Artists International Association was an exhibiting society founded in London in 1933, which held exhibitions and events to promote and support various left-of centre political causes. Having come out of the First World War and then seeing the global effect of the Great Depression in 1929 many of these artists wanted to promote a better world. Though the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War erupted it was important to have a society where artists could still publicly protest war in a subtle way.
Vanessa Bell – London Children in the Country, 1939
The principal founders of the A.I.A. were Misha Black, James Boswell, Clifford Rowe and Pearl Binder. The guiding ethos was to promote a radical response to political events in the world. A unity against Fascism, both home and abroad.
Its membership quickly grew throughout the 1930s and 1940s (930 members by 1945) so that in 1947 it was able to acquire permanent premises in Lisle Street. In the 50′s the political aims of the group were dropped after they broadcast support for an alliance between Britain and the Soviet Union. In 1953 it became an exhibiting society.
In the Second World War the A.I.A. started a series of prints but due to the economic climate of WW2 it wasn’t a vast success.
In 1942 it was reported to members that the scheme had run into production and retailing difficulties and with ultimately only about 5,000 prints sold, the royalities could not have been very remunerative. †
The print series ran from 1939 to 1942 and all the images in this post are taken from the series.
Helen Binyon – The Flower Show, 1939 – Everyman Prints AIA
James Boswell – Hunger marchers in Hyde Park, 1939 – Everyman Prints AIA
Helen Binyon – Summer Holiday, Walton-on-Naze, 1939 – Everyman Prints AIA
Lowes Dalbiac Luard – The Rescue, 1939 – Everyman Prints AIA
List of Artists International Association print series – 1939 to 1942
Mary Adshead – Sprint on Woodhouse Moor
S R Badmin – A British Common & Down for a Refill
Durac Barnett – Bread and Circuses
Vanessa Bell – London Children in the Country
Pearl Binder – Evacuation Scene, 1939
Helen Binyon – The Flower Show
Helen Binyon – Summer Holiday, Walton-on-Naze
Helen Binyon – The Gate
Stephen Bone – Village on coast
Arthur Boyce – Upheaval
James Boswell – Candidate for Glory
James Boswell – Gitte Business
James Boswell – Hunger Marchers in Hyde Park
Herbert Budd – September, 1939
Robert Butler – The Station
David Caplan – Liverpool Station
Raymond Coxon – Evacuated Children at a Yorkshire Village
Moira Evans – August Bank Holiday
Moira Evans – November 11th, 193 9
Chris Fontaine – The Library
Kathleen Gardiner – Market Day
Phyllis Ginger – Chimps at the Zoo
Rowland Hilder – Landscape
James Holland – ‘Here They Come’
James Holland – Country Town the Militia
James Holland – News Reel
Henry Holzer – Barrage Balloon
Diana John – On the Beach
Diana John – Evacuees, Bradford-on-Avon
Helen Kapp – ‘My Marmaduke’
Helen Kapp – A Queen’s Hall Prom
Helen Kapp – English Rose
Helen Kapp – Black-out; Listening to Beethoven
L D Luard – The Rescue
Peter Barker Mill – The Threat
Mona Moore – Draught Players
Theodore Naish – Underground
Freda Nichols – Fun Fair
Russel Reeve – Barrage Balloons ascending over Hampstead
Geoffrey Rhoades – Blackout
C H Rowe – Unemployment Assessment Board
Kenneth Rowntree – Wartime Hoardings
Maurice de Sausmarez – A Garden – God Wot
Edward Scroggie – Street Market
Beryl Sinclair – The Row
Elizabeth Spurr – Washing Day
Feliks Topolski – Drawing
William Townsend – W E A Meeting
Henry Trevick – The Fair
Kathleen Walker – The Mother’s Union in War Time
Carel Weight – Blockade
John Piper – The Font and Tortoise Stove: Britwell Salome
† Lynda Morris and Robert Radford – A.I.A. The Story of the Artists’ International Association, 1999. p58
One of the nicer parts of my researches into the histories of Edward Bawden and John Nash is looking at the works they created on holiday together. As artists visiting a place together it seems they would look at a subject (the bridge at Ironbridge) and wonder around to get a perspective that pleased them both. Here with the Quarry I would imagine they had less opportunity to wander about, as it was then and is still now, a working Quarry. This has given a forced subject and view. I find it interesting how they both have translated it into a painting.
On five occasions we shared a painting expedition in Wales, on the Gower Peninsula & again near Haverfordwest at Littlehaven; in Cornwall during a cold wet spell of misery in the De Lank Quarry at Blisland; at Dunwich in Suffolk & in Shropshire at Ironbridge. †
Located near Blisland, not far from Bodmin, the De Lank Granite Quarry was a particularly engaging subject for Bawden as, ‘unlike many granite quarries on or near the moors it is still being actively worked, & for that reason retains an interest that others have lost ‡
The forced perspective of where it was safe to paint gives an interesting view to how both Nash and Bawden worked. I like mostly the blash pressure and fuel tank behind the workers hut on the crane.
Edward Bawden – The De Lank quarry no.2 , 1960
John Nash – The De Lank Quarry, Cornwall, 1960
John Nash – The De Lank Quarry at Blisland, Cornwall , 1960
The paintings below likely were made on the same trip, Sharp Tor was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 1960 and The De Lank River, De Lank Quarry No 2 and The Engine House all exhibited in the 1961 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. The last two – likely worked upon in Bawden’s studio – are sad gloomy images.
Edward Bawden – Sharp Tor, Cornwall, 1960
Edward Bawden – The De Lank River, Cornwall, 1960
Edward Bawden – The Engine House, Cornwall, 1960
† Edward Bawden to John Rothenstein, 24th April, 1979.
‡ Letter from Edward Bawden, 12 July 1961
Camouflage and its part in WW1 has a curious and quaint history. Most people know of the dazzle ships and how the painter Norman Wilkinson found that painting the ships not to fit in made them harder to target by the enemy. But other areas of WW1 where more subtle.
Leon Underwood – Looking Toward Ardregne, 1917
It was another artist, Leon Underwood who worked with Solomon J Solomon on making a fake tree Observation post. With so much of the war being fixed with both sides in trenches, any height was an advantage to see what the enemy was up to. You can see how trees ended up looking after months of shell-fire from the Paul Nash painting below, a fractured set of stumps piercing the sky.
Paul Nash – The Menin Road, 1919
The plans for the Trees were drawn out in blue print to look like Shelled Trees and then would be transported to the place and erected side-wards and hope the enemy didn’t notice one new tree on the horizon
Construction blueprint plan of the Observation Tree.
Below is a photograph of one of the trees in the state of manufacture. In front of the men are the shredded crowns of the trees.
Below is another photograph of a tree in situ on the field with a warren for the men to get in and out of. In the side would be a slit for the men to look out of, rather than looking over the top.
The painting below is a large Leon Underwood of how the tree was erected, foundations laid into the side of a trench so men could get under and in, others carrying the sides ready to be grafted together.
What I like about the camouflaged tree is how bonkers it is but also how obvious. Below is a painting in the epic, almost religious style by Leon Underwood, not unlike Jesus at the Cross.
The school had no formal curriculum and students studied what and when they wished
The Grosvenor School of Modern Art sounds like it was a liberal progressive place, but what I have always wondered was, what was the teaching like? I find it a curious place in how much of the teachers hand has been passed on to the pupils.
In Wood:
The Grosvenor School of Modern Art was a private British art school. It was founded in 1925 by the Scottish wood engraver Iain Macnab in his house at 33 Warwick Square in Pimlico, London. From 1925 to 1930 Claude Flight ran it with him.
The influence of the teaching of Iain MacNab is a strange one. I have noticed that many of his pupils at the
Grosvenor School of Modern Art made prints under his direction with a Spanish flare to them, mostly in the buildings. It is a signature look for MacNab, so I can’t help wondering if he was such a dominant presence that he got his pupils to mimic his work? Was it a way to succeed under him? Were the pupils expected to pick up a style and mimic it in the same way old masters like Rembrandt used to with their pupils?
The main characteristic is the buildings have have a roof that slopes down with no central pitch. I wonder how many of the pupils travelled to Spain in the late 30s or were they showing a solidarity towards the Spanish Civil War? This post is full of questions I have no answers for.
I do know that Macnab did travel to France, Spain and Corsica himself. Many of his later works in the 50s were of such landscapes. The Grosvenor School was closed in the Second World War.
Iain MacNab – A Southern Landscape, 1941
Peter Barker Mill – Spanish Lane
Tom Chadwick – Unknown, c1930s
Suzanne Cooper – Back Gardens, c1930s
Rachel Reckitt – The Farm or House in Catalonia, c1930s
Guy Malet – Gran Canaria, 1939
Alison Mckenzie – Staithes
In Lino
When it came to Linocut, in the School they followed the external fashions of Futurism. A movement that started publicly in 1909 it inspired many British artists in the First World War, mostly C R W Nevinson. But these prints are much later from the 1930s. So maybe they are post-futurist? The mechanical features, repeating patterns and graphic devices made a beautiful set of prints. Ending up looking so similar to each other I still find it hard to know what is Power and
The painting series by Bawden named as ‘Pengwern’ is really in ‘Dyserth’ in Wales. The limestone quarry is in the hills above Dyserth in Denbighshire and it was closed in the 1980s.
Bawden’s paintings capture a curious geometry in the landscape with the sides of the quarry looking like large pieces of flint. Paintings two and three are the same view so are interesting to compare. At this time Bawden would start the paintings off with a drawing and then finish them in the hotel or at his Saffron Walden studio.
Edward Bawden – Quarry at Pengwern I, Llanrwst, 1977
Edward Bawden – Quarry at Pengwern II, Llanrwst, 1977
Edward Bawden – Quarry at Pengwern III, Llanrwst, 1977
The David Parr house is a new discovery for Cambridge. The exterior was very shabby and the interior was a mystery to most of the world, but it is highly decorated in the Arts & Crafts style. The house was owned by David Parr, who worked for F. R. Leach & Sons.
The company Leach & Sons were mostly employed in Cambridge restoring and painting churches and the university. Most noted is the work at All Saints Church, Jesus Lane, Cambridge in 1870 for
George Frederick Bodley. William Morris was previously employing Leach at Jesus Chapel as early as 1866.
Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge. William Morris Designed Ceiling. Executed by F.R.Leach & Sons
After working as Morris’s executant painter at Jesus College and for Bodley and Kempe at All Saints’ F.R.Leach developed a flourishing practice as a decorative artist on his own, and also branched out into the design of stained glass. Further research is needed to establish the complete corpus of his work, but during the 1870s and 1880s he carried out schemes of decoration in the Churches of St Clement, St Edward, Holy Sepulchre and St Michael. Painted work inside Scott’s new Master’s Lodge at St John’s College is also ascribed to him.
In St Michael’s, he worked under the younger Gilbert Scott to decorate the chancel arcades and east wall in 1874. Four years later he also painted the nave and designed stained glass for the west window. The firm was continued by his son, Barnett Leach, at the original premises of 36-37 City Road, until well into the middle of this century. †
Interior of All Saints Church, Jesus Lane, Cambridge. Designed by George Frederick Bodley and executed by F. R. Leach and Sons.
We may state that the roof of the nave has been richly decorated with black monograms of the Holy Name, and varied scroll work in red colour on the plaster ground… Great praise must be given to Mr F. R. Leach, our fellow-townsman, who is carrying out these works, for it is no small credit these days to be able to work out such details in free hand drawing… and we rejoice that so important a step in the education of the Art workman should be so successfully illustrated in Cambridge. †
My memories with the Parr house don’t factor him at all, but I do remember Mrs Palmer. The shop that I have my artworks in is just over the road from 186 Gwydir Street and I would see her walking up and down the road with her walking stick and large coat. Elsie Palmer came to Gwydir St in 1927 aged 12 to look after her grandmother, David Parr’s wife. She lived there for 85 years and inherited the house, got married and had a family within this gothic revival interior.
When she died the property was preserved and has been in the process of being cleaned and restored. As when the house was opened I wasn’t allowed to take photographs inside all of the photos are scavenged from other people who could.
† Duncan Robinson – Morris & Company in Cambridge, 1980
The power of the Great Bardfield artists over the past few years is being tested, the prices they command when exhibitions happen and how much they command at different times. I have lot of people who sell me work tell me how they could pick up a Olive Cook or Bawden so cheaply years ago, but this is now not the case. It’s the power of the Fry Art Gallery and their sales over the years. Fry Art Gallery is now coming into force and artists are being called Bardfield Artists, just because they are in the Gallery, but they are not. One is John Bolam. Lately I just corrected the Wikipedia page on him as it stated he was a Bardfield artist but I have found no evidence of this.
John Bolam – North Down Visit III, 1991
John Bolam was born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire in 1922. He originally studied painting at Hornsey School of Art and furniture design at High Wycombe School of Art. From 1970 to 1983 Bolam was Head of the Cambridge School of Art working with Warwick Hutton and Walter Hoyle.
John Bolam is painting is influenced by John Piper, Ivon Hitchins and Graham Sutherland. His first major exhibition was the the AIA Gallery. Further exhibitions were at Whitechapel Art Gallery, Arts Council Gallery, the Leicester Galleries and the New Art Centre. He is in the collection of the Fry Gallery, P&O Orient Line, Nuffield Trust, Contemporary Art Society of Wales, Cambridge Pictures for Schools Scheme, Rank Xerox, Barclays Bank and Touche Ross.
Mr Bolam is an imaginative abstractionist who l;eaves nothing to chance.. such work of Bolam’s that I have seen persuades me that no artist could have cultivated his chosen plot with more delicate care and refinement. †
Due to being in the Fry Art Gallery collection there is a myth that Bolam was part of the Bardfield Group but I have been unable to find any evidence to substantiate it. It is not in any of the books of Artists in the Fry or any of the reports about the exhibitions at Great Bardfield.
What he did do was move to Saffron Walden later in his life and so would have contended as an artist in North West Essex and thus for The Fry Art Gallery collection. But this myth is commonplace within a lot of the auction houses and galleries that sell his work. What is amazing is how no one does research anymore. It’s all copy and pasted from wikipedia.
I thought it would be good to have a dedicated Instagram account for the blog and so this morning I started one. You can follow me there too if you so choose. Be there at the start
The process of a picture is always interesting to me. I like seeing how a drawing is made, abstracted and translated into other mediums. Here are three versions of the same view of Thameside by John Minton. After the Second World War Minton took on a series of paintings of London’s Riverside and Docklands in rather bold contrast to some of his muted war works.
One of the most famous follies in Britain was in Gillingham. It was a folly for it was never completed, it was to be the Jezreel Temple of the Flying Roll. It was built by a religious sect, led by an ex-Indian army corporal
James Roland White, later known as James Jershom Jezreel. It was painted by Tristram Hillier for one of the Shell Posters.
The printed word in books, pamphlets, newspapers and the postal service may have helped the social situation that made for a boom in new religious orders at the time. In America there were the Mormans but in Britain there was also a wide range of strange religions and cults based on Christ, the power of the pyramids or séance and speaking with the dead, but mostly cranks seeking power. It happens that I collect the books of such people (especially on the pyramids), as a comedic and weird area of my library.
James White enlisted in the British Army on 27 July 1875 joining the 16th Regiment of Foot as a private, based in Chatham, Kent. It was at this time that White was also becoming interested in other spiritualists who had become famous. One was Joanna Southcott, a domestic servant who aged 42 in 1792 believed she had supernatural powers. Southcott wrote and
dictated prophecies in rhyme, announced herself as the Woman of the
Apocalypse spoken of in the Book of Revelations.
John Wroe was another inspiration. Wroe had set up the Christian Israelite Church at Chatham in 1875. The church was originally set up in Gravesend, Kent, ten miles from Gillingham.
White, while in Secunderabad, India, with his regiment complied a book made up from the writings of Johanna Southcott and John Wroe. To this compilation he gave the title of “The Flying Roll.” It is emblematically sculptured on the western tablet on the south front of the tower building as it remains today. The Flying Roll was described as a “ramshackle” book, made up of extracts “ransacked from the Bible, from Genesis to Revelations” together with references to Southcott and Wroe.
White joined a small branch of a Southcottian sect of Christian Israelites at Chatham, led by a Mr and Mrs Head and calling itself the New House of Israel. Shortly after joining he wrote a version of the manuscript to become known as the “Flying Roll” and took over the church. White adopted the name of James Jershom Jezreel and persuaded some worshippers that he was the Messenger of the Lord. White also went to Wrenthorpe, in Yorkshire, taking his “Flying Roll” with him. Here dwelt a community that had long followed John Wroe and Johanna Southcott. To these he made a fervid appeal claiming himself to be “a messenger sent by God to succeed their former prophet.” They promptly rejected both him and “Flying Roll.” He then returned to Chatham. As the “Flying Roll” had so signally failed him in both of these early appeals James decided to keep it back for later and happier days.
White completed his military service in 1881 and left the army to set about building a headquarters for his church. Leaving the army he changed his name from White and went on to be called Jezreel.
The site for his church was at the top of Chatham Hill and the highest point in the area. It was chosen, Jezreel said, after a revelation from God.
He envisaged a building based on Revelation xxi, 16: “And the city lieth foursquare, and the length thereof is as great as the breadth … the length and the breadth and the height thereof are equal.” It was intended to be a
sanctuary, assembly hall and headquarters of the New and Latter House
of Israel, as the church was now called.
Around the perimeter there would be shops plus accommodation for Israel’s International College, a school he had already set up at his home in Woodlands Road, Gillingham.
Jezreel wanted the new HQ to be a perfect cube, each side 144 ft long. The architects, however, persuaded him the design was impractical and he agreed a modified version – 124 ft on each side and 120 ft high at each corner. It was to be built of steel and concrete with yellow brick walls and eight castellated towers. The trumpet and flying roll, crossed swords of the spirit and the Prince of Wales feathers (signifying the Trinity), were to be engraved on the outer walls.
First, an enormous cellar had to be constructed for storage, lift machinery, a heating system and the all-important printing presses to turn out thousands of copies of the Flying Roll and other literature essential to the
sect.
The circular assembly room was a vast amphitheatre, said to be capable of accommodating up to 5,000 people. In the roof would be a glass dome, 94 ft in diameter. Jezreel planned gardens and stately avenues from adjoining streets, making it a focal point for the area. The estimate for these plans was £25,000 and completion was set for 1 January 1885. The money came from his followers savings and fundraising.
Jezreel insisted his followers were abstainers from drink – a rule that did not apply to the leader, who often appeared to be drunk.
Jezreel fell ill towards the end of 1884 and died on 2 March 1885. Nobody mourned his death, for the word was without meaning in the sect, who expected his speedy resurrection. His coffin bore the simple inscription James Jershom Jezreel, aged 45 years, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Grange Road cemetery near his home in Gillingham.
The sect was taken over by his wife Clarissa (née Rogers), a follower 10 years his junior whom he had married on 17 December 1881. (On the marriage certificate she added the name Esther by which she was then known.) She ensured the building work continued. The foundation stone was laid on 19 September 1885.
Digital version of White’s original design.
Much of the tower’s foundations were in place by early 1886 and some of the peripheral buildings were occupied. As building costs soared, Clarissa made economies in the budget for keeping followers. She found the cost of feeding Jezreelites was particularly high and declared the sect would become vegetarian, living off a diet of bread and potatoes.
“Queen Esther” (the derogatory name by which she was called in the press), however, was often to be seen in the area riding in a coach and dressed in fashionable clothing. Inevitably, this led to dissent and the number of followers – at one point as high as 1,400 – began to dwindle. After a legal case involving one of the followers, who had given all his money to the cause, a mere 160 Jezreelites remained.
By June 1887, the whole of the outside except for the roof was finished, while inside the ground floor was complete with the newly installed steam printing-presses rapidly turning out the sect’s publications – the ‘Flying Roll’ and ‘Messenger of Wisdom’. On the floor above, large quantities of steel girders had been installed to construct the meeting hall, balconies, the hydraulic choirs and preacher’s revolving platform.
However, payments to the builders began to slow down. In November 1887, the building was ready for its concrete and asphalt roof but this had to be delayed, and as the money finally ran out in March 1888, work ceased. So, roofless and surrounded by scaffolding, Jezreel’s fantastic tower lay exposed to the elements. By that time, £30,000 had been spent and it was estimated that another £20,000 would be needed. There was a possibility that the building could have been finished, but the sudden death of Esther in June 1888 removed the Jezreelites’ unifying influence and almost certainly ensured that this would not happen.
In July, 1888, Mrs Jezreel died suddenly from peritonitis. She was 28. The sect fragmented and work on the tower was suspended forever. It was demolished in 1961. The shops (and members accommodation) mentioned near the site of the tower and demolished in 2008.
