Exhibition visit; Joy For Ever: How to use art to change the world and its price in the market, Whitworth Art Gallery
Posted: June 4, 2019 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, Art history, exhibitions, Great Exhibitions, loan collections, Manchester, nineteenth century, school loans services, schools, taste Leave a comment
Marking 200 years since the birth of the writer, critic and teacher John Ruskin, Joy For Ever brings together archival material and historic and contemporary artworks to profile and interrogate Ruskin’s ideas, question whether they have relevance today, and ask what a ‘socially useful’ art might look like now and in the future.
Although it’s not exclusively focused on Manchester, some of the most interesting content in the exhibition relates to the ways and places in which the people of the city have been exposed to and encouraged to interact with art, craft and design over time, including during the city’s nineteenth century industrial heyday and resultant population explosion. This includes material relating to the Art Treasures exhibition which was held in Old Trafford in 1857, in the vein of the Great Exhibition of 1851 at Crystal Palace in London, and the Horsfall Art Museum in Ancoats. I discovered that the latter set up a picture loan scheme in 1890, lending sets of pictures to schools including Manchester Grammar School. Ruskin himself was a teacher as well as a prolific writer and lecturer; particularly interesting was a section relating to his teaching of women, at a time when women’s education was not encouraged, and the types of topics he considered it necessary for them to study, including science, ecology and economics.
Nevertheless, the exhibition acknowledges that many of Ruskin’s ideas now appear old-fashioned at best. For example, it shows how Ruskin and contemporaries such as William Morris sought to influence people’s taste, and the way in which they lived, by designing and promoting products and furnishings aimed at introducing ‘good’ craft and ‘design’ into the home. Aside from the problem of who gets to decide what and what isn’t ‘good’ design, these were, of course, priced well beyond the reach of the workers at which they were aimed.
Joy For Ever is at the Whitworth Art Gallery until Sunday 9 June: www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/upcomingexhibitions/joyforever/
Football Is Art at the National Football Museum
Posted: April 25, 2019 Filed under: post-war | Tags: art, Art history, artists, Artists International Association, Arts Council, Arts Council of Great Britain, Carel Weight, collections, documentary, exhibitions, Great Bardfield, Hertfordshire, loan collections, London, London County Council, Lowry, Manchester, Mass Observation, Michael Rothenstein, Painters, painting, Peter Peri, photographs, Pictures for Schools, post-war, prints, public art, Rothenstein, sculpture, Surrealism 1 Comment
I recently went to the launch of a new exhibition at the National Football Museum in Manchester showcasing the museum’s art collection, which has been developed with funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
One of the works which has been acquired is a maquette for Peter Peri’s ‘Boys Playing Football’ (I went to see the original on the wall of an estate in Lambeth back in 2017).
Peri was one of several artists who exhibited at Pictures for Schools whose work has been acquired by the museum; football, particularly local and amateur matches, was one of the aspects of everyday life captured in the pictures shown at Pictures for Schools and bought by local education authorities for school loan collections (see Carel Weight’s lively ‘Village Cup Tie’, purchased by the London County Council, and apparently later sold to the football museum, although not on display in this exhibition and Fred Uhlman’s atmospheric painting of a game on a winter evening, recently sold at auction as part of the disposal of Hertfordshire County Council’s art collection). Like many of the artists at Pictures for Schools, as a member of the Artists’ International Association he was interested in depicting and reflecting relatable aspects of people’s lives, and presenting his art in places that was familiar and accessible to them.
The exhibition encompassed a wide variety of styles and genres, from Lowry’s iconic images of northern life, to delicate illustration by Paul Nash, to contemporary British artists such as Rose Wylie and digital artworks, to fashion and textiles, to vintage posters and advertising, to portraits of footballers and artworks by famous footballers such as George Best, and even a sculpture by Piccasso.
Far from the glitz of today’s game, with its superstar footballers on multi-million pound salaries, many of the works I liked best depicted the quieter, more personal aspect of the game and its individual and collective meanings to people as part of their sense of identity, leisure, routine, community and belonging: crowds huddled loyally in the cold of a snowy day, as in Alistair Grant’s lithograph ‘Snow at Stamford Bridge’, or behind the scenes of the game as in the Mass-Observation documentary photographer Humphrey Spender’s 1930s images of changing rooms, which suggested some of the tension and anticipation of the game.
Mid-twentieth century British art was particularly well-represented in the exhibition. I was interested to find out that several of the works had been exhibited in the Football and the Fine Arts exhibition, held in 1953, and organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Football Association in order to mark the latter’s 90th anniversary. One of the highlights was the Great Bardfield artist Michael Rothenstein’s prize-winning etching and aquatint ‘Moment of Victory’, an abstract set of shapes which appeared to represent little in a literal sense, but suggested movement and celebration. Another highlight was the robotic stacked shapes of surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun’s colourful oil painting ‘The Game of the Year’, dating from the same year as the Football and the Fine Arts exhibition.
Football Is Art is at the National Football Museum until Sunday 27 October: www.nationalfootballmuseum.com/whatson/football-is-art/
Sale of Hertfordshire County Council’s collection
Posted: February 14, 2019 Filed under: post-war | Tags: art, Art history, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, collections, Hertfordshire, John Newsom, loan collections, painting, Pictures for Schools, post-war 1 CommentSad news from Hertfordshire, where the county council is following in the steps of Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire and selling the bulk of its impressive educational art collection. The collection was founded in 1949 by pioneering Director of Education John Newsom for loan to the county’s schools, as part of an extensive programme of school building and educational reform, and purchased artworks by leading British artists from Pictures for Schools among other sources. This is no particular surprise given that the loan service was suspended in 2012, staff who had previously been involved in its operations were made redundant and it was extremely difficult (impossible?) to get anyone from the council to answer any of my enquiries about it during my PhD.
This follows a ‘consultation’ on the future of the collection at the start of 2018, which was couched in terms which made the sale sound like it was a foregone conclusion, and a petition by local woman Armaiti Bedford against the sale of the works, which was signed by thousands of people.
The sale is being handled by Cheffins in Cambridge, who handled the (highly lucrative) sale of the Cambridgeshire art collection in 2017, and the first auction, of paintings, takes place on 21 March.
The sale has received a few passing mentions in the regional and national press; for more information see www.artlyst.com/news/hertfordshire-county-council-sells-off-art-assets.
Inexpensive Progress on Pictures for Schools in Cambridgeshire
Posted: June 28, 2018 Filed under: post-war | Tags: art, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, loan collections, Pictures for Schools, school loans services, schools Leave a commentThis fascinating blog post by Inexpensive Progress, a Cambridgeshire-based writer and collector, sheds some light on the fate of some of the work from the Cambridgeshire Collection of Original Artworks for Children, as well as giving details about the scheme’s history in Cambridge and some of the artists involved.
Exhibition visit: ‘Radical Clay’, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery
Posted: May 19, 2018 Filed under: post-war | Tags: Abstract art, art, art education, Art history, Bristol, ceramics, collections, Education, loan collections, Local Education Authority, Pictures for Schools, pottery, school loans services, School Museum Service, schools Leave a comment
This week I visited Bristol to catch ‘Radical Clay’, a small but thoughtfully done exhibition showcasing some of the ceramic pieces which were acquired as educational resources for the city’s schools. The exhibition posed the question: ‘Is investing in children’s creativity by showing them the very best still something to aspire to?’
Now mostly accessioned into the Bristol Art Gallery collection, more than 400 examples of studio pottery were purchased to be lent to schools across Bristol in the post-war period. Pictures for Schools was one of the places from which Bristol, along with a small number of other local education authorities and museum services, bought pottery, as well as purchasing work directly from galleries such as Primavera in London.
Bristol developed an impressive collection containing work by some of the leading potters of the time, including Bernard and Janet Leach, Hans Coper, Lucy Rie, Helen Pincombe and Peter O’Malley, as well as potters with more local connections, including to the local art schools. Pieces ranged from abstract sculptural objects, such as a stoneware vase by Hans Coper (1970), to more functional items such as bowls, teapots, cups and vases, to crafted object such as an earthenware dove by Ewart Uncles (1969).
Whilst some were chosen to appeal to children, incorporating imagery such as fish, cockerels and birds, the exhibition usefully drew out some of the other ways in which the pieces might have been used in schools, such as demonstrating particular techniques, ways of forming shapes, and of creating decorative patterns.
The pieces were lent to schools until 1990 when the service, consisting of increasingly valuable and hard-to-insure artworks, closed. However, ‘Radical Clay’ gave some idea of how the artworks might have been used in schools, reproducing photographs of ceramic pieces displayed in school alongside students’ own work, alongside testimonies from those who had studied and taught in Bristol’s post-war schools about the influence that creative education had had on their future careers.
As well as placing the collection within the post-war educational context of Britain’s post-war schools, as a tool for fostering first-hand learning and the development of creativity, the exhibition explored wider trends in studio pottery at that time, partly through the use of archival documentary films demonstrating particular schools, studios/production contexts and techniques. The exhibition drew connections not just to a fashion for Mediterranean dining, and to artists’ and craftspeople’s ambitions that their work should be affordable and enjoyed as part of everyday life, but to countercultural movements which reacted against mass culture and consumerism and placed renewed value on the handmade at that time.
‘Radical Clay’ is at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery until Sunday 10 June. For more information visit www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/whats-on/radical-clay.
Exhibition of Argyll County Council’s school art collection
Posted: April 5, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, art education, Education, exhibitions, loan collections, Pictures for Schools, Pictures for Scottish Schools, School, school loans services, schools, Scotland Leave a comment
I’ve received an email about an upcoming exhibition of work by Scottish artists from Argyll County Council’s art collection for schools, dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, organised by Cowal Open Studios.
The exhibition Paintings are for People — the Argyll Art Collection takes place at Dunoon Burgh Hall from 21 April-2 June and Tighnabruaich Gallery from 28 April-3 June.
