LUCY WERTHEIM
Towner Eastbourne has unveiled two interconnected exhibitions which reveal the galvanising role played in the birth of Modern British art by a little-remembered art-world pioneer, Lucy Wertheim.
In 1930, Wertheim, the wife of a wealthy Dutch diplomat, was embarrassed into opening her own gallery when she realised – on showing a Parisian friend around London – that there was no space in the capital dedicated to displaying the country’s talented new wave of Modernist painters.
Phelan Gibb
Three Graces, 1911. Towner Eastbourne, the Lucy Wertheim Bequest, 1971
A chance encounter with Christopher Wood, and an introduction to the work of Edward Wadsworth, had opened her eyes to the new scene. Over the next decade she championed the cause, supporting the likes of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Cedric Morris, Alfred Wallis, Frances Hodgkins and David Jones. She held solo and group shows in her much-visited gallery in Burlington Gardens, furnished like a drawing room, replete with carpets and armchairs. She was also a major patron, collector and donator to public collections, bequeathing, for example, over 50 works to Towner Eastbourne in 1971.
Towner’s curator Karen Taylor has created two side-by-side shows across the upper floor of the recently redesigned venue, which feature over 150 works by Wertheim’s artists. A Life in Art displays many of the paintings (and a few sculptures) that passed through her gallery, by the likes of Wood, Wadsworth, Sickert, Moore, Hepworth and Phelan Gibb (a friend of and colleague of Picasso and the Montparnasse crowd, whose career she helped revive in the 30s). The gallery was requisitioned in 1939, for use as an air-raid shelter, never to reopen.
She also set up a collective of artists under the age of thirty and Reuniting the Twenties Group showcases their work. Some (Moore, Hepworth et al) became world-renowned figures. Others, naturally, fell by the wayside, particularly female artists whose careers were cut short by their adherence to post-war society’s expectations that women should dedicate their lives to housework and child-rearing. Nearly half of the Twenties Group were female, which corresponds with the male-female ratio in art schools during those years.
There is a range of quality, as one might imagine, particularly in the latter exhibition, but there are some major works on show, by Christopher Wood and, most excitingly for this reviewer, by Phelan Gibb, whose Three Graces (1911) creates quite a buzz.
Downstairs, there’s a splendid (unconnected) exhibition of works by Eileen Mayo, the Modernist muse and multi-talented artist who emigrated from England to Australia (then New Zealand) in the 1950s, and is thus much better known in the Antipodes than the country of her birth. The show opens with several 1940s portraits of Mayo by Dod Procter, and Laura and Harold Knight: if you don’t recognise her work, you’ll probably recognise her face.