ENID MARX
Women designers and the popularisation of ‘folk arts’ in Britain 1920 - 1960.
This event, a collaboration between Manchester School of Art and Compton Verney in Warwickshire, examines the problematic relationship that objects of material culture associated with the terms ‘folk art’ and ‘vernacular design’ have within debates about artistic value in British visual culture. It concentrates on the re-emergence of an interest in folk art, especially amongst women designers, in Britain in the first half of the 20th century, and looks at the way that both ‘folk art’ and particular types of design activity practiced by women have been omitted from traditional historical narratives of art and design.
ONE DAY SYMPOSIUM
The curatorial work and collections of women designers and educators during the early half of the twentieth century is one example of what Ellen Lupton calls the ‘intangible contribution’ women have made to the field of design. Noteworthy names in this respect are , Enid Marx, Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher, Olive Cook, Peggy Angus, Pearl Binder, and Barbara Jones. All were design practitioners and private collectors, who found little interest during their lifetimes from the art establishment in legitimising the work their collections centred around.They nevertheless mounted their own small exhibitions and published books and articles to publicise the works to a wider audience (see Myrone, 2009).
AND HER CONTEMPORARIES
COMPTON VERNEY, WARWICKSHIRE FRIDAY 13th SEPTEMBER 2013
These collector/practitioners took creative and practical inspiration from the objects and images as aesthetic and culturally significant designs, but they also had a professional interest in the way that they had been made. Their collections were useful to the women in their profession as designers as well as ‘experts’ and educators. One of the aims of the event is to interrogate the relationship between the ‘discerning eye’ of the collector and creative practice.
9.30 REGISTRATION 10.00 - 10.15 WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION 10.15 - 10.45 Penny Sexton: Curating the Marx/Lambert collection
PANEL 2B INTERIOR VIEWS Louise Campbell Jane Hattrick Jessica Kelly
SESSION ONE
15.00 - 15.15
BREAK
SESSION THREE
15.15 -16.45
11.00 - 12.30
PANEL 1A CREATIVITY AND COLLECTING Anwyl Cooper-Willis Liz Mitchell Linda Brassington PANEL 1B FOLK LEGACIES Lou Taylor Marie Mcghloghin Carolyn Trant 12.30- 13.30
LUNCH
SESSION TWO
13.30 - 15.00
PANEL 2A FIELD STUDIES Desdemona McCannon Anne Sudrow Harriet Cory-Wright
PANEL 3A WOMEN, DESIGN AND INDUSTRY Lotte Crawford Fiona Hackney Amanda Girling Budd PANEL 3B EVERYDAY CREATIVITY Jane Webb Stephen Knott Rosemary Shirley
17.00 -18.00
PLENARY SESSION
CREATIVITY AND COLLECTING Jane Webb Anwyl Cooper- Willis • Liz Mitchell • Linda Brassington
The three papers in this panel, by Anwyl Cooper- Willis, Liz Mitchell and Linda Brassington, contextualise connections between collecting, creativity and pedagogy through presenting biographical narratives of three women who were successful writers, designers, and educators. The particular circumstances of their lives and achievements are considered in a series of case studies. These women belong in the canon of influential 20th century designer/authors, without doubt. However, this claim is nuanced by the consideration of the nexus of institutional, social and personal conditions that facilitate or hinder the life of a professional creative, and perhaps help us extend the definition of design away from an industrial model of design towards seeing it as a more inclusive and diffuse set of creative practices.
Panel 1A
Anwyl Cooper-Willis
Liz Mitchell Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design (MIRIAD)
Susan Williams-Ellis, Stoke potter and Folk Art afficionado
My mother saw herself as a modern designer, but the Marx-Lambert catalogue could almost have been of her collection. There are close parallels between my mother’s and Marx’s careers. Both were freelance book illustrators and designers of textiles, carpets and other homewares. Both had a discerning eye for British pottery, treen, cast iron, and all the miscellany of shells, christmas ornaments and pictures. Susan’s family were appreciators of craft. Her maternal grandparents, Stracheys, were fringe Bloomsburyites and had a serious interest in the Arts and Crafts movement. Her father Clough Williams-Ellis’s earlier designs show an influence of vernacular architecture in the style of Voyesy and Lutyens. He also was a collector of craft objects. After seeing a Botticelli at the age of eight, Susan decided to become and artist. Later, she realized, in the spirit of William Morris, she wanted to make excellent design available to ordinary people. My parents started Portmeirion Potteries 1960. Susan produced two game-changing designs. In 1963 Totem set the tone for ceramics in the 1960s. All those coloured glazes with raised or overprinted all-over designs were ‘inspired’ by Totem. Out went the pale pastels and tentative florals which had been the mainstay of Stoke potters for the previous three or four decades – now everyone wanted sturdy bold ware in strong earthy colours. Botanic Garden, launched in 1972, was the forerunner of the tide of botanical florals that washed over the 1970’s and into the eighties, including Laura Ashley chintzes and the Diary of the Edwardian Lady. Susan’s influence on mid twentieth century design has never been fully acknowledged, perhaps as a result of being both female and a Stoke potter.
Born inWales, largely educated in England.After a slightly mis-spent youth ended up in America. Spent 10 years there and in Canada in biological research. Returnedto Stoke-on-Trent to work with the design team at Portmeirion Potteries for the next 17 years or so.During this time designed a few shapes and the Christmas pattern. In 2006 went back to the beginning and did degrees in fine art; BA and MA.
Creativity and Wonder: The handicraft collection of Mary Hope Greg
“Machine made things can never take the place of handmade ones. We cannot put our love of beauty or true worth into a machine made article. We can make useful, true, accurate things but the higher, nobler satisfaction is only to be found when we work with our head & hands & heart.” So wrote collector Mary Greg in the preface to Manchester Art Gallery’s Catalogue of Handicrafts of Bygone Times in 1922. Greg is a little-known figure in the histories of collecting, craft and education, overshadowed by her husband, the renowned ceramics collector Thomas Tylston Greg. However, recent research has revealed that she was a prolific and passionate collector of domestic, traditional and artisanal crafts and manufactures during the early years of the 20th century. Her lifetime, from 1850 to 1949, spanned a period of extraordinary social, economic and cultural change; from Queen Victoria to George VI through two world wars, votes for women and the spread of industrialisation through town and country. A dedicated follower of John Ruskin, she developed a lifelong commitment to preserving the material culture of disappearing ways of life, the humble and everyday ‘things of the least’. At the age of 72, recently widowed, she gave nearly 2,000 such objects to Manchester, marking the start of a relationship with museums and galleries across Britain that lasted until her death nearly thirty years later. Mary Greg was not a professional maker, but she did make things. This paper will consider aspects of creativity within the Mary Greg Collection, from the preservation of domestic and artisan-made everyday objects, to Mary’s own making and the creativity inherent in the making of a collection. It will draw on attitudes to the redemptive capacity of handwork, both in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and in present-day craft writing as, for example, evidenced in the recent V&A publication Power of Making (2011).
Liz Mitchell is a freelance curator and writer on craft and decorative art. She is currently researching her PhD on the handicraft collections of Mary Hope Greg at Manchester Art Gallery, where she was previously Interpretation Manager and Decorative Art Curator. Liz has written widely on the subjects of craft, design and museums, for journals and magazines including Ceramic Review, Journal of the Society of Decorative Arts, Journal for Heritage Interpretation and the Times Educational Supplement. She has curated several exhibitions including Stephen Dixon: The Sleep of Reason; Visual Dialogues: Grayson Perry and most recently The Art of the Potter at Gallery Oldham.
Linda Brassington
Source collections of women textile artists in the 20th century: ‘my favourite things’ or an embodiment of creative reflection?
The social theorist, Baudrillard describes a collection as ‘a personal microcosm’ in which the collector ‘seeks to piece together his world’. The Textiles Collection at the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham includes artefacts with important provenance in the context of 20th century design. Previously owned, and subsequently bequeathed, by Muriel Rose and textile artists from the inter-war years, Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher, followed by Marianne Straub and Susan Bosence in the post-war period, these objects reveal personal stories and connections with creative practices in the last century. Significantly, the majority of these artists’ source collections originate from other continents and cultures, suggesting an empathy with histories and communities outside their own experience and heritage. Brought together as a learning resource, their legacy continues in the context of education through the development of contemporary practice, stimulating new approaches to making and encouraging re-interpretations of folk art in the 21st century. This paper considers the relationship of collections to their owners. Through references to objects, it explores factors influencing the work of those female practitioners who, as Christopher Frayling describes them, became a group of people who found out for themselves that the headlong rush towards novelty, and outrage, and quantity rather than quality, was not part of a race they wished to join’.
Linda Brassington has developed a long career in higher education, principally as Senior Lecturer in Printed Textiles at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, where she continues to contribute as a visiting tutor. Her research spans historical and contemporary practice, including international consultancy and publications for the Crafts Council. This paper coincides with her current research towards Studies in Form and Substance, an exhibition of the teaching collections supporting textiles and ceramics at the Crafts Study Centre, UCA Farnham, from 23rd July to 28th September 2013.
Notes
FOLK LEGACIES Amanda Ravetz Lou Taylor • Marie Mcghloghin • Carolyn Trant
The papers by Lou Taylor and Jo Gladstone, Marie McGholghin and Carolyn Trant explore the legacy and impact of folk collections in a series of encounters. The speakers are daughters, students and friends of Pearl Binder, Muriel Pemberton and Peggy Angus respectively, and their outlook is at once intimate but also framed through their own academic practice. All speakers discuss the impact of the designers’ interest in folk and their subsequent work within education and the design industry, acknowledging the crucial contributions that they made to genres of design practice within education, and design philosophy and practice.The three papers tell individual stories but of three women who were friends with each other, thus simultaneously painting a picture of the wealth of knowledge, experience and confederation of women designers, that is often underrepresented in mainstream design history. Yet, though it is certain that these women belong in the canon of influential 20th century designers and authors, however this claim is nuanced by the consideration of the nexus of institutional, social and personal conditions that facilitate or hinder the life of a professional creative. As such perhaps these papers also help us extend the definition of design away from an industrial model towards understanding that is a more inclusive and diffuse set of creative practices.
Panel 1B
Lou Taylor
Pearl Binder (1904-1989), Satirical Graphic Artist, Illustrator, Writer and her Collection of ‘Folk Art.’
From a poor Jewish family, and leaving school at 16 to become a clerk in a textile warehouse, Pearl Binder studied graphic art at free evening classes at Manchester School of Art in about 1922-25. Moving to London, she struggled in her first few years as a freelance illustrator in the late 1920s, whilst attending free lithography evening classes at the Central School of Art in the 1931-35 where she was involved in founding the Artists International Association. Her first success was in a series of lithographs of the Jewish East End published in 1932 and 1935, supported by Elsie and Bronislaw Malinowski. Her friends included Peggy Angus, Jim Fitton, A.L. Loyd and David Bomberg. Pearl Binder was already by then fascinated by English circuses, fun fairs, Stoke figures, Jewish East End life and music halls. This presentation will made by Lou Taylor, Pearl Binder’s youngest daughter and Professor of Dress and Textile History at the University of Brighton. It will examine Pearl Binder’s collecting practices, her use of her collection and her interest in popular culture from all over the world through her surviving artefacts, her travel sketches and diaries and through photographs.The Pearl Binder Archives are currently being placed in the Design Archives of the University of Brighton. The assessment will go on to chart Pearl Binder’s later life as a politician’s wife, mother and supporter of the Pearly Kings and Queens of London, artist, collector and world traveller. From her first visits to Paris in the 1926 and to Moscow in the mid 1930s, she went travelled in Poland, China, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Australia, Fiji, Rabi Island and elsewhere. She collected ‘folk art’ wherever she went and has left behind many travel drawings, letters and journals. Themes will focus on Pearl Binder’s collecting practices as representative of Belk’s ‘extended self ’ and on aspects of her collection as an auto/biographical memory of her life and passionate interests.
Lou Taylor is author of The Study of Dress History and Establishing Dress History, Manchester University Press, 2002 and 2005. Josephine Gladstone [Elwyn Jones} is author of Life: Its Nature, Origins and Distribution (Contemporary Science Series),1971; Zadig,Jackanory Story Books, 1976; Chi Ming and the Tiger Kitten, Dobson, 1964, Chi Ming and the Jade Earring, Dobson, 1968 and, co-authored with Francis Gladstone, Red King’s Dream, Lewis Caroll in Wonderland, Pim, 1996.
Marie Mcghloghin University of Brighton
Fashion: An Unsophisticated Art?
Muriel Pemberton arrived at the RCA just as Enid Marx left. Like Marx she was accepted into the Painting School; ‘it was really unacceptable to be in any other’ said Marx. But after a year Pemberton made the extraordinary decision to change to the less well regarded Design School arguing that as a woman in need of an income she needed to study a ‘practical art’ . Rather than follow a traditional craft like textiles or pottery Pemberton wanted to study fashion design. As there was no curriculum for this at the RCA Pemberton wrote one, based on drawing, pattern cutting, museum study and the less easily defined consumption and marketing of high fashion. She was to gradually introduce this curriculum to St Martin’s from 1931, was to remain there until 1975 and influenced the teaching of fashion throughout the UK from her position on government bodies. Her contribution to the current high status of British fashion design is incalculable. Pemberton was also an illustrator of note, covering both Dior’s ‘New Look’ and the Royal Wedding, of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip of Greece, in 1947. Her drawings appeared in the News Chronicle under the heading ‘Drawing by Pemberton’. This use of an ungendered surname was unusual for a woman at that time.This alone would assure her contribution to the ‘unsophisticated arts’. She gradually relinquished her illustration career for one of teaching and painting. She was to remain a painter all her life, exhibiting more than 50 paintings at the RA Summer Shows, often Sussex landscapes like those of her RCA tutor Eric Ravilious. As a neighbour of Peggy Angus and friend of Pearl Binder, her position within a cohort of British women whose ‘intangible contribution’ to British design should be acknowledged is without doubt.
Marie’s PhD at the University of Brighton; ‘Fashion, the art school and the role of Muriel Pemberton in degree level fashion education’ was supervised by Professor Lou Taylor who, like Marie, studied Fashion Design under Pemberton at St Martin’s School of Art. Marie has worked as a freelance designer, and as a maker and researcher of period film and TV costumes. Her MA, at Winchester School of Art, was on the Utility Scheme. She now works as a lecturer at the University of Brighton, specialising in twentieth century and contemporary fashion with a particular interest in the crossover between art and fashion.
Carolyn Trant
Peggy Angus: Art for Love
This paper will look at the reasons why Folk Art was so important for her own designs, her teachingand her political philosophy. For her it was not a historical curiosity to be collected but a living tradition. Her art syllabus for schools included investigating all kinds of art well outside the western canon, from cake decorating to face painting and items made for festivals that were not designed to be preserved...”..in this world so cluttered up with paper and concrete consumable art like cakes and bonfire effigies have much to recommend them...”Ideas about medieval craftsmen were behind her designs for the Festival of Britain (tiles for the Susan Lawrence School – a ‘Live Exhibit’); and for the British Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Exhibition. However she was not a reactionary and she was working with modernist architects who were excited by what she was doing.Radical politics and a trip to Russia in 1932 lay behind her aesthetics ; along with a scholarship to study Folk Art in Java and Bali in 1960, they nurtured her ideas that ‘Everyone is an Artist’. In 1973she set up her ‘People’s Workshop’/Community Art School in London, Camden, alongside creatingher own wallpaper designs.Despite her campaigning, lecturing and militant letter-writing, her uncompromising stance and steps she took to remain defiantly ‘outside the system’ were of course the very thing that mitigated against her ideas being taken seriously by the society she was vehemently interested in.She continued to champion anonymous makers of ‘Art for Love’ – art not produced primarily to sell,with a belief that “unless we learn from them we will all go mad”. Current government initiatives to make artists ’ Business Ambassadors for Britain’ show just how prescient she was in seeing and fighting against the relentless commodification of our culture.
Carolyn Trant is an artist (Slade graduate) and the biographer of Peggy Angus - She was her pupil, apprentice, wallpaper printer and amanuensis, ‘Art for Love’ - Incline Press 2004. Carolyn also contributed to ‘The Cultural Life of Images’ ed. Molyneux, Routledge 1997. She makes Artists Books, using stories from myth and popular culture, and on collaborations with contemporary poets. Her books are in V&A National Art Library, Tate, British Library and USA Library of Congress, and many other private collections and University Institutions across the UK, USA and Europe. She runs Lewes Printmakers, producing community books about local distinctiveness and ecology.
Notes
FIELD STUDIES Rosemary Shirley Desdemona McCannon • Anne Sudrow • Harriet Cory-Wright
This panel, with papers by Desdemona McCannon, Anne Sudrow and Harriet Cory Wright considers the ways in which women designers participated in and facilitated narratives of national identity. At the same time as the Mass Observation Unit was giving voice to thousands of ‘ordinary’ Britons to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’, several women writer/illustrators were engaged in creating a parallel set of narratives- collecting, documenting and illustrating what could be termed ‘lore’- the haptic knowledge embedded in the practices of everyday life. Publishing for the mass market, books such as Barbara Jones’ The Unsophisticated Arts (1951) and Enid Marx and Margaret Lamberts’ English Popular Art (1946) popularised the idea of an national ‘genius’ for design, and their illustrations contributed to a lexicon of images surrounding ideas of national identity. However the consideration of this ethnographic documentation of ‘British-ness’ is complicated by the transnational agenda of modernism, and the ways in which Britain looked to the design cultures of other nations- specifically Germany- are considered in relation to its impact on industrial design and publishing in Britain immediately after the second world war.
Panel 2A
Desdemona McCannon Manchester School of Art
The Jobbing Artist as Ethnographer: Documenting ‘Lore’
This paper will look at the illustrated writings of several professional women designers who wrote about ‘folk lore’ within the period 1920- 60, most notably the work of Dorothy Hartley (specifically Made in England) Enid Marx (English Popular Art) , Barbara Jones (The Unsophisticated Arts) and Pearl Binder (Odd Jobs). The women in question were producing these books at the same time as the Mass Observation Unit was capturing the voices and opinions of ordinary men and women in an attempt to create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’ (Harrison 1937). Their work also shares a concern for documenting and preserving the material culture and skills that are felt to be passing out of popular memory in Britain. There was a turn towards ‘Recording Britain’ (Palmer 1946) through its material and ‘folk’ culture, looking to rural crafts and the landscape for a lexicon of images through which to define a nationhood which it was felt was under a dual threat from industrialisation of domestic life and ideological invasion from hostile political forces. I propose to characterise the ways in which illustration is used in these books to document ‘folk’ culture and haptic ‘lore’.This interest in knowledge that is often overlooked precisely because it is non verbal and generates no literature only ‘patterns’, can be seen in various modes of representation in the women’s illustrations. For instance narrative images of people ‘at work’, the illustration of procedures and haptic knowledge, technical drawings of operational structures and objects, and the documentation of material culture through drawings and paintings rather than photographs. Although there is a body of writing about the use of photography, film and sound technologies in capturing anthropological ‘field work’ (Pink, 2000, Ravatetz 2012) there is relatively little critical writing that considers the types of drawings that could be classed as ethnographic illustrations. The personality and opinions, of the artist/ participant/ observer is ever present- partisan, affectionate and knowledgeable, identifying herself as a participator as well as an observer of the traditions and lives being documented. Desdemona McCannon is a Senior Lecturer within the Contemporary Art History Department at Manchester School of Art specialising in Illustration and print cultures. She is currently studying towardsa Phd at MIRIAD investigating the presence of ‘folk arts’ within contemporary visual culture and is co-authoring a book on the subject with Rosemary Shirley. She is also a practising illustrator and curates the zine ‘Ministry of Frogs’.
Anne Sudrow Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, Germany Looking abroad: Enid Marx’s and Margaret Lambert’s Assessment of Design, Craft Education and Folk Art in Germany In the summer of 1946 Enid Marx and Margaret Lambert were sent on a government mission to Germany. As part of a team of designers and design experts chaired by the German expatriate Nikolaus Pevsner, their official task was to evaluate German industrial practices, design education and German craft products for their quality of design. On their own initiative they also investigated German craft and folk art. Sponsors of the mission were the Council of Industrial Design (CoID) and BIOS, a British military committee for the investigation of science and industry in occupied Germany. The mission’s final report, which has only recently been found and published in its original English language,1 is probably the single most comprehensive source on the practice of industrial design in mid-twentieth-century Germany. Among a wide range of German consumer goods industries and design schools studied by the British mission over a period of six months, Marx and Lambert were responsible for examining fashion schools, art and craft education as well as craft exhibitions in the South of Germany and in Berlin. Further fields of their particular investigation were pottery, printing and textile products – i. e. areas that had been covered in their book ‚English popular and traditional art’ which was published in the same year. This paper shows how Marx and Lambert came to be members of the CoID expert mission to Germany and what was their contribution to its final results. It asks how they viewed German industrial design and assessed National Socialist popular art. It tries to establish whether Marx and another female member of the mission, Margaret Leischner, formulated particular views on the differences in the products and in the training of designers in Britain and Germany. How did they distinguish ‚good’ from ‚bad’ design? And how did this tie in with their own personal experiences as (female) design practitioners? Finally it proposes that we interpret the professionalisation of industrial design in the 20th century as a transnational process, in which female collectors and designers played a specific networking role.
Anne Sudrow received her PhD in History from the Technische Universität Munich and is currently a research fellow at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany. She is the author of several books and articles on the transnational history of consumer products. She recently edited a British report about a secret mission to occupied Germany by the early Council of Industrial Design, chaired by Nikolaus Pevsner. It was published in English and German in the publishing series of the Deutsches Museum, Munich (Wallstein Verlag).
Harriet Cory-Wright
The Golden Age of Stone: The women of Puffin Picture Books 1940-1965 This presentation will map the history of the dozen or so female practitioners that contributed to Noel Carrington’sPuffin Picture Books(1940-65)and assess the currency of their work within design practice, both within and beyond the 20th century. It will identify key examplesof their work and document an approach that was shaped by inter-war developments in artistic discourse and practice, as well as relevant trends within 20th centuryvisual communication; in particular, theappropriationof the folklore aesthetic cast through the modernistlens, and thoseelements that have influenced and fed concurrent concerns within art and design.ThePuffin Picture Booksopened up a direct dialogue betweentechnology, artist practiceand the dissemination of knowledge, with Carrington’saccelerated pursuitfor affordable, high-quality, well-distributed printed matter. Thissaw,amongothers,the work of Barbra Jones, Phyllis Ladyman and Margret Pottercommissionedto produce aesthetically progressive, didactic, engaging content for children’s books using complex autolithographic printmaking processes. These illustrations, drawn direct to the lithographic plate, achieve such an apparentfluencyandthoughtfulness,whilst necessitating such economy of line and colour show a remarkable level of draftsmanship and technical ability.The vocabulary of visual description that was developed amongst these practitioners sits at a point between the naturalistic and abstracted: the treatment of organic andmanmadeforms translate into a patchwork of tone, pattern and line. And, often, reflecting the visual conventionscharacterisedby the folkart tradition (see Mar Sikes’Pottery and its Makingand Peggy Hart’sThe Magic of Coal). The works seemingly live and grow within the vernacular British midcentury paradigm, and at the same time transcend it; with a growing sharedappreciationof the aesthetic sensibilities among contemporaryillustration and design cultures (see NoBrow’sAda),as well recentfacsimilere-issuesof a few titles from thePuffinlibrary.Though, for reasons that merit further investigation, seldom does one see these women’s work outside of the pages ofPuffin Picture Books,or discussed and celebrated within the wider art and design landscape, outside of specialistPuffin Picture Bookforums. Inview of this, this presentation will seek to investigate the visual and thematic concerns of these women’s practices, tracing the source of theirinceptionand their application to the content of thePuffin Picture Books.And how, the very same reasons fortheir omittancefrom critical recognition andappreciation,makes them figures of such reverence today. Since graduating from Camberwell College of Arts with a BA in Illustration Harriet has worked as a researcher, printmaker and curator. Her interests include autolithographic publications, visual theory and performative pedagogy. More recently, Harriet has been involved in curatorial, educational and research-based projects with Camberwell Press and the RCA.
Notes
INTERIOR VIEWS Liz Mitchell Louise Campbell • Jane Hattrick • Jessica Kelly
The setting for the three papers by Louise Campbell, Jane Hattrick and Jessica Kelly is the quiet domesticity of everyday life and the impact of home-making on the practices of both male and female designers. While the writers are not seeking to tie women to the home, they do propose how, in differing ways, the role of women was crucial in creating a convivial atmosphere in the home in order to engender (perhaps this is exactly the right word) a creative atmosphere in which both themselves and other male and female designers and artists could produce. In this respect they echo current literature that seeks to address the home as a complex, performative environment. In doing this, the writers also address oppositions that are often characteristic of writing on Modernist art and design. They challenge dichotomies of male/female, art/craft, rural/urban, and private/public, thus contributing to questions about Modernism and its relationship to the arts and crafts movement, craft of the 1930s and interior design.
Panel 2B
Louise Campbell University of Warwick
Winifred Nicholson: modernism, craft, place
Jane Hattrick University of Brighton
Crafting the Lives of Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher: Issues of gender, sexuality, self-presentation and interiors, 1923-1964.
Art historians associate Winfred Nicholson with the essay ‘Unknown Colour’ which she contributed under the name ofWinfred Dacre to the celebrated anthology of artists’ writings, Circle: international survey of constructive art in 1937, and with the abstract paintings she exhibited at that time. However she occupies a more interesting and complex place in the art world of the inter-war years. Trained as a painter at the Byam Shaw School of Art, Nicholson moved with her husband Ben and young child to a Cumberland farmhouse in 1924. Their domestic routines included designing and making rag rugs, making a wooden model of a Cumbrian cottage for their children and creating a vegetable garden. This was an existence which combined progressive aesthetics, Christian Science and the simple life. Ten years later, living in Paris, Winifred was instrumental in persuading Mondrian to contribute to Circle, and in bringing him to London in 1938, where he became part of the artistic community in Hampstead. Her relationship with Mondrian (which was greatly underplayed in the 2012 Courtauld Gallery exhibition exploring the artistic relationship between Mondrian and Ben Nicholson) was as friend, patron and interlocutor. This paper explores the significance of Winfred’s singular aesthetic – described as ‘the fusing of art and daily living’ - for her contemporaries, both artists and architects, the poet Kathleen Raine, and the collectors Helen Sutherland and Jim Ede, creator of Kettle’s Yard. It suggests the enduring resonance of the arts and crafts movement and the idealization of home as a place for creating and nurturing art and culture, and explores the importance of landscape and the domestic for British interwar modernism. Focusing on the relation between modern art, craft practice and textile design in the 1920s and 30s, it will discuss the traditional opposition between naïve and sophisticated art, figurative and abstract, country and city, regional and cosmopolitan.
The craft writer and curator Robin Tanner photographed the interiors of hand block-printed textile designer Phyllis Barron’s Gloucestershire home, Hambutts House, shortly after her death in 1964. Dorothy Larcher had shared this space with her partner in life and work, Barron, between 1930 and her death in 1952. Further images of their private intimate spaces reveal something of their identity as a couple and also their taste and identity as designers through their interior schemes, the use of their printed textiles, and the display of their collections and dried flower arrangements. Traditional lesbian stereotypes have been applied to both their selfpresentation and their work, with Barron described as ‘tall, handsome and commanding’ in her ‘close cropped hair and men’s brogues’ and Larcher’s ‘smaller figure…beautifully dressed’ in a floral print of her own design embroidered at the collars and cuffs. In their designs, Barron tended towards geometrical patterns and Larcher to plant motifs, which they also wore on their bodies in the form of garments. This paper will assess the impact of a designer’s gender and sexual identity on their creative output, and the reception of this work, through an examination of material culture pertaining to Barron and Larcher at the Crafts Study Centre in Farnham.
Louise Campbell studied art in Paris, History of Art at the University of Sussex and gained an MA and PhD from the Courtauld Institute. She teaches History of Art at the University of Warwick, is Honorary Vice-President of Friends of Coventry Cathedral and a member of the Cathedral’s Fabric Advisory Committee. Her interests include modern architecture, artists’ habitats and public art in the twentieth century, and she has published extensively on these topics. Her books include Coventry Cathedral: art and architecture in post-war Britain and Basil Spence: buildings and projects (co-authored with Miles Glendinning and Jane Thomas)
Dr Jane Hattrick is a lecturer in the History of Art & Design, and teaches both practice and history undergraduates and MA students. Her work on the London couturier Norman Hartnell analyses his fashion and royal designs within the context of his sexual identity and personal taste in interior schemes and decorative objects. Other research interests include the design and production of twentieth century couture; cultures of collecting; the display of fashion and dress in retail and museum contexts; LGBTQ life and style and the uses of archives and oral testimony in design history research.
These women, art school trained, produced textile designs for use across soft furnishings, table linen and dress, printed on a wide variety of textiles in weights and finishes appropriate to use, using natural dyes and reviving dyeing and printing techniques. Their source material included a large historical collection of old printing blocks, which were often exhibited with their work. Both women also drew inspiration from earlier “primitive” art forms including African and Indian patterns. Within the domestic ‘pastoral’ setting for the production of this ‘domestic modernism’ with a small ‘m’, Barron and Larcher designed everyday life for an avant garde clientele. Their work was sold through The Little Gallery in London and The Red Rose Guild in Manchester during the 1930s.
Jessica Kelly Middlesex University
Peggy Angus and Furlongs: a collage of the modern and the vernacular
From the early 1930s until her death Peggy Angus rented a small cottage called Furlongs on a working farm on the outskirts of Lewes in Sussex. For the years between 1934 and 1939 Furlongs became a gathering place for Peggy Angus and her husband, the architectural critic and editor James Maude Richards and their circle of friends which included Helen Binyon, Tazah and Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and a collection of other visitors including Myfanwy and John Piper. Both Peggy Angus and J.M. Richards are peripheral characters in the history of modernism in British art and architecture. I will argue that Peggy Angus in particular, and Furlongs cottage, were pivotal in the organisation of an avant-garde of British modernism in the 1930s. This paper will look specifically at the interior spaces of Furlongs cottage and explore the relationship between the decoration of these rooms and the cultivation of a specific approach to modernism amongst the group of artists, architects and critics who gathered in them. I will argue that the methodology of collage, which informed Peggy’s approach to the design of the cottage, describes the group’s approach to modernism and aesthetics more broadly. Through a comparison of the interior of Furlongs with that of Charleston, another countryside base for a group of avant-garde intellectuals, this paper will argue that Furlongs presents a specific and overlooked approach to modern aesthetics – one that embraced rather than rejected traditional vernacular art and design.
Jessica Kelly is Lecturer in Design History and Theory. Following a BA in History, Jessica graduated with distinction from the V&A/RCA Masters in Design History in 2007 with a dissertation which won the RCA Society + Thames and Hudson Art Book Prize. Jessica also won the Clive Wainwright Memorial Prize, 2006. In addition to her contribution to the research community at UH, Jessica’s external research activity includes participation in the AHRC funded Vienna Café research project at the Royal College of Art. In particular, Jessica is working on the organisation of an exhibition on the historical and contemporary Vienna Cafe, to be held at the Royal College of Art in October 2009. She is also a member of the conference team for Writing Design: Object, Process, Discourse, Translation, the Design History Society Annual conference to be hosted by the tVAD Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire in 2009. Jessica is completing a PG Cert in Higher Education and is an accredited supervisor, currently supervising a Research MA in fashion.
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WOMEN DESIGN AND INDUSTRY Lotte Crawford • Fiona Hackney • Amanda Girling Budd
The three papers by Lotte Crawford, Fiona Hackney, Amanda Girling-Budd concern the position of women within design and industry, emphasising their embrace of craft and folk art as characteristic of their practice and their work in a national setting.The papers question the classification of women’s design in a historical context as well as within a contemporary critical practice. Does gender, and the social positioning that results from it, create particular practices that are marginalised yet empowered by this peripheral status? These papers both explore this marginal state by focussing on it in design practice, on a national stage as social design and also the spaces in which design was seen and sold.They deal with issues around the amateur and professional and women designers working commercially across a range of media.
Panel 3A
Lotte Crawford
Fiona Hackney Associate Professor Design Cultures & Community Engagement, Falmouth University
The Unsophisticated Arts and the public space: Recording Britain, tube seats and the Social Use of Folk Art I propose to examine the work of women artists and designers such as Pearl Binder, Barbara Jones, Enid Marx and Evelyn Dunbar, with an emphasis on their development of a social use for ‘folk culture’ within design. Focusing on these artists’s impact on design during the interwar period and beyond, and using individual examples of their work that were purposefully made to connect art and national culture, I hope to put these artists into the context of their more formally recognized male peers such as Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Barnett Freedman. I will investigate the way in which these women’s specific interest in vernacular aesthetic and folk culture lead to their work being used for social design, commissioned by the British government. Examples will include Enid Marx’s 1937 commission from the London Passenger Transport Board to design moquettes for London tube seats, and the role of Barbara Jones and Enid Marx’s watercolour paintings for Recording Britain; a series of books commissioned in 1940 by the Ministry of Labour which aimed to record the British buildings and cultural heritage threatened by potential bomb damage during the Second World War. I am also interested in discussing this group’s perception of landscape and environment within their work, through Pearl Binder’s social reportage and illustrations of East London and through Evelyn Dunbar’s status as an official war artist and her portrayal of women. I would like to focus on the historical context of these designers, investigating their integration of political sentiments towards class and gender as well as their perception of ‘Folk’, which lead to the creation of work that was to be to be used in a functional, social and decorative sense.
Feminising the Public: British women designers in the 1920s and 1930s
Feminising the Public: British women designers in the 1920s and 1930s Enid Marx, writing in Craft History in the 1980s, recalled a “great florescence” in arts in the inter-war period describing looking back to it as “akin to looking through a Kaleidoscope, so many were the influences that had a share in altering the ways in which people thought and expressed themselves in all media.” Marx herself was fascinated by the cross-fertilization between the traditions of craft, folk art, African carvings, chap books, child art, textile and theatre design, for instance, and modern industrial design. She is perhaps the best known among many women designers who drew on such sources to shape a new language of mass production in distinctive ways. Women such as Dora Batty, Betty Swanwick, Henrietta (Herry) Perry, Irene Fawkes, Freda Beard, Althea Willoughby, and Minnie McLeish, were trained professionals who worked in diverse media (design for print, textiles, advertising, book illustration, engraving, poster and ceramic design) in the commercial arena. At a time when women achieved the vote on equal terms with men and a growing domestic economy targeted goods at female consumers, industry needed women such as these to appeal to an increasingly powerful audience of female citizens. One reason perhaps that Frank Pick at London Underground, Harold Curwen at the Curwen Press, and Crawford’s advertising agency employed large numbers of women. Hierarchies, nevertheless, persisted and women had to negotiate and strategize, developing a visual style that was considered simultaneously modern and suitably feminine; Batty’s work was praised for its “decorative feeling”, “personal manner”, and “charm”. This paper argues that in a period when private life took on new public forms, women commercial artists contributed to a feminisation of the public sphere, putting an alternative set of values, qualities and concerns at the heart of public life.
Finally I would like to discuss the commonalities between these artists in their collecting of folk objects and their shared belief in the need for a folk museum to exist for the public; examining the Marx Lambert collection at Compton Verney and the continuing impact of Barbara Jones’s Black Eyes and Lemonade at the Whitechapel Gallery. Lotte Beatrix Crawford is a London based illustrator and printmaker. She graduated from Kingston University with a First Class BA Hons in Illustration. Alongside her editorial work, she has designed murals and is currently recording the Modern churches of Basil Spence for the 20th Century Society. As well as being a practicing artist, Lotte is involved with research exploring the nature of English folk culture, with a focus on the social use of illustration and the possibilities of collaboration and the interdisciplinary.
Dr. Hackney is a design historian who works on gender, craft and print studies. Her research explores themes of cultural agency, community identity and everyday creativity, which are developed in the Material and Visual Culture research group that she co-convenes at Falmouth University. She is currently running a number of projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Forthcoming publications include ‘Quiet Activism and the New Amateur: The Power of Home and Hobby Crafts’ Design and Culture (2013) and a monograph on popular women’s magazines: Women’s Magazines and the Feminine Imagination: Opening Up a New World for Women in Interwar Britain, currently in preparation for I. B. Tauris (2014).
Amanda Girling Budd
An idiosyncratic exercise in shopkeeping: the forging of a new craft aesthetic at the Little Gallery
In the thirties designers were seeking to professionalise their activities through the establishment of bodies that would be recognised by industry. This drive towards legitimacy was being pushed along by men, and the emphasis was on design for manufacture and mass markets. Women were welcome at social networking events on the arms of their designer husbands, but were largely excluded either by regulation or custom from participating in the profession. Women’s input was mostly limited to the domestic sphere. A small number of women designers were determined enough or successful enough to gain recognition for their work through professional bodies, notably Enid Marx and Susie Cooper, both of whom won coveted Royal Designer for Industry awards, but many talented women chose to work outside this male dominated framework and the thirties saw the emergence of a network of independent women designers and craftswomen, working on their own or in partnerships, who were not reliant on the support and patronage of industry, but concentrated on high quality craft production, often in small workshops, often supported by family and friends, and nurtured by small scale retailers and gallery owners who shared their passion for high quality craft production. I propose to examine the work of women artists and designers such as Pearl Binder, Barbara Jones, Enid Marx and Evelyn Dunbar, with an emphasis on their development of a social use for ‘folk culture’ within design. Focusing on these artists’s impact on design during the interwar period and beyond, and using individual examples of their work that were purposefully made to connect art and national culture, I hope to put these artists into the context of their more formally recognized male peers such as Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Barnett Freedman.
Amanda Girling Budd has a PhD in Design History from the RCA, and until recently taught Contextual Studies to design students at London Metropolitan University. She is now an independent researcher, involved in craft practice and teaching, and has a particular interest in furniture history. Her current research interest though is informed by both design history and gender studies and concerns the network of women designers and craft practitioners in Britain in the thirties and their strategies for pursuing their careers in a male dominated world.
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EVERYDAY CREATIVITY Alice Kettle Jane Webb • Stephen Knott • Rosemary Shirley
This panel, with papers by Stephen Knott, Jane Webb and Rosemary Shirley, centres on the interlinked and multivalent relationships between Folk Art and Modernism and the professional and the amateur. Folk Art and processes of hand-making or crafting are often presented as oppositional to certain forms of Modernism, these papers however, seek to complicate this simple distinction. Differing motivations and intensions around engagements with Folk Art are explored by examining contrasting stances adopted by professional and amateur practitioners, from utopian alternatives to capitalist society to rural re-imaginings centring on private property and continuity. These papers show that from the designer’s studio to the village hall radical modernisms emerge in unexpected places.
Panel 3B
Jane Webb Manchester Metropolitan University
Crafting Folk: defining folk, craft and design
It is tempting to think about the relationship between Modernist design and the interest in folk art in the way that Timothy Mowl (2000) has characterised the views of Nikolas Pevsner and John Betjeman, as ‘stylistic cold wars’. But while there are obvious differences and even battles, this paper looks not at the mutual exclusivity of Modernism and folk, but at the philosophical legacy between them in the generation just prior to Enid Marx. Examining ideas, practice and texts that emerged from the colony of Chipping Campden and later Ditchling, with specific attention to the work of the ethnographer, writer, weaver and educationalist Ethel Mairet, this paper considers how issues of tradition, the hand and the machine, the status of amateur and professional, and the place of craft and design in society, discussed by this slightly earlier generation, ricocheted around in the ideas of Marx and Lambert and later literature aimed at the amateur or student of design and craft. Ultimately, this paper considers whether attention to the discourse on the professionalisation of craft and design practice through the middle decades of the twentieth century leads us to understand the definition and importance of ‘folk’ for designers like Marx, more clearly.
Stephen Knott Founder Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Craft, Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, University of Creative Arts Which vernacular? Professional and amateur appropriation of vernacular crafts, 1918-1939
Vernacular crafts in the inter-war period offered an alternative pathway to a career in art or design for women prevented from conventional courses of art education. Tanya Harrod has described how craftswomen, like Ethel Mairet (weaving), Phillis Baron, Dorothy Larcher (textile design), Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie and Norah Braden (ceramics), contributed to an inter-war ‘eclectic modernism’ by placing the handmade centre stage. This paper complicates this narrative by considering the much more diffuse appropriation of vernacular or traditional crafts among untrained or partially trained women who attended evening classes, weekly meetings at Women’s Institutes, craft fairs, or programmes of rural revival. I outline tensions and inter-relationships between coteries of women artists with radical intentions for their appropriation of the vernacular – for example, linking folk motifs with an interest in formal abstraction, progressive pedagogy, the union of art and life, and anti-capitalist critique – and occasional practitioners engaging in their own revival of presumed traditions of British village craft in their spare time. This comparison elucidates how the material culture of folkish arcadia has been mobilised to underpin divergent utopian imaginations, from those with pseudo-Marxist neo-Medieval undertones, to those well suited to suburban notions of private property. Different attitudes to skill and material are at stake too. For example, Mairet criticised the Women’s Institute for teaching methods of weaving that used readymade materials, and more generally challenged the sentimental, nostalgic, and therapeutic understanding of craft, seen as an antidote to modern pressures rather than a radical challenge to existing paradigms of production.
Jane studied anthropology and material culture before doing a PhD in design philosophy and Radical politics in the early 19th century in Britain. She specialises in teaching contextual studies to craft and design students and is also a freelance writer. She is currently working on a series of books about the collection at the Costume Gallery, Platt Hall in Manchester, to be published by Bloomsbury from 2015.
Stephen Knott is the Founder Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Craft at the Crafts Study Centre in Farnham, Surrey. He has recently completed research into the importance of evening classes, part-time and self-directed learning in crafts to the craftspeople represented in the Centre’s collection. He graduated from an AHRC-funded collaborative PhD at the Royal College of Art/ Victoria and Albert Museum entitled ‘Amateur craft as a differential practice’, in July 2012. He also teaches at the Royal College of Art, Kingston University and Camberwell College of Arts.
Rosemary Shirley Manchester School of Art
Golden Jubilee Scrapbooks from the WI
This paper centres on a set of scrapbooks created by the rural women’s organisation the Women’s Institute. They were made in 1965 by WI’s all over the country to celebrate the organisation’s golden jubilee, and were intended to provide a snap shot of village life at that moment in time. Now held in county archives or by the institutes themselves, the books reveal something of the complexity in how modernity has been felt in rural places, evidencing dramatic yet uneven changes in the landscape, in consumption and in the home. Part of the importance of these documents is that they articulate rural everyday life from a female perspective. The scrapbooks communicate how the world was represented to the rural women of the WI at this time, through media and consumer products and how they chose to represent their world to future generations. The scrapbooks are visually fascinating objects and in addition to the historical content of these documents this paper will discuss the idea of making or crafting as a way of accessing and recording alternative or unofficial histories.
Rosemary Shirley is a lecturer in Art History at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research centres on everyday life and visual cultures, with a particular emphasis on contemporary rural contexts. She is co-authoring a book on Folk Art and Visual Cultures with Desdemona McCannon, and her monograph Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Cultures will be published by Ashgate in 2014.
Notes
Acknowledgements We would like to thank Penny Sexton at Compton Verney for enabling the symposium to happen, and Penny Macbeth Head of Art at Manchester School of Art for supporting it. Thanks also to Simon Costin and Ruth Armontsky for their generosity with their advice and contacts. Also Abigail Woodhouse and Bethany Thompson for volunteering their time. Information about the ‘Folk Arts Research Network’ can be found at: http://folkartdesign.org/ To join the network please sign up here: FOLK-ARTS-RESEARCH-NETWORK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK