (1887–1976) City Gentlemen 1963

9 page 32 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Venetian Beggar Woman No. 2 c. 1949

Oil on board 30.48 x 57.15 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘L.S. Lowry 1963’ Mason Owen Collection

Oil on board 83 x 75 Signed (lower right) ‘J.E.’ On loan from Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow

3 page 25 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Two Heads Oil on board

10 page 34 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Mother and Child 1945–47

29 x 28.5 The Estate of L.S. Lowry, on loan to The Lowry Collection, Salford

Oil on board 33 x 41.3 Signed and dated (verso) ‘Josef Herman 45-47 Ystradgynlais’ Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

4 page 27 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Boy’s Head Oil on board 25.5 x 27.5 Signed (lower left) ‘EARDLEY’ Lent from the UK Government Art Collection

11 page 36 L S Lowry (1887–1976) The Professor 1960

5 page 28 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) Portrait of Clifford Rowan c. 1952

Oil on board 18.42 x 16.51 Signed (lower left) ‘L S Lowry’, dated (lower right) ‘1960’ Mason Owen Collection

Oil on canvas 91.6 x 71.3 Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust, Carlisle

6 page 28 and page 47 Josef Herman (1911–2000) The Welsh Miner 1948 Oil on board 78 x 58 Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

7 page 29 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Portrait of a Woman Oil on paper 71 x 55.1 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift from Mr and Mrs P. Frankfurther

12 page 36 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Walking Woman 1936–64 Oil on board 21.59 x 13.97 Signed (upper left) ‘L.S. Lowry’, dated (upper right) ‘1936–64’ Mason Owen Collection

13 page 37 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Street Scene, Ystradgynlais 1945 Oil on canvas 42 x 50.9 Signed and dated (verso) ‘Josef Herman 1945’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by the estate of the late Jolanta Neufeld through the Art Fund 2009

15 page 39 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Little Girl with a Squint Oil on canvas 75 x 49.5 Signed (lower left) ‘Eardley’ On loan from the Dumfriesshire Educational Trust, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

16 page 39 L S Lowry, R.A. (1887–1976) Woman with a Shopping Bag 1956

22 page 61 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Brother and Sister 1955 Oil on canvas 102.2 x 76.5 Signed (lower right) ‘EARDLEY’ Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

23 page 66 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Girl in Blue, Winter Charcoal and crayon on paper

Oil on board 40 x 12.1 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘L S Lowry 1956’ Lent by the Royal Academy of Arts, London

22.23 x 13.97 Studio stamp: ED645 Private Collection, London

17 page 40 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Girl in a Red Jumper Oil on canvas

24 page 67 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Girl in a Red Dress Pastel on paper

33 x 30.5 On loan from Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow

16 x 12 Studio stamp: ED602 On loan from Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow

18 page 41 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Boy with Piece Pastels on brown paper 30 x 23.8 On loan from Dumfries and Galloway Council, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

19 page 42 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) The Khaki Shirt Pastel on paper 28.5 x 19.5 Signed (lower right) ‘Joan Eardley’ On loan from Dumfries and Galloway Council, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

20 page 43 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Baby on Boy’s Knee 1959 Ink on paper 51 x 38 City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries

25 page 75 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) Women by a Stile 1956 Charcoal on paper 55.88 x 76.2 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘S Fell 1956’ Private Collection

26 page 78 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) Woman in the Snow 1955 Oil on canvas 76.2 x 101.6 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘FELL ‘55’ Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

27 page 80 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) Portrait of Ann Fell I c. 1955 Oil on canvas 102.2 x 76.5 Signed (lower right) ‘FELL’ Anna Fell

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Archival material 28 page 81 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994), Fellow and Member of Council (1936), Professorial Fellow, Nobel Prize, OM 1962 Oil on canvas 90 x 70 Signed (lower right) ‘FELL’ On loan from Somerville College, University of Oxford with permission of the Principals and Fellows

29 page 82 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) (attributed) In a Mine c. 1955 Charcoal on paper 55.1 x 63 cm Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust, Carlisle

30 page 85 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) Wedding in Aspatria 1958 Oil on canvas 128 x 102.5 Lent from the UK Government Art Collection

31 page 89 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) West Indian Waitresses c. 1955 Oil on paper 76 x 55 Private Collection

32 page 91 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Woman with Two Children Oil on paper 76 x 56 Private Collection

33 page 92 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Newspaper Seller c. 1955 Oil on paper 74 x 56 Private Collection

34 page 93 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Street Conversation Lithograph 44 x 28 Private Collection

35 page 93 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Old Man in Brown Cap Oil on paper

41 page 115 Josef Herman (1911–2000) In the Canteen 1954

24 x 18 Private Collection

Oil on canvas 91.4 x 122 Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

36 page 95 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Series of 8 sketches from ‘Whitechapel Diary’ i. Untitled: Boxer, Pen and ink on paper, 13 x 19.8 ii. Untitled: Woman in hospital, Pen and ink on paper, 12.2 x 10 iii. Untitled: Woman Cleaner, Pen and ink on paper, 13.1 x 10 iv. Victoria Docks (2), 1957, Pencil on paper, 14 x 10 v. Untitled: Girl with a Teddy Bear, 1956, Pencil on paper, 14 x 9.8 vi. Workmans Caf Whitechapel, 1957, Pencil on paper, 14.3 x 10.25 vii. Italian Woman Stepney, 1957, Pencil on paper, 14.1 x 10 viii. Catherine + John, 1957, Pencil on paper, 14.4 x 10.5 Private Collection

37 page 97 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Woman holding Baby in White Cap Oil on paper 76 x 55 Private Collection

38 page 105 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Miner in Landscape 1952 Mixed media 56 x 74 Boundary Gallery

39 page 109 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Peasant Watercolour, pen and ink on paper 18.2 x 22.5 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

40 page 111 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Miners Oil on board 48.8 x 67.2 Southampton City Art Gallery

42 page 117 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Miner Returning Home 1957 Oil on canvas 73 x 58 Flowers Gallery

43 page 121 L S Lowry, R.A. (1887–1976) Figures in a Street 1960 Oil on board 21.7 x 20.2 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘L S Lowry 1960’ Lent by the Royal Academy of Arts, London

44 page 126 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Portrait of a Young Man 1955 Oil on canvas 30.5 x 20.3 Signed (lower left) ‘L.S. Lowry’ and dated (lower right) ‘1955’ Courtesy of the Frank Cohen Collection

45 page 127 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Portrait of Ann 1957 Oil on board 35.5 x 30.5 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘L.S. Lowry 1957’ The Lowry Collection, Salford

46 page 127 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Group of People 1959 Watercolour on paper 35.6 x 25.5 Signed and dated (lower right) ‘L.S. Lowry, 19 aug. 1959’ The Lowry Collection, Salford

48 page 57 Looking Forward: an exhibition of realist pictures by contemporary British artists (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1952) Private Collection

49 Josef Herman: paintings and drawings 1940-56 (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956) Private Collection

50 Sixty paintings for ’51: Festival of Britain (London: The Arts Council, 1951) The Book Library, Courtauld Institute of Art

51 Paintings and drawings [by] L.S. Lowry, Josef Herman. Pottery [by] Nehemiah Azaz (Wakefield: City Art Gallery, 1955) The Book Library, Courtauld Institute of Art

52 Eva Frankfurther: People with an appreciation by Mervyn Levy (London: Gilchrist Studios, 1962) Private Collection

53 A Selection from the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition (London: Royal Society of Painters in WaterColours, 1958) Private Collection

54 Eva Frankfurther 1930-1959 Retrospective Exhibition 14 Feb– 9 March 1962 (London: Ben Uri Art Gallery, 1962) Ben Uri Archive

55 Tercentenary exhibition of contemporary Anglo-Jewish artists (London: Ben Uri Art Gallery, 1956) Ben Uri Archive

56 Eardley: first one-man exhibition (London: St George’s Gallery, 1955) The Book Library, Courtauld Institute of Art

47 page 129 L S Lowry (1887–1976) The Assignation 1960 Oil on board 40 x 9.84 Signed and dated (lower left) ‘L.S. Lowry 1960’ Mason Owen Collection

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Figures 1 page 11 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Woman Dressing her Hair 1940

10 page 18 Prunella Clough (1919–1999) Cranes 1952

19 page 52 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) Autumn Cumberland (Farm towards Dusk) 1958

28 page 69 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Girl with Bag and Paper 1959

Oil on Canvas 130.1 x 97.1 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Lithograph 43 x 36.8 Tate

Pen and ink on paper 51 x 39 Private Collection

2 page 11 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Still Life with Skull Leeks and Pitcher, March 14 1945 1945

11 page 19 Victor Pasmore (1908–1998) Abstract in White, Black, Indian and Lilac 1957

Oil on board 91.5 x 129.5 Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust, Carlisle

20 page 53 Josef Herman (1911–2000) The Road Gang 1953

Oil on Canvas 73 x 115.9 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Painted wood 106.7 x 116.8 x 3.2 Tate

Oil on canvas 89 x 126 British Council Collection

3 page 12 Terry Frost (1915–2003) Madrigal 1949

12 page 19 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Industrial Landscape 1955

21 page 54 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) Houses near Number Five Pit 1957

Oil on canvas 71 X 91 Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

Oil on canvas 114.3 x 152.4 Tate

Oil on canvas 127.3 x 102 Courtesy National Museums Liverpool (Walker Art Gallery)

4 page 12 Francis Bacon (1909–1992) Figure in a Landscape 1945

13 page 33 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Mother and Child 1945-50

Oil on canvas 144.8 x 128.3 Tate

Oil on canvas 103 x 87.3 City & County of Swansea: Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Collection

5 page 13 Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) The Busy Life 1953

14 page 33 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Mother and Child 1968–69

Oil on canvas 130.2 x 195.6 Tate

Oil on canvas 49 x 39 National Museum of Wales

6 page 14 Lucian Freud (1922–2011) Man’s Head (Self Portrait I) 1963

15 page 35 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Mother and Child Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas 53.3 x 50.8 Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester

7 page 15 Peter Lanyon (1918–1964) Soaring Flight 1960 Oil on canvas 152.4 x 152.4 Arts Council Collection

8 page 15 Nicholas de Staël (1914–55) Composition 1950 1950 Oil on board 124.8 X 79.4 Tate

9 page 16 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Industrial Landscape 1953 Oil on canvas 45 x 60 The Lowry Collection, Salford

22 page 55 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) Snow on the Mountains Oil on canvas

29 page 69 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Two Girls with Shopping Bag 1959 Pen and ink on paper 56.2 x 38 Private Collection

30 page 70 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Philip the Fat Boy c. 1949-50 Pastel and chalk on paper 69 x 49 City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries

31 page 71 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Catterline in Winter 1963

102.87 x 76.2 Castlegate House Gallery

Oil on board 120.7 x 130.8 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

23 page 56 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) A Carter and His Horse 1952

32 page 73 Jorge Lewinski (1921–2008) Sheila Fell 1964

Oil on canvas 70 x 119 UK Government Art Collection

Bromide print The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth

24 page 59 Audrey Walker (1910–1996) Joan Eardley at Work, Catterline Photograph

33 page 77 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) Woman in a Cornfield c. 1960

61 x 51 Private Collection

15 x 10 Dumfriesshire Educational Trust, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

Oil on canvas 130.4 x 97.2 Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust, Carlisle

16 page 44 L S Lowry (1887–1976) A Protest March 1959

25 page 64 Audrey Walker (1910–1996) Joan Eardley’s Townhead Studio Photograph

34 page 87 Unknown photographer Eva Frankfurther in Florence 1951 Photograph

Oil on canvas 61 x 51 Private Collection

15 x 10 Dumfriesshire Educational Trust, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries

Private Collection

17 page 48 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Industrial City 1945–48

26 page 65 Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) Deutschlands Kinder hungern!

(Germany’s Children are starving!)

1923

Oil on canvas 63.5 x 76 British Council Collection

18 page 51 Sheila Fell (1931–1979) Seagulls over a Ploughed Field Oil on canvas 71.12 x 91.44 Castlegate House Gallery

Lithograph 53.5 x 37.5 Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum, Berlin

27 page 68 Joan Eardley (1921–1963) Glasgow Close 1960

35 page 99 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Black Man Seated Oil on paper 72 x 56 Private Collection

36 page 99 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Waitress Resting c. 1955 Oil on paper 76 x 56 Private Collection

Oil on canvas 61 x 51.2 The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow

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37 page 100 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Tightrope Walker Oil on paper

46 page 119 Ida Kar (1908–1974) L. S. Lowry 1954

26.8 x 20.6 Private Collection

Vintage Bromide Print National Portrait Gallery, London

38 page 101 Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) Self-Portrait in Red Dress Oil on paper

47 page 123 L S Lowry (1887–1976) The Lodging House 1921

76 x 55 Private Collection

Pencil on paper 50.1 x 32.6 The Lowry Collection, Salford

39 page 103 Jorge Lewinski (1921– 2008) Josef Herman 1964 Bromide print 30.2 x 37.5 Private Collection

40 page 106 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Musicians (From a Memory of Memories) c. 1940-43 Pen and ink and wash on paper 17.1 x 21.6 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

48 page 124 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Houses in Broughton 1937 Pencil on paper 25.3 x 35.6 The Lowry Collection, Salford

49 page 125 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Bandstand, Peel Park, Salford 1925 Pencil on paper 36.7 x 54.6 The Lowry Collection, Salford

41 page 107 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Refugees c. 1941

50 page 125 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Coming from the Mill 1930

Gouache on paper 47 x 39.5 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

Oil on canvas 42 x 52 The Lowry Collection, Salford

42 page 109 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Burgundian Peasants Pen and ink and grey wash on paper

51 page 128 L S Lowry (1887–1976) Man Lying on a Wall 1957

19 x 24.3 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

Oil on canvas 40.7 x 50.9 The Lowry Collection, Salford

43 page 110 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Miners 1951

52 page 131 L S Lowry (1887–1976) The Cripples 1949

Oil on board 132.4 x 281.6 City & County of Swansea: Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Collection

Oil on canvas 76 x 101.5 The Lowry Collection, Salford

44 page 110 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Miners (Study for Festival of Britain Mural) 1950 Oil on paper on board 52.5 x 121.3 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

45 page 113 Josef Herman (1911–2000) Miners Pen and black ink on paper 19.6 x 25.5 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

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Picture credits Cats.

Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections Cats. 22, 41 © Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

Arts Council Collection Cats. 6, 26 Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist’s estate

Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Cats. 7, 13, 39 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

Boundary Gallery Cat. 38 Boundary Gallery

City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries Cat. 20 City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries

The Frank Cohen Collection Cat. 44 Edward Hopley, London, courtesy of the Frank Cohen Collection

Cyril Gerber Fine Art Cats. 9, 17, 24 On loan from Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow

Dumfries and Galloway Council, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries Cats. 18, 19 Dumfries and Galloway Council, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries Cat. 18 © photo Mike Bolam Cat. 19 Courtesy of the Gallery

Dumfriesshire Educational Trust, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries Cat. 15 Dumfriesshire Educational Trust, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries Courtesy of the Gallery

Flowers Gallery Cat. 42 © Courtesy Flowers Gallery

UK Government Art Collection Cats. 4, 30 © Estate of the Artist / Image: Crown Copyright, UK Government Art Collection

The Lowry Collection, Salford Cats. 45, 46 © The Lowry Collection, Salford

The Estate of L. S. Lowry, on loan to The Lowry Collection, Salford Cat. 3 © The Estate of L S Lowry, courtesy of The Lowry Collection, Salford

Mason Owen Collection Cats. 2, 11, 12, 47

National Library of Wales Cat. 10 By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales

Private Collection Cats. 27, 25 Castlegate House Gallery

Private Collection Cats. 1, 8, 14, 21, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37 © The Estate of Eva Frankfurther Photography © Miki Slingsby

Private Collection Cats. 23, 48, 36 Photo © Justin Piperger

Royal Academy of Arts, London Cats. 16, 43 Photo: © Royal Academy of Arts, London; photographer: John Hammond

Somerville College, University of Oxford Cat. 28 On loan from Somerville College, Oxford with permission of the Principal and Fellows

Southampton City Art Gallery Cat. 40 Southampton City Art Gallery

Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle Cats. 5, 29 Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust, Carlisle

© editionsltd

Figures Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London Fig. 7 Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © Sheila Lanyon

Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Figs. 40, 41, 42, 45 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

British Council Collection Figs. 17, 20 Photo © Todd White, courtesy of the British Council Collection

Castlegate House Gallery Figs. 18, 22 Castlegate House Gallery

City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries Fig. 30 City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries

Dumfriesshire Educational Trust, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries Figs. 24, 25 Dumfriesshire Educational Trust, Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries Courtesy of the Gallery

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Fig. 2 The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, museum purchase, Whitney Warren Jr. Bequest Fund in memory of Mrs. Adolph B. Spreckels, Grover A. Magnin Bequest Fund, Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Income Fund and Bequest of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick J. Hellman, by exchange, 1992.1

City & County of Swansea: Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Collection Figs. 13, 43 City & County of Swansea: Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Collection

UK Government Art Collection Fig. 23 © Estate of the Artist / Image: Crown Copyright, UK Government Art Collection

The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow Fig. 27 Image supplied courtesy of the Hunterian, University of Glasgow

Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum, Berlin Fig. 26 photo: Fotostudio Bartsch

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Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum Fig. 3 © Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum (Warwick District Council)

The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth Fig. 32 © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth / Bridgeman Images

The Lowry Collection, Salford Figs. 9, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52 © The Lowry Collection, Salford

The Museum of Modern Art, New York Fig. 1 DIGITAL IMAGE © 2014,The Museum of Modern Art/ Scala, Florence

Courtesy National Museums Liverpool (Walker Art Gallery) Fig. 21 Image copyright of Artist. Courtesy National Museums Liverpool

Private Collection Fig. 15 Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images

Private Collection Fig. 16 © The Estate of L.S. Lowry. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2014 Private Collection Fig. 39 Photo © Justin Piperger

Private Collection Figs. 35, 36, 37, 38 © The Estate of Eva Frankfurther Photo © Miki Slingsby

Private Collection Fig. 34 © The Estate of Eva Frankfurther Photographer unknown.

Private Collection Figs. 28, 29

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Figs. 31, 44 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Tate, London Figs. 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12 © Tate, London 2014

Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Figs. 19, 33 Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust

National Museum of Wales Fig. 14 © National Museum of Wales

National Portrait Gallery, London Fig. 46 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester Fig. 6 Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester © Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Art Library

Photo © Andy Phillipson

Copyright Francis Bacon ©Tate, London 2014 Prunella Clough © Estate of Prunella Clough 2014. All Rights Reserved DACS Nicolas de Staël © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014 Jean Dubuffet © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014 Joan Eardley © Estate of Joan Eardley. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2014 Sheila Fell © Estate of the Artist

Eva Frankfurther © The Estate of Eva Frankfurther Lucian Freud © Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Art Library Terry Frost © Estate of Terry Frost. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2014 Josef Herman © Estate of Josef Herman. All Rights Reserved Ida Kar © National Portrait Gallery, London Käthe Kollwitz © DACS 2014 Peter Lanyon © Sheila Lanyon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2014

Jorge Lewinski © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth / Bridgeman Images L. S. Lowry © The Estate of L.S. Lowry. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2014 © The Lowry Collection, Salford © Martin Bloom

Victor Pasmore ©Tate, London 2014 Pablo Picasso © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2014 Audrey Walker © Estate of Audrey Walker

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Ben Uri – Short history and mission statement Ben Uri, ‘The Art Museum for Everyone,’ focuses distinctively on Art, Identity and Migration across all migrant communities to London since the turn of the 20th century. It engages the broadest possible audience through its exhibitions and learning programmes.

The museum was founded on 1 July 1915 by the Russian émigré artist Lazar Berson at Gradel’s Restaurant, Whitechapel, in London’s East End. The name, ‘The Jewish National Decorative Art Association (London), “Ben Ouri”’, echoed that of legendary biblical craftsman Bezalel Ben Uri, the creator of the tabernacle in the Temple of Jerusalem. It also reflects a kinship with the ideals of the famous Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts founded in Jerusalem nine years earlier in 1906.

Ben Uri’s philosophy is based on our conviction that, by fostering easy access to art and creativity at every level, it can add weight to our two guiding principles:‘The Dignity of Difference’ and ‘The Equality of Citizenship’. Ben Uri connects with over 300,000 people a year via its various creative platforms. The museum positively and imaginatively demonstrates its value as a robust and unique bridge between the cultural, religious, political differences and beliefs of fellow British citizens.

Our positioning of migrant artists from different communities in London within the artistic and historical, rather than religious or ethnic, context of the British national heritage is both key and distinctive.

Through the generous support of our ‘Preferred Partner’ Manya Igel Fine Arts, we provide Free Entry to all our exhibitions, removing all barriers to entry and participation.

Ben Uri offers the widest access to all its programming and resources via physical and virtual access including publications, our website and outreach, as follows: ■■ The Permanent Collection: Comprising 1,300 works, the collection is dominated by the work of first and second generation émigré artists and supported by a growing group of emerging contemporary artists, who will be a principal attraction i n the generations to come. The largest collection of its kind in the world, it can be accessed physically or virtually via continued exhibition, research, conservation and acquisitions.

■■ Temporary Exhibitions: Curating, touring and hosting important internationally focused exhibitions of the widest artistic appeal which, without the museum’s focus, would not be seen in the

UK or abroad.

■■ Publications: Commissioning new academic research on artists and their historical context to enhance the museum’s exhibitions and visitor experience.

■■ Library and Archive: A resource dating from the turn of the 20th century, documenting and tracing in parallel the artistic and social development of both Ben Uri and Jewish artists, who were working or exhibiting in Britain, as part of the evolving British historical landscape.

■■ Education and Community Learning: For adults and students through symposia, lectures, curatorial tours and publications.

■■ Schools: Ben Uri’s nationally available ‘Art in the Open’ programme via the ‘National Education Network’ and The London Grid for Learning’ is available on demand to 25,000 schools across the United Kingdom. Focus-related visits, after-school art clubs, family art days and competitions are also regular features.

■■ Artists: Regular artists’ peer group programmes, competitions, guidance and affiliation benefits.

■■ Care in the Community: Pioneering project exploiting the many diverse facets of the visual arts as a component part of addressing the relevant needs of the elderly and in particular those caring for individuals with or themselves living with the early stages of dementia.

■■ Website: Provides an online educational and access tool, to function as a virtual gallery and artists’ reference resource for students, scholars and collectors.

■■ Social Media: Engaging audiences worldwide through Facebook and Twitter.

■■ Future: Few museums in London are 100 years young. Given its humble beginnings, it is remarkable how this institution has survived and prospered. Now exploring the principal contexts of Art, Identity and Migration, we aim to partner other émigré communities to share and build on this heritage. The strength of the museum’s growing collection and our active engagement with our public – nationally and internationally – reinforce the need for Ben Uri to have a permanent museum and gallery in the heart of Central London alongside this country’s great national institutions. Only then will the museum fulfil its potential and impact the largest audiences from the widest communities from home and abroad.

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Ben Uri International Advisory Board UK Prof. Brian Allen, Hazlitt Group Dr. Shulamith Behr, Courtauld Dr. Richard Cork, Art Historian Gill Hedley, Curator Norman Lebrecht, Writer Prof. Griselda Pollock, Scholar Dr. Andrew Renton, Gallerist Sir Norman Rosenthal, Curator Sir Nicholas Serota

Brian Sewell, Critic Dr. Evelyn Silber, Historian Peyton Skipworth, Writer

Dr. Danielle Spera, Director Edward van Voolen, Curator

USA and CANADA

EUROPE

Joel Cahan, Director Dr. Eckhart Gillen, Curator Dr. Leo Pávlat, Director

Prof. Bruce Boucher, Director Tom L Freudenheim, Writer Derek Gillman, Director Prof. Sander Gilman, Scholar Susan T Goodman, Curator Daniel Libeskind, Architect Prof. Jack Lohman, Director

Lindy and Geoffrey Goldkorn Goldmark Gallery, Rutland Madelaine and Craig Gottlieb Averil and Irving Grose Tresnia and Gideon Harbour Mym and Lawrence Harding Peter Held Sir Michael and Lady Heller Joan Hurst Beverly and Tony Jackson Laura and Lewis Kruger Manya Igel Fine Arts Jacob Mendelson Scholarship Trust Jewish Memorial Council Sandra and John Joseph Neil Kitchener QC Hannah and David Latchman Agnes and Edward Lee Lady Hannah and Lord Parry Mitchell Robin and Edward Milstein Montgomery Gallery, San Francisco Hanno D Mott Diana and Allan Morgenthau MutualArt.com Olesia and Leonid Nevzlin

Susan and Leo Noé Opera Gallery, London Osborne Samuel Gallery, London Susan and Martin Paisner Shoshana and Benjamin Perl Louis Perlman Lélia Pissarro and David Stern Ingrid and Mike Posen Simon Posen Janis and Barry Prince Reed Smith LLP Ashley Rogoff Anthony and Lizzie Rosenfelder Shoresh Charitable Trust Ann Susman Jonathan Symons Esther and Romie Tager Myra Waiman Judit and George Weisz Eva and David Wertheim Cathy Wills The Maurice Wohl Charitable Foundation Alma and Leslie Wolfson Sylvie and Saul Woodrow Matt Yeoman

ISRAEL

Prof. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Scholar Shlomit Steinberg, Curator

Ben Uri Patrons Clare Amsel Annely Juda Fine Art Gretha Arwas Pauline and Daniel Auerbach Esther and Simon Bentley Blick Rothenberg Miriam and Richard Borchard Brandler Galleries, Brentwood Barry Cann Jayne Cohen and Howard Spiegler Marion and David Cohen Sheila and Dennis Cohen Charitable Trust Nikki and Mel Corin Suzanne and Henry Davis Rachel and Mike Dickson Peter Dineley Sir Harry and Lady Djanogly Marion and Manfred Durst The Fidelio Charitable Trust Wendy Fisher The Foyle Foundation Patsy and David Franks Franklin Family Barbara and David Glass Sue and David Glasser

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Index A Abstract art 10, 15, 24, 28, 47, 49, 50, 78, 140, 141 Denny, Robyn 10, 15, 24, 28, 47, 49, 50, 78, 140, 141 Riley, Bridget 10, 15, 24, 28, 47, 49, 50, 78, 140, 141 Abstract Expressionism 13 American painting 12 Andrew Forge 12 art criticism 11, 46, 51, 141, 147 Arts Council 10, 15, 24, 28, 47, 49, 50, 78, 140, 141 Aspatria, Cumbria 10, 15, 24, 28, 47, 49, 50, 78, 140, 141. See also Cumberland

Attlee, Clement 10 Auerbach, Frank modernist realism 10, 12, 50, 76, 90, 93, 140, 141, 142, 144, 155

B Bacon, Francis 12, 50 Baudelaire, Charles 46, 141, 143 Baxandall, David 49 Beaux Arts Gallery 50, 74, 83, 128, 140, 144 Beaux Arts Quartet Bratby, John 12, 140 Greaves, Derrick 12, 140 Middleditch, Edward 12, 140 Smith, Edward 12, 140 Bell, Quentin 46, 48, 141, 144 Ben Uri, the 26, 29, 37, 106, 107, 109, 113, 141, 144, 145, 147, 154, 155

Berger, John 12, 46, 49, 51, 52, 53, 140, 141, 147 Burlington Magazine, the 141, 145 curator of Looking Forward exhibitions 24, 52, 53, 143 Encounter 46 Listener, the 46 Looking Forward: an exhibition of realist pictures by contemporary British artists 24 Marxist (see also left-wing) 12 New Statesman & Nation, the 12, 116, 143, 145 Observer, the 46 on contemporary art outside London 46 relationship with Josef Herman 24, 106, 116 reviews of Josef Herman 51 Times, The 46 writer 46 Blake, Peter 65 Bloch, Martin 106, 140, 144 Bloom, Monty 129 Bomberg, David 90, 106, 147

Braque, Georges 10 Bratby, John 12, 50, 140 British Council 10, 48, 53, 140, 143 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter 104, 108 Burlington Magazine, the 46, 141, 144, 145

C Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 35, 116 Carlisle College of Art 76 Catterline, Scotland 14, 59, 64, 65, 68, 71 Cézanne, Paul 35, 83 Chagall, Marc 62, 106, 108 Chamberlain, Diana 10 Clare Hall, Cambridge 90, 141 Clark, Kenneth 46, 49, 50, 106 Art in a Distracted World 50 Clough, Prunella 12, 18 socio-political scenes 18 Clutton-Brock, Alan 46, 50, 141, 146 Coffee House gallery 93 community 20, 24, 35, 62, 74, 76, 84, 98, 104, 108, 122

conceptual art. See Long, Richard constructive artists. See Martin, Kenneth and Mary Cumberland 20, 52, 76, 84, 140, 141. See also Cumbria

Cumbria 18, 20, 24, 84, 128, 140, 144, 147. See also Cumberland

Fauve 30 first solo exhibition at St George’s Gallery, Cork Street, 1955 48 France, 1951 62 Girl in a Red Dress 30, 67, 148 Girl in a Red Jumper 30 Girl in Blue, Winter 30, 66, 148 Glasgow 20, 24 Glasgow School of Art 11 graffiti 11 Italy, 1949 28, 62 Jewish refugees 11 Johns, Jasper 65 lesbianism 68 Little Girl with a Squint 30, 39, 63 Livingstone, Margaret and Alan, sitters from Brother and Sister 60 Macaulay, William 69 New York Abstract Expressionism 65 ‘No. 1, Catterline’ 64 Pop Art 65 Rauschenberg, Robert 65 relationship with Josef Herman 24, 62 Samson family 62 Sandeman, Margot 71 seascapes 14 The Khaki Shirt 30, 42 Townhead studio 30 Venetian Beggar Woman No. 2 (c. 1949) 28, 32, 33 working-class and urban themes 24 World Refugee Year, 1959 69 East End Academy 26, 53, 96, 141, 142, 144 East End, London 18, 20, 24, 26, 30, 33, 53, 96, 98, 141, 142, 144, 154

D Daumier, Honoré 35, 83, 142 de Kooning, Willem 65 Denny, Robyn 13 de Staël, Nicolas 13, 15 Dubuffet, Jean 13

Émigrés German 98 Jewish 35 Polish 35 Encounter 46 ex-servicemen and women 10

E

F

Eardley, Joan 10, 14, 18, 20, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32,

33, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 51, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 123, 141, 143, 147

Baby on Boy’s Knee 30, 43 Blake, Peter 65 Boy’s Head 26, 27 Boy with Piece 30 Brother and Sister 30, 60, 61, 141 collage 65 Eardley, Pat (sister) 69 elected as Associate Member of the Royal Scottish Academy, 1955 48 father’s suicide 69

Fauve 30 Fell, Sheila 10, 14, 18, 20, 24, 26, 28, 30, 35, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 128, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147

Carlisle College of Art 76 commission at Somerville College, Oxford 83 community 76, 84 exhibition at Beaux Arts Gallery 50, 74 Fell, Anna (daughter) 84, 141 growing up in Aspatria 76 Houses Near Number Five Pit 50 In a Mine (c. 1955), attributed 24, 82

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inspiration from Westmoreland mountains 76 John Moores Painting Prize, 1957 50 life in London 76 McDowell, Daniel (cousin) 83, 141 miners 18, 83 on art 83 Portrait of Clifford Rowan (c. 1952) 26, 28, 81, 83 relationship with her mother – Ann Fell 83 relationship with Josef Herman 83 relationship with L S Lowry 83 solo art exhibition at Beaux Arts Gallery 83 St Martin’s School of Art 76 Wedding in Aspatria (1958) 24, 84, 85 Winter Landscape (c. 1960) 49 Woman in a Cornfield 77, 84 Woman in the Snow (1955) 78, 84 Women by a Stile (1956) 74, 75, 84 Festival of Britain, 1951 24, 49, 104, 106, 110 60 Paintings for ’51 24, 49 Herman, Josef Miners (1950) 49 Lowry, L S Industrial Landscape: River Scene (1950) 49 figurative art 20, 46, 49, 50, 62, 65, 76, 83, 84, 116 Foreign Office Fine Art Department 10 Forge, Andrew 12 ‘Modernist realism’ and social realism 12 Francis, Sam 13 Frankfurther, Eva 10, 18, 20, 21, 29, 31, 38, 45, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 140, 141, 142, 144, 147

Auerbach, Frank 90 Bateson Mason, F 90 Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead 96 Black Man Seated 96, 99 Breastfeeding 30 Coffee House gallery 93 Couple with Infant (1956) 28 Demonstration 33, 45 depression 100 East End Academy 26, 53, 96 evacuation to Hertfordshire 90 fleeing to England 90 German Expressionism 33, 100 Girl with a Teddy Bear 30 Grandmother and Child 98 growing up in Dahlem, Berlin 90 Hackney Gazette review 98 humour 98 immigrants 96, 100 Israel 100 Italy, 1951 93 Jews 33, 90, 100 Jones, Catherine and daughter Helen 28, 96

Kossoff, Leon 10, 90 Lyons Corner House 18, 20, 88, 96, 98 move to lodgings in Whitechapel 96 multicultural Britain 24 National Socialism 35, 90 Newspaper Seller 33 Old Age Pensioner 98 Old Man in Brown Cap 33, 93, 98 on style and technique 26 Paris 93 Pitchforth, Roland Vivian 10, 90 Portrait of a Woman 26, 29 Raphael 96 Rembrandt, Two Moors (1661) 96 Self-Portrait in Red Dress 101 Self-portrait with Plait (1946) 90 St Martin’s School of Art 30, 76, 90, 93, 98 Stolow, Sari 100 Street Conversation 33, 93 style and technique 93 suicide 100 Tate & Lyle sugar refinery 28, 98 teaching art in North Carolina and East End 30 Times Educational Supplement, the 96 United States 96 West Indian immigrants 18, 19, 24, 28, 96, 140 West Indian Porters (c. 1955) 21, 96 West Indian Waitresses (c. 1955) 28, 89 Whitechapel Diary 26, 98 Woman and Child 96 Woman with Two Children 91, 98 workers 96, 98 Fraser, Donald Hamilton 10 French painting 12, 65 Freud, Lucian 12, 13, 14, 50, 140 Frink, Elisabeth 10, 140 Frost Report Class system sketch 20 Frost, Terry 11, 12, 140, 143 abstract work 11 Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts 11 prisoner of war 11

G German expressionism 33, 98, 100 Giacometti, Alberto 12 Glasgow 11, 20, 24, 26, 28, 32, 40, 48, 49, 60, 62, 64, 67, 68, 69, 104, 108, 112, 116, 140, 141, 143, 145

Glasgow School of Art 11, 24, 62, 69 Gombrich, E H 49 Gotlib, Henryk 106 Gowing, Professor Lawrence 50

Grant, Duncan 49 Great Bardfield, Essex 12

H Hepworth, Barbara 10, 49 Herman, Josef 11, 12, 15, 18, 19, 20, 24, 26,

28, 30, 33, 34, 35, 37, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 57, 62, 71, 83, 98, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 124, 125, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147

Aldermaston March (1963) 116 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter 104, 108 community 20, 24, 35, 104, 108 Festival of Britain, 1951 24, 49, 104, 106, 110 Henry Moore, exhibition with 106 In the Canteen (1954) 28, 115 Jewish refugees 11, 24, 35, 106, 116 life in Poland 106, 108 living in Glasgow 108, 112 London Group, the 24 ‘Memory of Memories’ 26, 106, 108, 116, 145 Miner in Landscape (1952) 105 Mother and Child (1945) 30, 33 Mother and Child (1968–9) 30, 33 National Socialism 35, 106, 108 Permeke, Constant 35, 104, 106, 112, 116 ‘Phrygian Bonnet’ 104, 106 Realism 12, 24, 53, 104 Refugees (c. 1941) 107 relationship with Joan Eardley 24, 62 relationship with L S Lowry 24 relationship with Sheila Fell 24, 83 Rembrandt 108 Rouault, Georges Henri 30, 104, 106, 108, 112 Street Scene, Ystradgynlais (1945) 30, 37 Study of a Miner (1951) 49 The Welsh Miner (1948) 26, 28, 47, 49 Warsaw 24, 104, 106, 108 Welsh miners 15, 24, 51, 83, 108, 112, 116, 145 workers as inspiration 104 Ystradgynlais, Wales 11, 20, 24, 26, 30, 33, 51, 104, 108, 116, 140 Heron, Patrick 10, 12 Hockney, David 65 Hodgkin, Dorothy 28, 81, 83, 141 Hyman, James 14, 140, 141, 143

I Immigrants 18, 20, 24, 96 Cypriot 24, 96 Irish 96 Jewish Refugees 11, 90, 106 Pakistani 24, 96 West Indian 18, 24, 96, 140, 142

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J Johns, Jasper 65

K Keynes, Maynard 10, 140, 143 Klee, Paul 10 Knapp, Helen 125 Kollwitz, Käthe 35, 62, 65, 98, 106, 116 Kossoff, Leon 10, 12, 90 modernist realism 12 Kynaston, David 20, 140, 143

L Lamb, Henry 50 Lambirth, Andrew 35, 108, 145 Lancashire 49, 140 Lanyon, Peter 10, 13, 15 sport and art 13 Lefevre Gallery 49, 124, 125, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146. See Lowry, L S; See Herman, Josef

left-wing 35, 98, 104, 106, 116. See Berger, John; See Frankfurther, Eva; See Herman, Josef

Léger, Fernand 10 Lessore, Helen 50, 83, 141, 144 Listener, the 46, 48, 49, 50, 140, 141 Listener, the 46 London Group, the 24, 140 Long, Richard 13 Lowry, Laurence Stephen 11, 12, 14, 15, 16,

18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 33, 35, 36, 39, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 83, 84, 96, 106, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146

A Landmark (1936) 128 Alex Reid & Lefevre Ltd 124, 140 Ann, portraits of 26, 127 A Protest March (1959) 33, 44 A Tribute to L.S. Lowry held at Monks Hall Museum 49 Band Stand, Peel Park, Salford (1925) 123, 125 City Gentlemen (1963) 23, 26 Coming from the Mill (1930) 122 Coronation, Elizabeth II 24 Daisy Nook 120, 124 Figures in a Street (1960) 30, 120, 121, 129 Fonteyn, Margot 26 future 120 Houses in Broughton (1937) 123, 124 identity 18 ‘incident’ paintings 122, 129 Industrial Landscape: River Scene (1950) 49 industrial scenes 15, 30, 49, 122, 124, 128, 129 London Group, the 24 Lowry and Herman exhibition, 1943 24, 125, 140 Lytham St Annes 128 Manchester 20, 24, 26, 120, 122, 123, 129 Manchester School of Art 122, 129

Man Lying on a Wall (1957) 128, 129 modernity 18, 120 on painting figures 122 Pall Mall Property Company 122 Peel Park, Salford 123, 125 Pendlebury, Greater Manchester 49, 122, 123 Portrait of a Young Man (1955) 33, 126 relationship with Josef Herman 24, 106, 124, 125 relationship with Sheila Fell 14, 24, 26, 83, 128 Royal Technical College. See Salford School of Art Salford 16, 18, 25, 49, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131, 141, 142, 146 Salford School of Art 122, 123 Seascape (1952) 128 Sunderland 129 Taylor, Bernard 122, 144 The Cripples (1949) 129, 131 The Lodging House (1921) 122, 123 The Walking Woman (1936-4) 33, 36 Trafford, Greater Manchester 122 Two Heads 25, 26 Victoria Park, Manchester 122 Woman with a Shopping Bag (1956) 129 Lyons Corner House 18, 20, 88, 96, 98

M Macaulay, William 69 Manchester 14, 20, 24, 26, 49, 120, 122, 123, 129, 141, 145

Manchester City Art Galleries 49, 145 Mané-Katz, Emmanuel 106, 108 Marshall, Micky and Tilly 128, 146 Martin, Kenneth and Mary 12 Mason, F Bateson 10, 90, 142 Mathieu, Georges 13 Meidner, Ludwig 106, 142 Middleditch, Edward 12 minimalism 83 Modernist realism 12 Bacon, Francis 12 Freud, Lucian 12 Giacometti, Alberto 12 Moore, Henry 12 Modigliani, Amedeo 62 Monks Hall Museum, Salford 49, 141, 146 Moore, Henry 10, 12, 15, 49, 106, 140, 141, 146 coal production 15 Mottram, Cheshire 11 Mullins, Edward 112 Munch, Edvard 104, 106

N National Assistance Board 24 National Gallery 50, 71, 110, 143 Newcastle 128, 142, 146

New Statesman & Nation, the 12, 46, 48, 51, 141, 143, 145, 146

Newton, Eric 46, 50, 51, 141, 143, 144 on Joan Eardley 51 on Sheila Fell 50 Nicholson, Ben 49

O Observer, the 46, 49, 50 Outsider, The (Colin Wilson) 33

P Paris 10, 13, 93, 106, 141, 143 Parsons Gallery, London 48, 143 Pasmore, Victor 12, 19 constructive artist 12 Permeke, Constant 35, 83, 104, 106, 112, 116 Peter Stuyvesant Foundation 13 Picasso-Matisse exhibition 10 Picasso, Pablo 10, 11, 13 Pitchforth, Roland Vivian 10, 90 Pollock, Jackson 65 Pop Art 13, 65, 83 Robertson, Bryan 13 Postwar art criticism abstraction and realism 11 Poverty 15, 18, 19, 98, 104, 140

R Rauschenberg, Robert 65 Read, Herbert 46, 49, 56, 141, 142, 143 ‘The Art of Art Criticism’, 1952 46, 141, 143 realism 11, 12, 13, 15, 19, 50, 53, 83, 104 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn 35, 96, 106, 108 Riley, Bridget 13 Robertson, Bryan 13, 96 Rothenstein, John 46, 49, 50, 141 on L S Lowry 49, 50 Rouault, Georges Henri 10 Royal College of Art 13, 142 Ruskin, John 46, 50

S Salon de Mai and Salon des Réalités Nouvelles 10 Hepworth, Barbara 10 Heron, Patrick 10 Lanyon, Peter 10 Sandbrook, Dominic 20, 140 Sandeman, Margot 71 Scrutton, Hugh 49, 50, 141 Simmonds, Doig 10, 140 Skiddaw, Cumbria 128 Smith, Jack 12 social realism 12

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Bratby, John 12 Greaves, Derrick 12 Lowry, L S 12 Middleditch, Edward 12 Smith, Jack 12 South London Arts Gallery 52 Soutine, Chaïm 62, 106 Spear, Ruskin 50 Spencer, Stanley 50 Steel, Dorothy 62 St George’s Gallery 48 St Martin’s School of Art 10, 13,

First World War 11, 69, 120 Second World War 69, 76, 120, 125 Welfare State 10, 96 Welsh miners 112, 116 Whitechapel Art Gallery 13, 52, 96, 106, 143, 145 New Generation exhibitions 13 Whitford, Frank 90, 98, 141 Working class 20, 26, 52, 53, 83, 116, 122

Y Ystradgynlais, Wales 11, 20, 24, 26, 30, 33, 37, 51, 104, 108, 116, 140

30, 74, 76, 90, 93, 98, 142

Auerbach, Frank 90 Chamberlain, Diana 10 Fell, Sheila 10, 26, 76 Frankfurther, Eva 10, 26, 30, 90, 93, 98, 142 Fraser, Donald Hamilton 10 Frink, Elisabeth 10 Kossoff, Leon 90 Mason, F Bateson 90 Pitchforth, Roland Vivian 10 Tilson, Joe 10 Stone Gallery, Newcastle 128 Sylvester, David 12, 46, 49, 50, 141, 143, 144, 146 ‘invasion’ of paintings from beyond London 49 on L S Lowry 50 on Sheila Fell 50

T Tachisme 13, 65 Francis, Sam 13 French Tachisme 65 Mathieu, Georges 13 Tate Gallery 13, 116 Modern Art in the United States. 1956 exhibition 13 Taylor, Bernard 122 critical tutor of L S Lowry 122 Tilson, Joe 10 Times, The 46, 50, 144 Townhead, Glasgow 20, 24, 30, 60, 62, 64, 68 Townhead children 20

V Valette, Adolphe 129 van Gogh, Vincent 10, 35, 83, 98, 106

W Wakefield 24, 125, 128, 140, 142, 143, 146 Wakefield City Art Gallery 125, 140, 142, 146 Wales. See Ystradgynlais Walker, Audrey 59, 64, 68 Walker, Lady Audrey 143 Wallis, Nevile 46, 49, 141, 143 review of Joan Eardley 49 war 10, 11, 15, 20, 62, 76, 88, 90, 106, 129, 140, 142

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FELL

FRANKFURTHER

HERMAN

LOWRY

edited by Sarah MacDougall

Refiguring the 50s

REFIGURING THE 50s

EARDLEY

Refiguring the 50s Joan Eardley Sheila Fell Eva Frankfurther Josef Herman L S Lowry

Cover image: Eva Frankfurther, West Indian Waitresses (detail)

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