AN OUTBREAK OF TALENT

SYNOPSIS

In November 1935, an article titled “New Draughtsmen” by the painter Paul Nash was published in the first edition of Signature Magazine – A Quadrimestrial of Typography and Graphic Arts.

In his article, Nash looks critically at the concept of art and design at that time and the unequal status assigned to Fine Art – which he calls ‘free’ – and commercial design and advertising – for which he uses the term ‘applied’ – by the ‘upper classes’.

“The old snobs of our upper classes, particularly that precarious division known as the Upper Middle, die hard, suspicious to the last, and to these the horrid paradox of a commercial artist must seem a very low form of life.”

Later in the article, he recalls his time at the Royal College of Art, where he had served as a tutor for nine months between 1924 and 1925, and emphasises the work of eight artists (six of whom had been his students) while using the phrase ‘an outbreak of talent’…

“Ten years ago I was teaching design at the Royal College of Art. I was fortunate in being there during an outbreak of talent, and can remember at least eight men and women who have made names for themselves since then in a variety of different directions: in Painting, Edward Burra; Applied Design, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman, and Eric Ravilious; Textiles, Enid Marx; Pottery, Bradon; also William Chappel in Stage Design and Barbara Ker-Seymer in Photography.”

Against the backdrop of the London art scene and advertising industry of the 1920s and 30s, the film will follow the careers of these eight artists who have made significant contributions to British Modern Art & Design. Furthermore, it will take a close look at the key protagonists and institutions that shaped the creative environment of that time.

I started this project in 2019. Owing to the pandemic, work only resumed in 2022.
I am currently looking for funding to complete this film.

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Please click on the contributor to watch Interview excerpts.

PEYTON SKIPWITH

Peyton Skipwith is a fine art consultant and author. He served as Edward Bawden’s artistic executor until earlier this year when he felt that for continuity the responsibility should be in younger hands.

ALAN POWERS

Alan Powers planned the revival of Eric Ravilious when drinking from one of his Alphabet mugs at the age of three, and at the same period met Barnett Freedman through his cover for The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear. He later met Enid Marx and Edward Bawden in person. After graduating in History of Art from Cambridge, he has combined writing, curating, teaching and publishing Judd Street Gallery Pattern Papers with topographical painting, printmaking and graphics (see Alan Powers: The Art of an Art Historian, Inky Parrot Press, 2018).

JAMES RUSSELL

James Russell is an art historian and curator, most notably of exhibitions at Dulwich Picture Gallery devoted to Eric Ravilious (2015) and Edward Bawden (2018). He has written numerous books on 20th century British artists including Paul Nash, Peggy Angus and Edward Seago, as well as Bawden and Ravilious. ‘The Lost Watercolours of Edward Bawden’ was a Sunday Times Book of the Year 2016. He lectures across the UK and beyond, independently and for The Arts Society.

CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING

Sir Christopher Frayling is a British educationalist and writer, known for his study of popular culture. He taught history at the University of Bath and was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Arts) from that University in 2003. In 1979 Frayling was appointed Professor of Cultural History at London’s post-graduate art and design school, the Royal College of Art. Frayling was Rector in charge of the Royal College of Art from 1996 to 2009.

DAVID GENTLEMAN

David Gentleman is an artist, lithographer, wood engraver, illustrator and designer. His platform-length Eleanor Cross mural at Charing Cross is one of the Underground’s most striking station designs. His work includes watercolours and screenprints, books on London, Britain, Paris, Italy and India, anti-Iraq war march placards and many British postage stamps, and is represented in Tate Britain, the British Museum, the V&A and in private collections. He lives in London.

DAVID BOYD HAYCOCK

David Boyd Haycock is a freelance art historian, author, curator and lecturer. He read ‘Modern History’ at St John’s College, Oxford, and has an MA in Art History from the University of Sussex and a PhD in History from the University of London. His books have included Paul Nash (2001) and A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (2009). He is currently completing a biography of the bohemian Welsh artist Augustus John and his young contemporaries.

SARAH KNIGHTS

Sarah Knights’ biography ‘Thoroughly Modern, The Pioneering Life of Barbara Ker-Seymer, Photographer’ will be published by Virago / Little Brown in early 2023. Her previous biography, ‘Bloomsbury’s Outsider: A Life of David Garnett’ (Bloomsbury, 2015) was shortlisted for the James Tait Memorial Prize and the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize. She has a degree in art history, an MA in Life Writing and a PhD in Biography, all from the University of East Anglia. Previously Sarah was director of Dragon Hall, a medieval merchant’s hall in Norwich, now home to the National Centre for Writing.

MATTHEW EVE

Matthew Eve is a freelance writer, historian, illustrator and occasional exhibition curator, and has published numerous articles and lectured widely on the subject of book illustration and design. From 2000-2006 he worked as archivist, cataloguer and biographer to the Estate of the British designer Enid Marx, and as an adviser on exhibitions and collections, including: the Enid Marx Archive at the V&A Museum, the Marx-Lambert Collection of Folk Art at Compton Verney, the Breuning-Eve Collection of Enid Marx Prints at Pallant House Art Gallery in Chichester, and ‘Ravilious & Co.’ at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne.

HELEN RITCHIE

Helen Ritchie is Curator of Modern Applied Arts at The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Recent exhibitions include Things of Beauty Growing: British Studio Pottery, Flux: Parian Unpacked and Designers and Jewellery 1850-1940: Jewellery and Metalwork from The Fitzwilliam Museum, for which she wrote the accompanying catalogue. Helen is also the author of A Passionate Collector: Mrs Hull Grundy and Jewellery from the Harrogate Collection (2014). She studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and the University of the Arts London, and has worked at numerous institutions including the Royal Collection Trust, Christie’s, Harrogate Museums and British Museum.

IAN BECK

Born Hove Sussex 1947. Ian Beck is an author and illustrator. He has illustrated and sometimes written over a hundred books mostly for children of various ages but also for grown ups too. Most recently he published a book of his late Mother In Law Janet Stone’s photographs. He is perhaps best known for his album cover design for Elton John’s 1973 album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. He is currently working on a book about the late painter and lithographer Glynn Boyd Harte which will be published in June 2020. He is married to Emma younger daughter of the engraver and letter cutter Reynolds Stone.

JANE STEVENSON

Jane Stevenson is a Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, University of Oxford, having previously taught at Cambridge, Sheffield, Warwick and Aberdeen, where she was Regius Professor of Humanity. Her books include Baroque Between the Wars (Oxford University Press, 2018), a study of alternative currents in the inter-war arts, and she is also author of a biography of Edward Burra.

BRIAN WEBB

Brian Webb is a graphic designer and director of Webb & Webb Design Limited. He has lectured, assessed students and courses in the UK and abroad, was a Fellow and Past-President of the Chartered Society of Designers and committee and jury member of D&AD; Fellow of the University College of the Creative Arts (now the University for the Creative Arts), Visiting Professor University of the Arts London, Royal Society of the Arts Student Design Bursary judge for 25 years, he has also judged the Prince Philip Designers Prize.

ANDY FRIEND

Andy Friend has spent a decade researching the life and work of Eric Ravilious and his extensive circle. He is co-curator of Towner Art Gallery’s major touring exhibition, ‘Ravilious & Co.’ He is also the author of the book ‘Ravilious & Co – The Pattern of Friendship’.

ANN SUTTON

Ann Sutton, MBE (b. 16 May 1935) is a British artist, author, educator and broadcaster. She gained international recognition as an innovative textile artist and designer from the 1950s and has continued to develop her making and research in other media to the present day. She was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1991, and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art and a Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts, both in 2005.

JOHN EDGELER

VINCENT FREEDMAN

Born in January 1934, Vincent was the only child of Barnett and Claudia Freedman. He was brought up in Kensington and was a constant intruder into his father’s studio in Canning Place. A stream of artists and musicians visiting, are his earliest memories of a warm and very happy childhood. Evacuated in 1939 with Claudia to a two-room cottage in deepest Buckinghamshire; he recalls an entirely happy period, with his father in army uniform arriving from time to time with many extraordinary presents such as a pre-fabricated rabbit hutch, a two-hundred-year-old microscope and various weapons conned off safely crash-landed enemy airmen.

PAUL RENNIE

Dr. Paul Rennie is a collector, curator, writer, and teacher, at Central Saint Martins, London. Paul is recognised as an authority of the history of graphic design in Britain and has written about many aspects of design history in Britain, and about the Festival of Britain (1951). The artists identified through “an outbreak” provided a template for an expanding practice art and design..and whose work provides compelling evidence of a specifically British form of modernity, expressive of a combination of social progress and pleasure; modernism with beach-huts and bunting! Together with his wife, Karen, Paul curates a gallery in Folkestone by the sea, where they share their enthusiasm for this form of ‘comfy modern’.

RUSSELL MILLS

Russell Mills (born Ripon, Yorkshire, 1952) studied at Canterbury and Maidstone Colleges of Art, and the Royal College of Art. Mills’ pioneering practice spans media, encompassing mixed media painting, site-specific installation, sound, film, design, visuals and lighting for contemporary dance and music, and writing.

JAMES GORDON

James L. Gordon was born in Paisley, Scotland in 1940. He left school at 15 years and – after various jobs – became an Interior Designer, working on various projects such as QE2, The Cafe de la paix Paris & the Carlton Hotel Cannes. When he retired, he accidently started his collection of Theatrical Art in 1983. His collection includes an impressive number of works by Edward Burra.

NEIL WELLS

Neil Wells is a Chartered Accountant and Information Technologist who began working life in the printing industry. For many years, he has collected book illustrations and printed work of artists with the Curwen Press. He is currently writing a book about Signature magazine and its editor / publisher Oliver Simon for publication in 2020.

JEREMY PARRETT

Special Collections archivist at Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections with responsibility for the care and management of the Barnett Freedman archive.

DR. JAN D. COX

Dr Jan D. Cox was awarded a PhD in History of Art from the University of Leeds, where he specialised in 19th century Nordic art. He shares his interests between this topic and British art of the early 20th century. At Oxford Brookes University, Jan was awarded the Jeanne Sheehy Memorial Prize for work on Christopher Wood, an MA at Bristol followed, where his studies focused on John Minton, Keith Vaughan and British Neo-Romanticism. Subsequently, at the University of Plymouth, he placed online Wyndham Lewis’s art criticism in ‘The Listener’ magazine.

THE FRY ART GALLERY

Home to the North West Essex Collection of paintings, prints, books and ceramics by artists
who have lived in and around Great Bardfield and Saffron Walden.

NIGEL WEAVER

Nigel Weaver is the Vice Chairman and a founding member of The Fry Art Gallery Society.

IRIS WEAVER

Iris Weaver is a founding member of The Fry Art Gallery Society.

GORDON CUMMINGS

Gordon Cummings is the Honorary Secretary of The Fry Art Gallery Society.

DAVID OELMAN

David Oelman is the Chairman of The Fry Art Gallery Society.