Edwina Sandys’s Manhattan

Travel

Winston’s girl takes Manhattan

Artist Edwina Sandys, Churchill’s granddaughter, is inspired by her New York home and her great ancestor. By Anthony Haden-Guest

Art wasn’t Edwina Sandys’s first choice when it came to deciding on an occupation.

That was in the early ’70s, when she was married to Piers Dixon (1928-2017), son of the British Ambassador to France, with two sons.

‘I thought, what next? I should be doing something,’ says Edwina, 83. But what? ‘Then I thought, well, we’ve got a family business.’

Yes, indeed. Winston Churchill was her grandfather; she is the daughter of Diana Churchill (1909-63). Duncan Sandys (1908-87), her father, was a Cabinet Minister under Macmillan and Churchill, his father-in-law. Going for a seat in parliament was clearly the answer for Edwina, too.

She was chosen to contest a difficult seat in London’s East End. ‘I made a speech. I said striped suit and spotted tie will not win this constituency,’ she says. ‘As I was a different sort of person from the average Conservative toff, they’d be more likely to be interested in me.’ She was selected.

Except it wasn’t the answer. Piers Dixon had already been offered a chance

Edwina with Child, UN, New York, 1979 Inset: Winston and Edwina, far left, 1943

at a seat, but was informed by the constituency that the offer had been made on the assumption that the Dixons’ presence would be as a married couple and would be withdrawn if Sandys pursued her bid. He went on to be MP for Truro from 1970 to 1974. She withdrew, teary-eyed. But she held on to the magic markers, then rather a novelty, that she had been using on her electoral map to colour in the areas she had been to.

‘When I had to give up the seat, I did quite a few abstract drawings, on nice heavy paper,’ she says. These were her first drawings since childhood but they looked strong. So she framed and hung them.

Thus the accidental birth of Edwina Sandys, amateur artist. It is interesting that her grandfather had been Britain’s best-known amateur artist.

‘We used to watch him,’ she says. ‘It was a very lovely thing – because we saw him when he was at home and relaxed. He was a different person from when he was in the House of Commons. When he went on holiday, he took the canvases with him. He did them fairly quickly. He didn’t stay with one for a month or anything like that.’

Sandys’s birth as a professional artist was also sudden.

A friend who came round for a drink one evening owned a restaurant on the King’s Road, Chelsea, and told her of an ugly incident that very day. ‘All the paintings we had hanging in the restaurant were stolen,’ he said. He was looking around her walls as she commiserated. ‘Why

Pictures by Edwina Sandys: Winston at Work, 1991; Peregrine Worsthorne, 1973; Window Shopping, 1974

don’t we hang some of yours, Edwina?’ he proposed. ‘And we can sell them.’

The show sold out. ‘Mostly at £20 each, which was wonderful,’ Sandys says. She settled down to making sketches of her London life, vivid in colour and observation. Some are charged with a naughty sexuality, such as the woman with an open coat, apparently flashing at the window of the posh Jermyn Street shirtmakers Turnbull & Asser.

Others catch the likenesses of figures on the London scene, such as Sir Peregrine Worsthorne of the Sunday Telegraph and the writer and Colditz inmate Michael Alexander. Others are of those dear to her, like her sons, Mark and Hugo. She had soon had her first gallery show with the Crane Kalman Gallery, Andras Kalman’s space on the King’s Road.

Sandys’s move into sculpture was occasioned by a visit to the studio of an artist friend who worked in clay. ‘I said, “Oooh! That’s rather nice. Maybe I should have a go!” The first thing I did was a head. Out of my imagination. A woman in a hat. Then I did a man. No model. And then I thought, what should I do now? Oh, I’ll do a female Christ! Women’s lib was in the air at the time. So I did it.’ This was Christa. A naked woman on a cross.

Did Sandys work from a live model? ‘I didn’t have any models,’ she said. ‘I can do faces anyway. What I really needed were things like arms. So I looked at my own. And my feet. They are important on a cross. I made it in one week. Then we had it cast. In bronze resin, which wasn’t too expensive.’

In the mid-’70s, Sandys, now divorced, rented a house in Lucca, Tuscany. ‘A friend there told me, “You’ve done bronzes – but we’ve got Carrara round the corner and all that wonderful marble,”’ she says.

She made the trip but saw that she couldn’t replicate in marble what she’d been doing in clay or bronze. ‘I would spend my life carving.’ Many artists have this meticulously detailed grunt labour done for them by the Carrara craftsmen. ‘But I didn’t want to rely on their brilliance.’

No problem. She radically simplified her ideas. When working in bronze, she had made unusual use of negative space, building a figure from a head and an arm, with the body wholly absent. She would take this further in marble.

‘I got flat slabs of marble. I would draw a shape on one and get them to cut it out,’ she said. The block with its negative space would sometimes co-exist with the separated piece.

‘The important early one was Woman Free,’ Sandys says. ‘It’s a woman coming out of a block of marble. She’s polished. She’s free to go places. Free at last!’ In a later marble, Hands, one hand is growing out of the head while a cut-out hand replaces a breast.

Sandys showed this work in London, along with Christa, which provoked relatively few hostile reactions. She had been increasingly showing in America and in 1978 she moved to New York, part of an influx of Brits and other Euros into Manhattan – a significant element in the disco phenomenon.

There Sandys visited the Very Rev James Parks Morton, Dean of the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which he had made into a vital part of the city’s cultural life.

‘I went to see him in the cathedral,’ Sandys remembers. ‘And I said, “How brave are you?” ‘He said, “Well, try me.”

‘I said, “Well, how would you like to have Christa, the female Christ, in the cathedral?”

‘So he said, “Yes, I’d like to do that.” And we did.’

It made the papers, worldwide, while Dean Morton was on holiday. ‘And all hell broke loose. It even made the papers in Tokyo,’ Sandys says. ‘The junior bishop was looking after things. We got letters saying, “It’s wonderful … it’s dreadful … sacrilege…’ So the junior bishop said, “Please take the sculpture back.” It was there for less than a week.’

She drove off with the sculpture on the top of a car and kept it under her bed. In time, the letters, warmly pro or fiercely con, stopped coming.

Sandys was by now married to a New York architect, Richard Kaplan. They lived in a SoHo apartment – two floors, tall ceilings, reconfigured by Kaplan – long before a downtown move became modish. Their social life was energetic, her work life productive.

In 1979, the UN Year of the Child, through an Austrian friend at the UN Sandys got her first public art commission. ‘I went to Carrara and designed a large piece called Child. It was first of all set up at the World Trade Center but then we moved it to the UN School on the East River. It’s been there to this day.’

This was followed by a UN commission for a piece in Geneva and another in Vienna. She has recently had solo shows at New York’s Salomon Gallery and Iona Studio in Toronto.

Richard Kaplan died in 2016. They and the Christos were the best art marriages I have known. ‘It was very important for me, being married to Richard,’ Edwina Sandys says. She now lives in New York’s Chelsea Arts Club equivalent, the National Arts Club, surrounded by her work.

The sculpture of three breasts, carved from a flat marble slab, is on her windowsill with a view of Gramercy Park. A model of a project of long standing, The Freedom Circle, is on a coffee table. Based on Stonehenge, it will be a circle of 20-foothigh stone blocks, from which female figures have been cut out and stand free.

A recently completed canvas shows Shakespeare, painted in black and white, sitting at a green desk, writing a sonnet. This is part of a series of pivotal figures. The first is her grandfather, painted sitting in front of one of his best-known paintings, Bottlescape – a still life of, yes, bottles, including his favourite, Pol Roger champagne.

And the next subjects?

‘Einstein and Madame Curie.’ A woman. Well, of course.