Extreme Culture: Rolf and Margaret Gardiner

Tanya Harrod, an independent author and art historian, reflects on her project of writing a joint biography of Rolf and Margaret Gardiner, and explores how their lives entwined with artistic and political movements of the twentieth century. In Spring 2021, Tanya was awarded a senior fellowship by the PMC to support this research.

Rolf Gardiner (1902–1971) and Margaret Gardiner (1904–2005) are names that will be familiar to very different kinds of readers. Rolf Gardiner’s achievements have been debated by historians of organic farming and forestry. He is central to discussions of “Englishness” in the context of the folk dance and song revival as it developed in the early twentieth century. He also floats up as a link with the German youth movement in the 1920s and he has been categorised as a fellow traveller of the right in the 1930s. His sister, Margaret Gardiner, is recognised as an important patron and collector of modern art, but she will also be familiar to those investigating antifascism in Britain in the 1930s. After the Second World War, she emerges as a prominent campaigner for nuclear disarmament and against the continuance of the Vietnam War.

Why then research Rolf and Margaret Gardiner, in a double biography, given that the various literatures in which they are discussed make absolutely no connection between the two? One reason might be that to write about siblings is to investigate a relationship that is too often taken for granted. While there is an extensive literature on the Oedipal triangle and on mother–child relationships, siblings have been relatively little studied, despite the vital importance of what is often life’s longest relationship. Another reason for examining them in tandem is that their joint lives touch on a startling range of twentieth-century issues, as both sought to be modern and to make meaningful contributions to society – at home and in Europe. Brother and sister introduce us to painful decisions in personal politics, art, ecology, and the idea of Europe in their own time and beyond. Their activities thread through the twentieth century in ways that challenge simple assumptions about choice.

Rolf and Margaret were exceptionally close and their varied friendships with figures as diverse as the poet W.H. Auden, the writer D.H. Lawrence, the anthropologist John Layard, and the educator A.S. Neill were often intertwined. Their thinking was affected by new intellectual disciplines as they entered popular discourse, in particular psychoanalysis and comparative anthropology. Their marked and specific ideas about what constituted art and their responses to the visual world are of particular interest and helped shape their political ideas. If Margaret lent emotional and financial support to individual artists, Rolf reacted against the individual in favour of communitybased activity, making him an early advocate of socially engaged art. For Margaret, art resided in discrete objects – progressive painting and sculpture, taking in poetry and fiction – produced by remarkable individuals. She was a patron who also, unconfidently, wanted to be an artist of a kind herself, initially as a writer of short stories and biographical sketches and, intermittently, as a painter. Artists, writers, and intellectuals became central to her circle of friends. For Rolf, by contrast, art was to be embedded and anonymous, framed by ritual, and involving dance, song, and ways of cultivating the land and managing forests.

As a Cambridge student in 1921, Rolf Gardiner was already in revolt against what he saw as devastating societal failures in postFirst World War Britain. This led, although not inevitably, to an interest in ecology, good husbandry and, more ideologically, the repopulation of the countryside. In political terms, he looked abroad, becoming part of the conservative and anti-capitalist wing of the German youth movement. In 1928, his mother’s friend the artist Maxwell Ashby Armfield painted Rolf as a young wanderer with a rucksack and stick, a poetic visual record of the young Rolf Gardiner’s dream of revitalising the land. If Rolf saw art in terms of action, not least, in working among the unemployed in the North of England, Margaret was at first less certain, taking part in her brother’s enthusiasms, admiring his idealism.

Travelling in Central Europe in the early 1920s both Rolf and Margaret had seen the human devastation caused by the First World War. Both visited Vienna in the early 1920s to stay with their mother’s relatives. Rolf, however, longed to leave what he regarded as a decadent city, living briefly among the peasants of the South Tyrol. Margaret, by contrast, revelled in her mother’s circle of friends within a cultivated assimilated Jewish community. She befriended the artist Franziska (Franzie) Zach whose work in fresco and oil on canvas has a monumental quality, peopled with women working or bathing. This contact with an artist who was to die of complications caused by malnutrition in 1930 affected Margaret deeply. It was no coincidence that in the year Franzie died, Margaret first came to know the sculptor, Barbara Hepworth. She became a focus and inspiration, Margaret becoming a friend and a patron of both Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. She also became an activist against fascism, serving from 1936–1940 as the secretary of For Intellectual Liberty.

Rolf’s interests and loyalties were put to the test in 1933. His friend and mentor Georg Götsch ran the Musikheim in Frankfurt an der Oder, its medieval-modern buildings designed by Walter Gropius’s colleague Otto Bartning. There Rolf and Götsch taught early dance and folk dance and polyphonic music in a progressive spirit: “Why should not the re-discovery of Josquin des Pres or the old ballad-form prove the height of modernity?”. As an admired place to train teachers and youth groups, it immediately came under surveillance when Hitler took power. Rolf was to endorse the so-called German Revolution in order to help save the Musikheim, writing, at Götsch’s suggestion, to Joseph Goebbels in its defence. His unconditional love of Germany subsequently led him to support National Socialism in the British press, bringing about a parting of ways with Margaret that kept them apart for more than a decade.

Margaret’s tastes, achievements, and way of living now seem uncontroversial and can be celebrated. Rolf’s causes and enthusiasms hardly appear part of a progressive twentieth-century narrative. As an anti-modern modern, an intellectual anti-intellectual seeking older less rational forms of wisdom, world events overtook him. Only now does it seem possible to analyse his political and artistic trajectory.

Writing about Rolf in relation to Margaret helps us understand them both and also suggests the contingency of their shared desire to do good politically and artistically. Both live on, Margaret through her collection of art at the Pier Arts Centre on Orkney and Rolf through his writing about good husbandry, more relevant than ever, and through the forested landscapes around Cranborne Chase in Dorset, still farmed organically by his son, the conductor John Eliot Gardiner.

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Detail of Maxwell Ashby Armfield, Rolf Gardiner, 1928, tempera on board, with frame 61.5 × 34.2 cm, without frame 51.5 × 24 cm. Private collection. Image courtesy of the Estate of Maxwell Ashby Armfield / Bridgeman Images / Photo: Matthew Hollow (all rights reserved).

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“Going out to bring home the last sheaves of the harvest, Aug 34”, Gore Farm, 1934. Private collection. Photo: Matthew Hollow (all rights reserved).

Margaret and Rolf Gardiner hiking, circa 1919. Private collection. Photo: Matthew Hollow (all rights reserved).

Rolf Gardiner dancing a jig, late 1920s. Private collection. Photo: Matthew Hollow (all rights reserved).

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The Theatre Hall at the Musikheim, Frankfurt an der Oder, completed 1929. Architect Otto Bartning; furniture Erich Dieckmann; lighting Wilhelm Wagenfeld; wall colouring Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. Private Collection. Image © Atelier Leopold Haase & Co. Photo: Matthew Hollow (all rights reserved).

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Ramsey & Muspratt, Margaret Gardiner, inscribed on back “Xmas 1932”. Private Collection. Photo: Peter Lofts Photography / Matthew Hollow (all rights reserved).

Maxwell Ashby Armfield, Margaret Gardiner, for Maxwell Ashby Armfield, The Woodlanders, 1911, pencil on paper, 22 × 17 cm. Private Collection. Image courtesy of the Estate of Maxwell Ashby Armfield / Bridgeman Images / Photo: Matthew Hollow (all rights reserved).

Barbara Hepworth, Two Heads, 1932, cumberland alabaster, 30 × 37.5 × 22.7 cm. Collection of The Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney (PAC 015). Image courtesy of Barbara Hepworth © Bowness (all rights reserved).

In this conversation, Sussan Babaie and Holly Shaffer reflect on art history as a methodology for approaching ephemeral and multisensory art forms, considering the example of food. They first explored this subject together in January 2023, at an event in the Paul Mellon Centre series titled “New Directions in Art History”. Sussan is Professor in the Arts of Iran and Islam at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and Holly is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University.