JEAN RENÉ GAUGIN

Reading Gordon Forsyth’s review of the ceramics entries in the Paris Expo 1925 I came across a reference to Jean René Gaugin, a ceramic sculptor I’d never heard of before. He was indeed related to Paul Gaugin, one of his five children with Mette-Sophie Gad, though he barely knew his father and they could not communicate because Jean René was raised in Denmark and did not speak French and his father did not speak Danish.

Jean René was working for Bing and Grøndahl in 1925, with whom he achieved considerable success, and then went on to work for Sèvres. This fine Rape of Europa is dated 1925, though I don’t know if it was exhibited at Paris. Below the headline items like the Art Deco of Lalique and the Corbusier pavilion it’s actually quite difficult to find out what was exhibited there. More catalogues are available online now but they sometimes lack detail and they usually lack pictures. In fact, there are few pictures of the many thousands of exhibits at Paris.

Forsyth lavished praise on the Danish exhibitors, but it was surprising, given that Jean René Gaugin is now so little known, that he declared him to be ‘one of the greatest artists that have ever worked in pottery’.

THE BRITISH LIBRARY

Although it’s of little importance to the economy or the health of the nation, research has been on hold for a year because of lockdown. One of the last things I did before the first lockdown was to visit the National Art Library. That’s closed until further notice, but yesterday I went to the British Library.

It felt pretty desolate. It’s open to readers, who sit a long way away from each other in masks, but there are no students in the public areas with their Mac Airs, no cafés, and almost no visitors other than researchers.

The one-way system is complicated by the building works under way. There’s a notice saying, ‘Please be patient. This is strange for us too.’

JESSAMINE BRAY

I have written before about Jessamine Bray, one of the two young women who ran the Dulwich Pottery in the 1920s and 1930s. The figurative potters have become so unfashionable that even relatives can tell you nothing. Thus, when I contacted a great-nephew of Gwendolen Parnell, the doyenne of the figurative potters, I found that he’d never even heard of her. Jessamine Bray fared a little better. Her great nephew told me that he knew that she was a potter but it wasn’t something she talked about. But when in her old age he took up pottery as a hobby, she dug out her old glaze materials and passed them on to him.

The picture is a portrait of Bray made by her partner in the Dulwich Pottery, Sybil V. Williams in 1935, sold by Woolley and Wallis a few years ago.

LUCIE RIE

I am looking for information about the figurative ceramics exhibited at the Paris Expo in 1925, the Exposition Internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, knowing that they were the height of fashion in the mid 1920s and being particularly interested in the Austrian exhibits. In Vienna, innovative ceramics were being made at the school of applied arts and the Weiner Werkstätte under the tutelage of Josef Hoffmann and Michael Powolny. Ceramics classes at the art school had a large female presence (as, incidentally, did the classes in London at the time at the Central School of Arts and Crafts) and extraordinary talents were emerging, inlcuding the figurative ceramists Susi Singer and Vally Wieselthier. Another of Powolny’s students was Lucie Rie (née Gomperz). It was surprising to find her collaborating in the making of a figure by Grete Salzer (above) that was entered in the Paris exhibition, so unlike any of Rie’s pottery made in either Vienna or London.

ADRIEN DALPAYRAT

When I wrote about Art Nouveau ceramics I said that there were few books about these potters, but recently a lavish volume about Adrien Dalpayrat by Etienne Tournier has been published. It’s large format and has wonderful detailed, full-page pictures showing Dalpayrat’s complex, irridescent glazes. Like the previous titles on this subject – Paul Arthur’s French Art Nouveau Ceramics (2015) and M. Lambrechts’ L’Objet sublime: Franse ceramiek 1875-1945 (2016) – Tournier’s book is not cheap. Phaidon’s RRP is £200.

LOCKDOWN READING

One group that benefitted from the pandemic was the booksellers. My last outing before the first lockdown was to the National Art Library, and since it’s been closed I’ve had to look for second-hand copies of the books I wanted to read there. Now we’re not sure when it’s going to open, while they work on their unwelcome restructuring plans. In the meantime, in no particular order, here’s some of my lockdown reading.

I was curious about William de Morgan’s novels, which brought him more money and fame than his pottery ever did, and I read a couple. Joseph Vance, the first and best-known, is pretty good, fizzing and bubbling with wit and joie d’écrire and with a fine Dickensian character in the person of Vance senior, a jolly, sympathetic builder who becomes unexpectedly rich, drinks too much and comes to a sad end. Mark Hamilton’s De Morgan biography, Rare Spirit, is unusual in that he takes him seriously as a writer, which few do nowadays. His main problem is that he wrote for a more leisurely age – Joseph Vance is 500 pages, about 200 too many.

But we’ve had leisure this year and I went back to a favourite, Little Dorrit, re-read it and borrowed the DVD of Christine Edzard’s wonderful film again, which at six hours is not too long. It has a starry cast with Derek Jacobi, Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Max Wall, Patricia Hayes, Miriam Margolyes, Roshan Seth – the list goes on – and Sarah Pickering as a perfect Little Dorrit in her first and last film role. Its depiction of nineteenth-century street life is gorgeous.

It was fun to read Cold Comfort Farm again, a wicked little book of which I don’t tire.

Ian Dunlop’s Louis XIV is based on contemporary documents but it’s a compelling biography of the man who both made modern France and was a cause of the French Revolution. Ines Murat’s Colbert (one of the few biographies available in English) follows a similar pattern. I was interested in Colbert’s economic policy and the advantages it gave to French manufacturing – not least to Sèvres – by grants of royal patronage and monopoly. Voltaire’s The Age of Louis XIV is good on religion and explaints how Louis’ persecution of Protestants undid his protection of industry by forcing the best tradesmen in the country to emigrate (tens of thousands of whom, to our gain, settled in England).

Stephen Games of Envelope Books introduced me to Robert Best, the Birmingham brass founder with an interest in design and links to Pevsner and Gropius, and I read From Bedales to the Bosch. Best’s businessman father was a governor of Birmingham art school, the first school to follow Arts and Crafts principles, but he had doubts about its principal, Robert Catterson-Smith, an associate of William Morris and a principled socialist. So he sent Robert to Düsseldorf art school, which was associated with the more progressive Deutsche Werkbund.

As I’m interested in the studio-pottery modellers of the early 20th century, I got The Cheyne Book of Chelsea Pottery, a well-illustrated account of a 1924 exhibition at Chelsea Town Hall that showed old Chelsea porcelain alongside work by contemporary potters, including De Morgan, Charles Vyse and Gwendolen Parnell. The Chelsea potters were neglected after the war and this old volume is the main source of information about them. It was intriguing to discover that a big patron of Parnell, the doyenne of the Chelsea potters, was Sir Basil Zaharoff, a hugely rich arms dealer of obscure origin, a Bond-type villain known at the time as the Wickedest Man in the World.

Deborah Sugg Ryan’s Ideal Homes 1918 – 39 describes the suburban houses whose owner might have bought pottery figurines. Sugg Ryan introduced me to the idea of “other modernisms” that’s now well-developed in design history – the modernisms that combined Tudorbethan exteriors with labour-saving interiors. She has a wonderful collection of printed ephemera showing happy homeowners mowing lawns, the jumble of styles in the 1930s lounge, moderne kitchens and period motifs like galleons and elephants.

Cheryl Buckley’s Designing Modern Britain also recognises the “other modernisms” in a comprehensive history of design from late Victorian to the 1980s. It’s a good introduction with excellent illustrations, though Buckley tries, needlessly in my opinion, to force her narrative into a quasi-Marxist framework.

These studies of design as anthropology rather than morality started with the Festival of Britain, when Barbara Jones organised the Black Eyes and Lemonade Exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. In 1951 she wrote The Unsophisticated Arts and Margaret Lambert and Enid Marx published English Popular Art. I had Jones’s book and I got a reprint of Lambert and Marx. It’s more systematic than Jones’s book and is organised by materials and methods.

THE NATIONAL ART LIBRARY (2)

I received this message today from the V&A which I’m passing on.

Hi Marshall, we wanted to get in touch as saw you’d posted the petition against the proposed changes to the National Art Library at the V&A.

We have just shared an update on our website which might be of interest here https://t.co/ftqasrNcN9

To give an overview, The NAL service review will now be fast tracked to 6m, rather than a year meaning the closure period will reduced to the absolute minimum. A core library service will be maintained during the review ensuring those who need access to collections will be supported, and thanks to the extension of the govt furlough scheme, the 33 roles are no longer at risk. A new plan for the NAL will be shared by the end of the year.

Thanks for your interest

THE NATIONAL ART LIBRARY

The Victoria and Albert Museum is £10 million down after COVID and they’re not the government’s top priority, so Tristram Hunt has proposed a re-organisation. Beyond his statement and a summary of V&A Future Plan it’s hard to find out much about it.

The idea is to arrange the collection by chronology rather than materials, presenting cross-sections of time. The number of curators will be cut and many fear a loss of expertise. But curators apart, displaying objects by period is a material-culture approach and has the advantage of revealing each item’s place in the culture of its age.

Museums change. The V&A was founded as a sort of sample-book for designers, with moral-aesthetic judgements about Good and Bad Design. We don’t look at it like that now, but its arrangement still reflects that purpose to some extent. There was once a time when the V&A didn’t acquire anything under 50 years old. Now its most successful exhibitions are about contemporary design. No-one could object to creating a department of Africa and Asia cultures, which is part of the plan.

The National Art Library (NAL) is another matter. The number of librarians is to be cut by two-thirds. The hitherto faultless service is bound to suffer. Uniting the V&A Research Institute with the NAL makes sense and with the removal of the archive from Olympia to V&A East (pictured), it might make sense to move the NAL there as well. I haven’t seen that suggested but it must have occurred to Tristram Hunt.

Tristram Hunt says he wants to open the NAL reading room to more users and to improve digital access so as to make the library accessible to audiences worldwide. That sounds good, as a friend in Yorkshire said who doesn’t get to London much. Hunt promises that a special-collections reading room will be maintained, which also sounds good, but it suggests that a general reading room will not. Anyone wanting to use the reading room now can apply to do so and use it free. How could it be more open than that?

Digitisation of the NAL’s million volumes won’t be cheap and will take a very, very long time. And as the digitisation of the National Census in collaboration with Ancestry shows, digitisation implies monetisation.

THE DULWICH POTTERY (2)

I found a picture of a figure by Jessamine Bray and Sybil Williams of the Dulwich Pottery, one of those lost works of art recorded in old newspapers that whet the appetite, an interesting example of the kind of portrait pieces that the figurative potters often made between the wars. The accompanying article answers my question about Bray’s and Williams’ relationship with Charles Vyse, whose work theirs so closely resembles, reporting that they trained with him. There’s little documentation about these potteries and Terry Cartlidge’s detailed study of Charles Vyse depended very much on the memories of surviving associates when he carried out his researches twenty-five years ago; but although he was able to identify some of Vyse’s workshop associates, nobody mentioned Bray and Williams to him.

THE DULWICH POTTERY

One of the best of the potteries making figures in the 1920s and 1930s was the Dulwich Pottery, which was run by two young women, Jessamine Bray and Sybil V. Williams, but like so many of the modellers of this period almost nothing is known about them. They practiced together for about ten years, then marriage, the war and changing fashions in ceramics condemned them to obscurity.

Their work is quite similar to that of Charles Vyse, the only one of the so-called Chelsea Potters with a lasting reputation. There may have been a connection, yet to be discovered, because both Vyse and Jessamine Bray taught at Camberwell School of Art in the late 1920s. Jessamine was only in her twenties at the time, yet there is a self-assurance in her work and she clearly impressed the appointments panel of the school.