Still more lost British surrealists

A final dozen “lost” British surrealists, or quasi-surrealists, picked from an extended plod through the latter part of the alphabet on the BBC’s Your Paintings site. (Click for enlargements / slideshow. For the previous batches use the “surrealism” tab or go here and here.) Again, the qualifying period is the ‘thirties to ‘sixties, so none of that knowing ‘eighties pseudo-surrealism, which was essentially a post-modernist look promoted in art schools.

Edith Rimmington, The Decoy, 1948

Grace Pailthorpe, Salempics, 1936

Julian Trevelyan, Standing Figure with Ace of Clubs, 1933

Edith Rimmington has only one painting in public ownership, judging by the BBC site, and this is it. And barely half a dozen visible online, it seems. A great pity, given her considerable ability and her important role in the British surrealist movement. This one is not entirely typical, but it does exemplify the interestingly violent physicality of her images. Next, lest we forget, a nice item by Grace Pailthorpe, the other half of Reuben Mednikoff; I’ve featured Pailthorpe and Mednikoff in a previous post. And then an early piece by the always interesting Julian Trevelyan. Or interesting until the later years, perhaps; at this point Trevelyan was well in the surrealist mainstream, and very much into myth, mescaline and Mass Observation.

John Pemberton, Since the Bombardment, 1948

Josefina de Vasconcellos, The Foxes Have Holes

Oscar Mellor, The Inquisitors, 1955

Next, some extended perspectives, with and without extended shadows. Who was John Pemberton? Scottish, apparently, born 1908, died 1960. More I can’t say at the moment. But Since the Bombardment is a cracker. Josefina de Vasconcellos was best known as a Cumbrian sculptor, but here, interestingly, stock surrealist elements are employed to carry Christian content. But why not? No date given, though the mushroom cloud on the horizon suggests the immediate post-war period. Last in this trio is a typical trompe l’oeil piece by Oscar Mellor, a stalwart of the Birmingham surrealist group, and often remembered as a publisher of poetry, though his painting career was long and productive. Curvy chicks with their vests off feature largely in his paintings, as Google Images will quickly reveal, but his pics are always something more than banal surrealist porn. Well, almost always.

Peter Rose Pulham, Horse’s Skull, Sphere and Moon, 1941

William McCance, Hiroshima (Atom Horizon) 1947

Ralph Maynard Smith, Eclipse of the Winged Embryo, 1949

More wartime angst from Fitzrovian painter and photographer Peter Rose Pulham, represented by this single image on the BBC site. The animal skull is a recurring motif in British neo-romanticism, and this is a powerful version, with an appropriately photographic quality. Pulham knew the Paris surrealist scene, but seems to have been a more marginal figure in the British context. Angst of a post-war nuclear variety from William McCance, here working in a surrealist vein, though better known for his paintings of the ‘twenties, when his portraits borrowed strongly from Wyndham Lewis, alongside landscapes of shiny cuboid constructions. The troubled architect and painter Ralph Maynard Smith (1904-64) seems to have been quite outside organised surrealism, but his work, somewhat akin to that of Paul Nash, is well worth attention, and his legacy is now promoted by the Trust that bears his name, which maintains a revealing website.

Frederick Macdonald, Two Figures with a Machine, c1960

Gordon Onslow-Ford, Determination of Gender, 1939

John Melville, The Museum of Natural History of the Child, 1937

Frederick MacDonald is another mystery, with just this single canvas on the BBC site, painted around 1960. I like the surrealist atmosphere and the period feel of these scratchy mechanomorphs. Much better known is Gordon Onslow Ford, friend of Matta and surrealist insider, though his force-line automatism deserves higher billing.

To be fair, some of these names may be rather less “lost” than others. I’ve not bothered with Dorothea Tanning, John Tunnard or Edward Wadsworth as all too well known. I’ve also left out Conroy Maddox, whom in any case I consider (despite – or rather because of – his affected surrealist ultra-orthodoxy) a mere pasticheur. Nor am I fond enough of the squidgy doodles of Desmond Morris. Well, it’s my choice. But to finish the round dozen, here’s another Birmingham name that, admittedly, is not truly “lost” – John Melville, a number of whose paintings feature children bewildered by nature. Michel Remy describes The Museum of Natural History of the Child as “one of the key paintings of British surrealism”, though he doesn’t really explain why. On the BBC site the title of the painting is altered and the image is mirrored. I imagine that Melville, who made a very spooky drawing of Carroll’s Alice, would have enjoyed that.

Some more lost surrealists

Here’s a second batch of lesser known surrealists or quasi-surrealists, culled from a continuing trawl of the BBC’s Your Paintings site. (First batch here. More to come, no doubt.) Again, I’m keeping to the “classic” period (‘thirties to ‘fifties). Though all here lived and worked in the UK, not all were British nationals, so I’ve left the “British” out of this post. Enjoy, as they say. Click for enlargement or slideshow.

Augustus Lunn, Objects Observed on a Beach, 1945

Beatrice Glenavy, From the Sea, 1930’s

Fergus Graham, The Far Journey

Augustus Lunn is one of the many dismissed by Michel Remy, in Surrealism in Britain, as “constitutively incomplete” – surrealists by virtue of technique alone, lacking doctrinal rigour. In Lunn’s case, this seems particularly unfair. Though with Beatrice, Lady Glenavy, Dublin aesthete, pupil of William Orpen and friend of Katherine Mansfield, we are definitely at the decorative end of surrealism. She seems to have moved from late Pre-Raph to Catholic symbolism to a sort of twee deco, but for a while in the ‘thirties, she certainly flirted with surreality. But whatever the style, her work is always highly accomplished technically. With Fergus Graham, we seem to be at the fantasy end. Beyond a show at the Lefevre in 1935, I can’t say I know much more about him.

Margarethe Garthe, Nocturnal Scene, 1957

Hein Heckroth, Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, 1939

Thomas Esmond Lewinsky, The Mask of FLora

Ditto Margarethe Garthe, who was born in 1891, lived in Beckenham, had a show at the Loggia Gallery, London, in 1972 and died in 1976. Hein Heckroth, on the other hand, was a considerable name as an art director for film and stage, well connected with the surrealist movement and with other wartime emigrés. His film work has definite Dalinian tendencies, but this portrait opts for the full bonkers effect, with tweedy military theorist and historian Liddell Hart looking splendidly out of place among the pipes, severed ears and assorted squishy objects that litter the receding desert. Thomas Esmond Lowinsky is best known as a successful purveyor of cool, classical-deco whimsy, but this fine, tight little canvas, often on show at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, achieves rather more of a disturbing effect.

Rene Halkett, Untitled, 1938

Charles Houghton Howard, The Cavern, 1953

Sam Haile, Woman and Suspended Man, 1939

Poet and artist René Halkett (1900 – 1983) was a Bauhaus veteran who transplanted to Britain. Google-wise, he seems best known these days for his late collaboration with David J of the band Bauhaus, but drop his name into Google images and it’s clear that his artwork is well worth a browse, especially the earlier Dada stuff. American Charles Houghton Howard lived and worked in Britain before and after the war. His nicely clean cut biomorphism puts him at the abstract pole of surrealism, not too far from the messier and more instinctual Sam (Thomas Samuel) Haile, potter and night-time painter – the most pukka British surrealist of the lot in this selection. Remy’s chronicle rightly devotes several pages to Haile, who, he says, “aims at flaying and tearing surfaces to help vision become primary again”. Haile was a developed theorist, but his work is unsettlingly de-learned and outsiderish; it’s no surprise to find that he highly rated the work of fellow psychonauts Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff.

When Reuben met Grace

Reuben Mednikoff, 'King of the Castle', 1938

A word in honour of British Surrealism’s oddest couple, the wonderful Mednikoff and Pailthorpe. After Grace Pailthorpe, psychoanalyst and mother figure, and Reuben Mednikoff, painter and child substitute, fell for each other (despite – or maybe because of – a two and a bit decades’ age gap) at a party given in 1935 by Victor Neuberg (forgotten Swinburnean poet and ex-acolyte of Aleister Crowley), they embarked promptly on a decade and a half of heroically intensive mutual psychoanalysis, using automatic drawing and painting as their chosen therapeutic method; in the process they generated hundreds of extraordinary artworks and uncounted pages of notes and interpretations. Much of their delving involved regression to infantile or even intra-uterine experience, and in late 1936 they developed a shared baby-talk language called “Curucuchoo”, in which they wrote a number of texts.

Reuben Mednikoff

Grace Pailthorpe

When their direction was deemed to diverge from the orthodoxy then required of the British surrealist group, their summary expulsion from it was engineered by E L T Mesens, bumptious and untalented Trotskyist, self-appointed group leader and André Breton’s mini-me. In 1940 the pair fled to New York, returning to England after the war. In 1948, Mednikoff was “adopted” by his mumsy lover, changing his name to Richard Pailthorpe.

Mednikoff, 'Bulbous Figure', c 1935

It’s hardly surprising that after fifteen years of squelchy, labyrinthine navel gazing, their project wound up as a school of art therapy; finally in the mid-sixties it descended inevitably into new-ageiness as the old-age duo took to the sub-Theosophical teachings of Alice A Bailey. Grace Pailthorpe died in 1971. Reuben Mednikoff, perhaps unable to live without her, died a few months later.

There is only one book about them – Sluice Gates of the Mind, the expanded catalogue to the 1998 exhibition of their work at the City Art Gallery, Leeds. This is well furnished with colour plates and original documents; it contains three substantial texts, but owes most to the exertions of Andrew Wilson. It’s on offer in some places (like many art books) at hopelessly silly prices, but I managed an as-new copy for a tenner.

Short of this, a quick starting point might be this breezy review at artcornwall.org. More determined readers might try the 2010 PhD thesis on the pair by Lee Ann Montanaro, downloadable as a pdf from the University of Edinburgh. It’s an academic study, so it proceeds at a stately pace, but her research has been grounded most thoroughly in primary materials from the rich Pailthorpe and Mednikoff archive at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh, making this a highly informed piece of work. The only regret is that Montanaro cuts off her account at 1940. A curious side issue on which she sheds some light is the tangled fate of Pailthorpe and Mednikoff’s papers before they were acquired as an archive, in relation to the unpublished study of Dr David Rumney.

Mednikoff, 'April 21 1935 - 4'

At this distance, as Freudian and Kleinian theory slide away into the Museum of Discredited Ideas, the endless and obsessive interpretations and analytical descriptions of the drawings and paintings tend to shed their fascination. The detailed identifications of murky and brutal symbolisms – mother, anus, penis, faeces etc – are extraordinary and compelling in small doses, but there’s only so much of this stuff that you might want to read. It’s the images that last. Of the two image makers, Pailthorpe, being untrained, is the lesser artist, though much of her work has a naïve/brut appeal. But Mednikoff, with the skills and experience of a commercial artist, brings an excitingly convincing plasticity to his automatic squiggles, which morph wonderfully and tonally into three dimensions, or suggest unpleasant cartoons drawn by Joan Miró on acid.

Pailthorpe, 'The Blazing Infant', 1940

By the ‘sixties, Pailthorpe’s paintings had become rather more decorative, with loose washes of primary colour. Much happier, in fact. Which suggests a resolution of some sort at the end of all those desperate years of birth trauma and castration. One would like to think so. But in any case, what a heroic endeavour! They may have sailed on Sargasso seas, but Pailthorpe and Mednikoff were true Argonauts of the Unconscious. We should salute them, at the very least, for the near-superhuman stature of their obsessions.

Mednikoff, 'Caucasian Blancmange', 1938

“Weirdly overwrought and hysterical”: Leslie Hurry and other neo-romantics at Tate Britain

At Tate Britain the Clore Gallery has been rebranded till next June, putting Turner within the broader context of The Romantics. (Details on the Tate site via the Collection Displays pages.) The whole thing is well devised and curated, and it’s good to see the odd Blake, Palmer or Fuseli in there among the straighter stuff. And as a little bonus, it all signs off with a separately curated roomful of 20thc neo-romantics.

Which, naturally, includes a bunch of Sutherlands (always a pleasure, especially the rich early etchings) and the regulation nod to Piper and Nash. But it’s also a joy to be able to inspect a totally gonzoid Michael Ayrton, a brooding John Craxton, and Keith Vaughan’s Cain and Abel, in which Vaughan appears to have stretched the scriptural record by having Cain slay his brother, Samson-like, with the jawbone of an ass. (A weensie bit strained, and not one of his best, but what the heck? Any Vaughan on show is a gift these days, and we should be grateful for this one.)

The relevant Tate web page also appears to promise John Minton, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, but no such luck. A pity. Though it’s only a small space and you can’t have everything, it is all rather Sutherland-heavy, and a sample from these three would have made things more considered. But in compensation for the omission, tucked in at the end, there is This Extraordinary Year, 1945 by Leslie Hurry.

Leslie Hurry, 'Conflict', 1944

Oo-er. Blimey! Leslie who? The name wasn’t too familiar, but on the strength of this painting it is clearly one to conjure with. It’s not possible to link to images of this or any other of his six pieces in the Tate collection, thanks to copyright restrictions (boo!), but This Extraordinary Year is an extraordinary painting, in which a glowing and naked Liberty raises the red flag among a writhing, apocalyptic mass of figures that includes a pope and a politician trampled under the revolutionary surge. Sound stuff!

Available information on Hurry seems limited, though a quick google will give an idea of his style. There is no mention of him in Remy’s irritatingly doctrinaire Surrealism in Britain, though he explored and exhibited automatic drawing, was tagged an “ultra-surrealist”, and was related to the painter John Armstrong (John Hurry Armstrong), whom for that matter Remy also writes off as less than surrealist. The last significant show of his work seems to have been in the ‘eighties. There is a nice self portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, but only one oil, Dialectic No 2, 1940, is to be found on the BBC Your Paintings site. In this the rather geometric figures look a bit Wyndham Lewis, even a bit Merlyn Evans. Most other pieces appear much more fluid. Many surviving works are designs for the theatre and ballet, though to my mind these are of lesser interest. He was also a friend of Mervyn Peake.

In The Spirit of Place, Malcolm Yorke quickly disposes of Hurry as “weirdly overwrought and hysterical”. What’s so wrong with that? Once could say the same of (for instance) the once derided but very wonderful Pailthorpe and Mednikoff, who these days have pukka status. And as British surrealists go, I’d rather take one Hurry than any number of those dry, clunky, repressed pastiches of Ernst by the amateurish and ludicrously over-rated Conroy Maddox.