Tadek Beutlich in Ditchling
Posted: March 6, 2017 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Abstract art, art, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, collections, craft, East Sussex, Folkestone, loan collections, Pictures for Schools, post-war, prints, textiles, weaving 1 CommentAn artist whose work was very popular at Pictures for Schools in the 1960s is the Polish-born printmaker and weaver Tadek Beutlich (1922-2011). Between 1963 and 1969 Beutlich, along with his wife Ellen, sold work to county council and school loan collections including Buckinghamshire, Manchester, West Sussex, Hertfordshire, the London County Council, Nottingham, Cambridge and the Inner London Education Authority Circulating Pictures Scheme, as well as Sion Manning School in Ladbroke Grove, London, Dunningford County Junior School in Hornchurch, Essex and Uppingham School.
Beutlich’s colourful, striking work is among my favourite to be shown at Pictures for Schools, so I loved the chance to see it in real life at two exhibitions in the picturesque and crafty village of Ditchling, East Sussex, which sits under the spectacular green hills of the South Downs, where he lived and worked for several years in the 1960s and 1970s. Tadek Beutlich ‘Beyond Craft’ is currently on at the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, and shows a small selection of his prints as well as textile sculptures, drawn from the Beutlich family collection as well as the nearby Royal Pavilion in Brighton.
I was surprised by how big and vibrant the prints are when seen in person (I’d previously only seen them on a screen). Whilst some focus in on elements such as birds’ beaks, and depict insects, creating pattern from detail, many are more generalised responses to natural phenomena and processes such as radiation, germination, pollination, sun, heatwaves and sunsets, using layered relief prints from objects such as foam and wood and experimenting with the process of mark-making as the basis for imagery and composition in a limited yet effective colour palette of reds/oranges, greens and purples.
A much larger selection of Beutlich’s work and output, drawn from his studio, is on display – and for sale – for a short time only at the Jointure Studios down the road. This shows the range of Beutlich’s work and his experimentation with materials, from different types of grasses and fibres to PVA glue, to create responses to organic forms such as shoots and fungus, as well as vertical wall hangings incorporating objects such as X-Ray tape. Also on display are teaching aids used by Beutlich, who taught at Camberwell School of Art as well as later running workshops and exhibiting at the Metropole Galleries in Folkestone; his wife Ellen, a former tapestry student of his at Camberwell, still lives in the town. At Camberwell, Beutlich worked with another printmaker who sold work at Pictures for Schools, Michael Rothenstein, and devised his own inventive methods for printing that didn’t involve the use of a printing press.
Among the prints on display is Radiation II, which was sold to Buckinghamshire education committee as well as the Catholic Sion Manning School in Ladbroke Grove, London. Out of all the artists whose work was selected to hang and be sold at Pictures for Schools, Beutlich’s is the easiest to imagine capturing children’s attention and making a visual impression in post-war schools, particularly among the relatively blank slate environments of system-built schools. In its colour and bold shapes, it’s unmistakeable both as Beutlich’s work and as a product of the 1960s, when both art and science sought both new understandings of and new ways of representing the world and its natural forms.
Tadek Beutlich – Prints and Textiles is at the Jointure Studios until 12 March.
Tadek Beutlich – Beyond Craft is at Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft until 16 April.
Pictures for Schools talk, Manchester Metropolitan University, Wednesday March 16, 6.30pm
Posted: March 1, 2016 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, art education, events, loan collections, Local Education Authority, Manchester, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University, Painters, painting, Pictures for Schools, school loans services, School Museum Service, schools, talk, Whitworth Art Gallery 1 Comment
I will be doing a talk about my PhD research for the March meeting of the Friends of the Manchester Centre for Regional History.
Pictures for Schools: Bringing art to Manchester’s post-war classrooms
Pictures for Schools was a scheme founded in 1947, which aimed to get original works of art into ‘schools of every kind’ so children could grow up with art as part of their everyday environments.
Between 1947 and 1969, annual Pictures for Schools exhibitions were held in London (with the exception of 1957, when a venue in London could not be found and the exhibition was instead held at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery). Here, contemporary artworks by living British artists were displayed and sold at prices affordable to educational buyers. Contributors ranged from well-known names such as LS Lowry to students who were obscure at the time but later went on to make a name for themselves.
Local education authorities, education committees and museum services across the country made the annual trip from London to make purchases from the scheme, and extensive collections of artworks were built up in towns, cities and counties large and small for loan to schools. Several schools in Manchester benefited from the opportunity to buy work, and education committees in Lancashire, Rochdale and Manchester were among the regular buyers from Pictures for Schools. Another purchaser was Manchester Art Gallery’s Rutherston Loan Collection for educational institutions in the north of England.
However, over the decades schools have closed, changed name or merged, and local authorities have come under pressures such as boundary changes and financial constraints. Many of these collections have now disappeared with little or no acknowledgment that such a service once existed. Does Pictures for Schools have a legacy in Manchester today, and can these artworks still have any relevance in the twentieth-first-century classroom?
The talk will take place on Wednesday March 16, 6.30pm, in Room 307, 3rd floor, Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University, Oxford Road, Manchester M15.
Free; all welcome
A visit to see Manchester Grammar School’s art collection: the final piece of the jigsaw
Posted: December 1, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Abstract art, art, art education, Art school, artists, Cambridge Society of Painters and Sculptors, collections, Edward Bawden, Great Bardfield, landscape, linocuts, loan collections, Manchester, Manchester Art Gallery, Midland Group Gallery, Nan Youngman, Painters, painting, Pictures for Schools, prints, Private school, School, The School Prints 1 Comment
I have long wanted to know what happened to the artworks sold at Pictures for Schools once they had left the exhibitions, and tried to contact schools which purchased work. This always been unfruitful as many schools have closed, merged, changed name or changed location and premises since the 1960s. Though most of the buyers were local education authorities and education committees, there were a number of primary, secondary and independent schools across the country that bought work from the exhibitions. Unfortunately, those schools which do still exist are often unaware that they once owned original works of art.
I was pleased to discover, through a chance conversation with their Head of Art, Lisa Murphy, that Manchester Grammar School (MGS) is an exception and still has several, though perhaps not all, of the artworks it purchased at Pictures for Schools. Lisa, who has been at the school since 1998, is keen to use original works with students, whether through direct observation, as part of project work, or as the basis for reinterpretation.
Manchester Grammar School Art Collection Fund was suggested by an old boy in 1956 for the purchase of original and contemporary works of art, and governors, old boys and friends of the school contributed. The collection was not just limited to works on paper, but was intended to encompass ceramics and sculpture, though this was not in evidence when I visited. In 1960, an exhibition of the collection was held. The catalogue explained that:
“The aim has been to buy pictures that are good of their kind by modern artists, known and unknown.”[1]
In the 1980s, an Ivon Hitchens work was sold to enable new purchases to be made. Aside from the Art Collection, other work belongs to the school Common Room. Some works were purchased through a bequest and some were gifts. There are also remnants of an earlier collection, and other work includes a 1945 John Skeaping print of a mare and foal which was part of the School Prints series. In addition to its own collection, the school also made use of Manchester Art Gallery’s Rutherston loan scheme for educational institutions in the north of England.
The Pictures for Schools invoice books held in Nan Youngman’s papers at the University of Reading, though incomplete, reveal that Manchester Grammar School was a regular buyer from Pictures for Schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Invoices were made out to the bursar on behalf of Art Master JH Bell, and on occasion on behalf of the ‘High Master’. John Henry Bell joined in 1951 and served as Head of Art from 1956-81. An Oxford-educated historian and scholar, he also painted landscapes, with a particular interest in mountains. He was known for an extensive collection of art and architecture slides, and recorded talks for BBC radio. At that time, the historical and critical aspects of art were emphasised in the school more than the practical aspects.
I recently visited MGS, a large and still academically oriented independent school in suburban south Manchester, to see what remains of the collection, and to get a sense of these artworks in a school setting, The artworks are scattered around the school, which is based around an extensive and disorientating 1930s building. In general, the school gives the impression of being filled with art and visual stimulation. Students’ work is displayed throughout the large and impressively resourced art department, as well as in the shared spaces of the school such as hallways and corridors. Changing and themed exhibitions of students’ work take place in a small gallery space next to the main reception, and there is also a small sculpture garden containing students’ work. Staff rooms, common rooms, reception, offices and classrooms also have pictures on display, ranging from formal and old-fashioned portraits of former grandees to architectural drawings of the school to work by local artists and artists who have been in residence in the school, including modern photography and graffiti-style stencil work. Some of the original mid-twentieth century 
works of art purchased by the school can be found among this, and highlights of the collection are on display in a wide corridor area. These include Edwin La Dell’s 1960 lithograph ‘Priddy Nine Barrows’, a green, rolling rural landscape. Though I had seen photographs of the print before, I much preferred it in ‘real life’, seeing its mark-making close-up and its colour choices appearing more vibrant.
Like many school buyers, Manchester Grammar School bought a large number of prints from Pictures for Schools, although it did also purchase paintings. Many of the artists involved in Pictures for Schools, and represented in the MGS collection, were themselves involved in art education, at secondary or university level.
Paintings at MGS include Gordon Bradshaw’s ‘Essex Landscape’ (1962), an unusual and stylised perspective on a townscape which is reminiscent of a briefly glimpsed view of a town looking down from a railway viaduct as the surrounding countryside stretches out behind it. Susan Horsfield’s ‘Boxes of Fish’ (1961) is a detailed oil painting. Horsfield met Pictures for Schools founder Nan Youngman through their involvement in the Women’s International Art Club and was invited by Youngman to submit work to the scheme. Peter Midgley’s humdrum oil painting ‘Still Life’ (1958), meanwhile, shows newspaper-wrapped grocery shopping in Kitchen Sink-style. Midgley taught at Beckenham School of Art.
Schools often had less money to spend on original works of art than local authorities. Prints, which could be purchased framed or unframed, were among the most affordable works of art at the exhibitions. Furthermore, prints such as linocuts had an obvious application in the classroom; they could be used to demonstrate to students what could be achieved in a medium they were likely to use themselves in school art lessons. There are also screen prints, etchings and lithographs. These include the bold 1966 screenprint ‘Blue Night Flower’ by Dennis Hawkins – who taught at Repton School and was a founding member of the Midland Group and the Printmakers’ Council’, which edges towards abstraction. Philip Greenwood’s, ‘Slate Street’ (1965) is a dark, sketchy, angular etching, while ‘Two Friends’ is a figurative lithograph by Alistair Grant, who studied with Edwin La Dell and taught at the RCA. Another print, ‘Barmouth’, from 1984, picking out the shapes of the town through exaggerated use of line and colour, is by John Brunsdon, who designed posters for Pictures for Schools as well as selling work through the scheme.
Perhaps the work I saw on my visit I liked the most was Euan Jennings’ highly stylised 1957 linocut ‘Essex Gravel Pit No 2’, a detailed reinterpretation of an everyday and workaday landscape in blue, black and yellow, in which contrasting textures and patterns are used to create contrast between different layers and areas of foliage, water, rock and stones. Jennings was Principal at Tunbridge Wells School of Art.
I also like Denys Delhanty’s 1959 gouache ‘Summer Landscape with Cow Parsley’, a more unconventional landscape that has something in its palette of black, white, greys and pale blues, and brush marks resembling surface scrapes and bubbles, of the quality of a photographic negative. Denys Delhanty was Head of Art at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and his work was extremely popular in the Pictures for Schools exhibitions.
Unsurprisingly, given their prominence in Pictures for Schools, a number of the artists in the MGS collection are associated with East Anglia. These include the Great Bardfield artist Edward Bawden – an artist’s proof of his linocut ‘Town Hall Yard’ (1957) is on display – as is a large, sweeping, abstracted, expressive linocut of an ‘East Coast Storm’ (1967) by Julia Ball who was, like Nan Youngman, a member of the Cambridge Society of Painters and Sculptors.
I was disappointed, however, not to see abstracted linocuts of farm machinery by Peter Green, one of the best-selling artists at Pictures for Schools, which once formed part of the collection. As Lisa Murphy is making a renewed effort to locate and catalogue the works to improve their visibility in the school, I’m hoping that perhaps they might be unearthed for a future visit.
[1] Information about the collection and the history of art teaching at MGS is largely drawn from the pamphlet Art at the Manchester Grammar School, edited by David Stockwell, 1993.
A day in Coventry (on the trail of Steven Sykes and Pictures for Schools)
Posted: October 12, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: architecture, art, Betty Rea, camouflage, Coventry, Coventry Cathedral, Essex, Great Bardfield, John Piper, loan collections, Local Education Authority, Manchester, mural, murals, Nan Youngman, Peter Peri, Pictures for Schools, planning, post-war, public art, reconstruction, sculpture, Steven Sykes, war art, World War II 2 CommentsMy interest in the artists who contributed to and sold work through Pictures for Schools, as well as the education authorities that purchased work from Pictures for Schools (and an enthusiasm for visiting and understanding more about post-war built environments more generally) recently led me on a day trip to Coventry.
I was on the trail of the artist Steven Sykes, whose work was very popular at Pictures for Schools, during which time Sykes also taught at Chelsea School of Art. He regularly submitted both drawings and works on paper to the scheme, as well as reliefs and sculptures. Many of them were themed around animals, and proved to be popular with child visitors. I first became interested in Sykes because he designed two large murals either side of the stage in New Century Hall, a concert and conference venue in the Co-operative’s former tower block headquarters at New Century House in Manchester, dating from 1963.
New Century Hall is a large ballroom with a sprung dance floor and charismatic 1960s light fittings, and many famous bands played there over the decades. Sykes’ tall murals are stylised depictions of musicians, which sparkle when the light hits them. Like other regular Pictures for Schools contributor Julian Trevelyan, Sykes was a camouflage artist during the war, and a war artist. In the 1960s, he turned his garden and home in Sussex into an ornate work of art.
Sykes was also responsible for the Gethsemane chapel in Basil Spence’s modernist ‘new’ Coventry Cathedral, the winning candidate for a replacement after the medieval cathedral was bombed in the Coventry Blitz of 1940. The Gethsemane chapel, which dates from 1959-60, is a glittering room featuring an angel in richly decorated concrete inlaid with mosaic which gleams like gemstones, against a golden backdrop.
It’s the most opulent and luxuriant piece of art in the building, most of which is far more sparse and restrained, from John Piper’s angular stained glass windows to the muted tones of Graham Sutherland’s giant Christ tapestry to John Hutton’s etched glass angels and saints, both still and suspended in action, which catch the light from the large windows to dramatic and striking effect.
Despite its vast scale, the cathedral, with its polished concrete, fossil stone floor (like that of the Royal Festival Hall in London) and decorative and functional use of wood, feels warm and human-scale. This struck me as a great contrast to the other 20th century cathedrals I have visited, in Liverpool (particularly the Anglican cathedral), which seem designed to strike the fear of god into the visitor with their oversize scale and austere atmospheres.
The cathedral, which interacts and is juxtaposed effectively with the ruins of the old cathedral, is an ideal place to get a sense of the two sides of Coventry, old and new, and to get an idea of the cityscape that Coventry’s 20th century reconstruction replaced. It stands on a hill-top, from which narrow streets descend, filled with cosy shops and restaurants. As the autumn leaves swirl to the ground, for a moment you think you could be in Canterbury, or in Montmartre, even, as a busker plays the accordion
The round, light-filled Chapel of Christ the Servant, with its floor-to-ceiling windows, on the other hand, looks out onto the brutalist architecture of Coventry university, including a high-rise accommodation block, though the modernist campus is effectively landscaped with green space.
Also in the vicinity of the cathedral is the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, opened in 1960 and extended and modernised in recent years. Like many of Coventry’s buildings, its municipal modernism incorporates light-filled areas and large windows, notably in the stairwell. I understand that the Herbert’s collection includes a number of artworks purchased by Coventry Education Committee, as well as a former schools loan collection. City of Coventry Education Committee was one of two major Coventry buyers at Pictures for Schools, the other being City of Coventry Training College, whose collection is now on display at the University of Warwick. There was much crossover in both the artists and the types of artworks chosen for the respective collections, with artists including Kenneth Long, Mary Fedden and George Chapman.
On display in the Herbert are many artists and artworks dating from the era of the Pictures for Schools exhibitions, and representing some of the most popular artists as well as the type of urban, everyday social realism that predominated at Pictures for Schools. These included the ‘kitchen sink’ painter John Bratby, whose 1959 painting ‘Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day’ layers thick paint onto the canvas to create exaggerated net curtains looking out over suburban back gardens. LS Lowry offers views of gravestones outside a village church, and Ebbw Vale in Wales. ‘Landscape with Tank’ by Prunella Clough, meanwhile, from 1957, is an unconventional landscape depicting stark, geometric shapes in shiny, dark shades of grey, including the gas tank of the title. George Chapman, one of the artists associated with Great Bardfield in Essex, is represented by ‘Miner Returning Home from Work’ (dating from ‘before 1960’), a large and tall urban scene depicting a miner descending a hill through jagged streets, angular roofs, stairs and sharp edges, overlooked by TV aerials. Another very popular artist was Kenneth Long. Long’s ‘Huntingdon Street Bus Station, Nottingham’, from 1957, depicts sketchy figures in drab greens, highlighting humdrum details such as pigeons and chip wrappers. In common with Joan Eardley’s ‘Glasgow Boy With a Milk Bottle’ (1948) and the grimy, dark face of Chapman’s miner, the impression given of life in post-war Britain in these paintings is drab, poor and restrictive, a far cry from the modern world suggested by the architecture of rebuilt central Coventry and conventional, hopeful narratives of reconstruction.
I was also very pleased to see a fairly large sculpture by Betty Rea, the partner of Nan Youngman, depicting a woman stretching in bronze fibreglass. Other sculpture included John Greaves’ women chatting on a church bench, and a girl waiting for a bus. The most extraordinary sculpture on display is ‘Coventry Sculpture’ by Peter Peri, another artist who submitted work to Pictures for Schools and was renowned for his work in educational settings, dating from 1958-59. The large sculpture captures pinched, rust-coloured clay figures in action, interacting with a metal tower structure. The figures capture both light and strength, suggesting sport, movement and height. They’re running, doing, jumping, climbing, throwing, building, carrying, passing, lifting, stretching, interacting and collaborating. Peri is himself in the sculpture, as a bearded figure – and the only still character!
Elsewhere, Coventry’s post-war architecture boasts an impressive range of murals, many of which are tactile and seem to invite sensory exploration. These include William Mitchell’s 1966 characteristic concrete doodles on the front of the former Three Tuns pub (now a fried chicken shop), and Gordon Cullen’s large, tiled mural of 1958, now restored and relocated in the Lower Precinct of Coventry Shopping centre, which makes effective use of both pattern and abstract forms and colours, as well as narrative details from Coventry’s history and industries, from clock and bicycle manufacture to post-war planning and rebuilding.
Another 1960s mural, in Sainsbury’s, shows the expansion of Coventry, and seems to be held in high regard by staff. Another effective retail mural is carved detailing outside the large Coventry Co-operative premises, built in 1956, depicting aspects of co-operative history and symbolism, as well as products. Unfortunately the building, which still retains its original lettering as well as a plaque for the CWS (Co-operative Wholesale Society) architects’ department, is soon to be vacated by Heart of England Co-operative Society and probably demolished.
As well as faith, education, art and retail, the people of post-war Coventry were catered for in leisure. However, another piece of Coventry’s post-war cityscape whose days are numbered is the 1960s Olympic-size pool. Like much of Coventry, its light-filled windows, which envelop swimmers in sensations of space, spectacle and modernity, are now grimy and neglected.
As a whole, the centre of Coventry feels very un-English. The cathedral, and the city centre as a whole, feel like transplants from Northern Europe, from Scandinavia, from Rotterdam, where cities are more mixed use, and living in maisonettes above shops, or in blocks towering above the city centre, is normal. The city centre is dominated by 20th century structures and street patterns. Despite a number of empty shops, the central shopping area feels lively and public spaces are pleasant. Coventry, with its lingering independent and specialist shops, also feels strangely retro, a city from a different decade. The type of place where a specialist pipe repair shop can survive, and a remnant from a different time and society. Visiting really gave me a sense of the context into which artworks in Pictures for Schools were received, the priorities and cultural attitudes of the time, and the types of environments to which they belonged.
Photographs by Natalie Bradbury and Steve Hanson.
Guest blog post for the Cambridge Primary Review Trust (and a note on Isabel Alexander)
Posted: January 16, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, artists, Cambridge, Cambridge Primary Review Trust, Cambridgeshire, collections, Essex, Isabel Alexander, loan collections, Painters, Pictures for Schools, schools 1 CommentFurther to the reference in my last blog post about the fascinating stories behind some of the artists submitting and selling work through Pictures for Schools, and the frustrations of trying to find information about some of these artists, many of whose names are no longer known, I recently received an email from Professor Robin Alexander, Chair of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, whose mother, the painter Isabel Alexander, submitted several paintings and lithographs to Pictures for Schools over a five-year period in the 1960s. Professor Alexander told me that though she exhibited widely at the time and attracted “quite a following”, with her work represented in public collections, she remains relatively unknown today. I was able to tell Professor Alexander about some of the buyers of his mother’s work (primarily landscapes, although she had moved towards more abstract work by this point), which included Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, Nottingham Education Committee and Cambridge Education Committee (which still appears to have the work in its collection) and in return he sent me some images of her bold, vibrant paintings and illustrations and a brief biography.
Isabel Alexander had a long and interesting life and I wad pleased to hear about her story. After Birmingham School of Art she taught briefly and then attended the Slade, before returning to teaching in Bromley, Banbury and Rotherham and later lecturing at Saffron Walden Training College. Professor Alexander told me that she was a member of the Society for Education through Art and subscribed to its journal Athene, so was well aware of developments in education. She travelled in Europe and went on to work in the documentary film movement in the 1940s. Her painting and illustrative work included drawing for Mass Observation, social documentary work of Welsh towns and miners and illustrating Puffin picture books. Pictures for Schools had strong links with East Anglia and Essex (with the Great Bardfield group of artists being closely involved with the scheme), and Isabel Alexander lived in Thaxted in Essex. Along with Pictures for Schools, she also contributed to a scheme for Pictures in Essex Hospitals.
After corresponding about my research and the work of Isabel Alexander over email, Professor Alexander invited me to contribute a guest blog post to the CPRT blog, partly to raise awareness and partly to try and stimulate debate about the role of original artworks in schools today and the value of the creative curriculum, which has now been published at http://cprtrust.org.uk/cprt-blog/pictures-for-schools-a-brilliant-idea-worth-reviving-or-an-expensive-luxury.
