Douglas Keen : The Publisher Who Revolutionised Children’s Books With The Ladybird Series.

Douglas Keen, the driving spirit behind Ladybird Books, was a publishing v0isionary and an inspired businessman. In the years following the Second World War, under his editorial direction, the series of children’s books became a household name. The Ladybird Key Words Reading Scheme alone sold 85 million copies, making Keen an important figure in promoting children’s literacy.

Keen was born in Cheltenham in 1913. His father was a market gardener who left the family while his son was still a small boy and Douglas’s mother then worked as a home-based dressmaker to support them. For the rest of his life, Keen valued education as a way out of poverty. He won a scholarship to Pate’s Grammar School, Cheltenham, and went on to study commercial art at evening classes. This led to a job in advertising as a sign-writer.

In 1936, at the age of 23, Keen moved to Wills & Hepworth, a printing firm based in Loughborough that produced catalogues in the West Midlands and whose clients included the car manufacturers Austin and Rover. It also published a small stock of children’s books; they were printed on cheap paper and were produced mainly to use up “machine time” between larger commercial commissions.

In 1940 Keen was called up to the RAF. He worked with a mobile radar unit throughout the war. In 1946, he returned to work for Wills & Hepworth, in the firm’s Birmingham office. From 1941, the firm had begun to experiment with children’s fiction and picture books in a small format that was easy for young readers to manage on their own. But these early “Ladybirds”, cheaply printed on one sheet of paper, were operating in a market that had never been properly analysed. Keen visited shops and schools over a wide area and concluded that while books to be read for pleasure always aimed to look as attractive as possible, educational books, with their soft covers and dreary two-colour line illustrations, lagged behind.

And so it was that Keen hit upon the idea of producing short, lavishly illustrated, properly researched, hard-cover factual books on approachable subjects, small enough to fit into a child’s Christmas stocking. Unable to convince his managers, he went ahead with his own mock-up of British Birds and their Nests to demonstrate what he had in mind. He wrote the text and the book was illustrated with water-colours by his mother-in-law, a trained artist, and drawings by his wife, Margaret, whom he had married in 1941.

The prototype won over Wills & Hepworth’s chairman, Jim Clegg, and Keen was given the go-ahead for the book. He commissioned Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald to provide the text and Allen Seaby the pictures. The result was a 52-page book with 24 full-page colour illustrations; its cover showed a kingfisher in full plumage perched on a branch. The final version of British Birds and their Nests appeared in 1953 and sales were excellent; a second print-run of 50,000 followed almost immediately and the great days of Ladybird Books had arrived.

More nature books were published under Keen’s direction. Each then, and for the next 30 years, cost only 2/6p. All had coloured hard covers and full-page illustrations by leading wildlife artists including C.F. Tunnicliffe, Rowland Hilder and John Leigh-Pemberton. But the books developed in other directions, too, and eventually the 300-odd titles included the “People at Work” series, illustrated by John Berry, and the “Junior Science” series, illustrated by Harry Wingfield, an artist who had formerly worked on the Eagle comic, along with Frank Hampson, another of Keen’s signings.

The books all featured clear technical drawings and human-interest pictures in which characters appeared, often in a state of eye-popping excitement at what they were seeing. Wingfield, who became Keen’s chief illustrator, was responsible for 65 titles and also worked on books for younger children, including Shopping with Mother and an ABC. His pictures of affectionate parents, beaming children and courteous tradesmen, all living in pristine middle-class environments, are collectors’ items, sometimes selling for as much as £1,500.

Wingfield also illustrated the Ladybird Key Words Reading Scheme. This was prompted by an article in The Teacher by William Murray, an educationist who was convinced that early reading material should concentrate on the 100 most common words in the English language. Keen commissioned Murray to write 36 texts devised according to his theories.

Published in 1964, the books were accompanied by illustrations featuring Peter and Jane, the permanently smiling junior inhabitants of an idealised suburbia. Wingfield’s tree-lined streets continued to feature cheery milkmen and kindly policemen as a backdrop to a cosy domestic life made possible by the presence of a smartly dressed young mother, contentedly at home with her children, with an equally jovial daddy coming back from work at six o’clock. The books were a huge success and led to Keen being invited to join Wills & Hepworth’s board of directors.

From then on the Ladybird brand was unassailable. One title, The Computer, was used by the Ministry of Defence to introduce its employees to higher technology. The same organisation later bought multiple copies of Understanding Maps to provide help with orienteering for the British Army during the Falklands War.

How it Works – The Motor Car was acquired in large quantities by the Thames Valley police force, again for internal consumption. Other titles on subjects such as gas or the water supply, in “The Public Services” series, were made interesting by a mixture of historical background and details on how each service worked at present. Dramatic accompanying pictures by John Berry were, like many other Ladybird illustrations, often copied directly from photographs.

Keen worked mainly from home in an extension added to the back of his purpose-built house in Stratford-Upon-Avon, where he and a part-time secretary for some time constituted the entirety of the Ladybird editorial department. With his wife Margaret, who regularly corrected the proofs and with whom he enjoyed a supremely happy marriage, he established a warm atmosphere much appreciated by the artists he commissioned, who often became personal friends and occasional holiday companions. Meetings held at his home invariably included lunch supplied by Margaret and would finish with a visit to the local pub, along with attendant sub-editors and the studio manager.

In 1973, when sales of Ladybird Books had reached around 20 million copies a year, Wills & Hepworth was taken over by Longman Pearson. Keen left the company and found himself out of sympathy with editorial changes that then took place.

The books lost their distinctive typography and illustrative style, and Peter and Jane were re-invented in jeans and sweatshirts, but Keen dissociated himself from all such re-branding. Living quietly at home, with easy access first to five grandchildren and then to two great-grandchildren, Keen remained a much-loved figure both within his own family and among those with whom he had worked so successfully over many years.

Artists: Georgia O’Keefe

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Georgia Totto O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist. She is best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O’Keeffe has been recognized as the “Mother of American modernism”

 

Early life and education

Georgia O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887 in a farmhouse located at 2405 Hwy T in the town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents, Francis Calyxtus O’Keeffe and Ida (Totto) O’Keeffe, were dairy farmers. Her father was of Irish descent. Her maternal grandfather George Victor Totto, for whom O’Keeffe was named, was a Hungarian count who came to America in 1848.

O’Keeffe was the second of seven children and the first daughter. She attended Town Hall School in Sun Prairie. By age ten she had decided to become an artist, and she and her sister received art instruction from local watercolorist Sara Mann. O’Keeffe attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin as a boarder between 1901 and 1902. In late 1902, the O’Keeffes moved from Wisconsin to the close-knit neighborhood of Peacock Hill in Williamsburg, Virginia. O’Keeffe stayed in Wisconsin with her aunt and attended Madison High School, then joined her family in Virginia in 1903. She completed high school as a boarder at Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia (now Chatham Hall) and graduated in 1905. She was a member of the Kappa Delta sorority.

O’Keeffe studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906. In 1907, she attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied under William Merritt Chase. In 1908, she won the League’s William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot. Her prize was a scholarship to attend the League’s outdoor summer school in Lake George, New York. While in the city in 1908, O’Keeffe attended an exhibition of Rodin’s watercolors at the gallery 291, owned by her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

O’Keeffe abandoned the idea of pursuing a career as an artist in late 1908, claiming that she could never distinguish herself as an artist within the mimetic tradition which had formed the basis of her art training.[7] She took a job in Chicago as a commercial artist. She did not paint for four years, and said that the smell of turpentine made her sick. She was inspired to paint again in 1912, when she attended a class at the University of Virginia Summer School, where she was introduced to the innovative ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow by Alon Bement. Dow encouraged artists to express themselves using line, color, and shading harmoniously. From 1912-14, she taught art in the public schools in Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle. She attended Teachers College of Columbia University from 1914–15, where she took classes from Dow, who greatly influenced O’Keeffe’s thinking about the process of making art.[7] She served as a teaching assistant to Bement during the summers from 1913–16 and taught at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina in late 1915, where she completed a series of highly innovative charcoal abstractions. After further course work at Columbia in early 1916 and summer teaching for Bement, she took a job as head of the art department at West Texas State Normal College from late 1916 to February 1918, the fledgling West Texas A&M University in Canyon just south of Amarillo. While there, she often visited the Palo Duro Canyon, making its forms a subject in her work.

Career

New York

O’Keeffe had made some charcoal drawings in late 1915 which she had mailed from South Carolina to Anita Pollitzer. Pollitzer took them to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery early in 1916. Stieglitz told Pollitzer that the drawings were the “purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while”, and that he would like to show them. O’Keeffe had first visited 291 in 1908, but did not speak with Stieglitz then, although she came to have high regard for him and to know him in early 1916, when she was in New York at Teachers College. In April 1916, he exhibited ten of her drawings at 291. O’Keeffe knew that Stieglitz was planning to exhibit her work but he had not told her when, and she was surprised to learn that her work was on view; she confronted Stieglitz over the drawings but agreed to let them remain on exhibit. Stieglitz organized O’Keeffe’s first solo show at 291 in April 1917, which included oil paintings and watercolors completed in Texas.

Stieglitz and O’Keeffe corresponded frequently beginning in 1916 and, in June 1918, she accepted his invitation to move to New York to devote all of her time to her work. The two were deeply in love and, shortly after her arrival, they began living together, even though Stieglitz was married and 23 years her senior. That year, Stieglitz first took O’Keeffe to his family home at the village of Lake George in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, and they spent part of every year there until 1929, when O’Keeffe spent the first of many summers painting in New Mexico. In 1924, Stieglitz’s divorce was approved by a judge and, within four months, he and O’Keeffe married. It was a small, private ceremony at John Marin’s house, and afterward the couple went back home. There was no reception, festivities, or honeymoon. O’Keeffe said later that they married in order to help soothe the troubles of Stieglitz’s daughter Kitty who was being treated in a sanatorium for depression and hallucinations at that time. The marriage did not seem to have any immediate effect on either Stieglitz or O’Keeffe; they both continued working on their individual projects as they had before. For the rest of their lives together, their relationship was, as biographer Benita Eisler characterized it,

a collusion … a system of deals and trade-offs, tacitly agreed to and carried out, for the most part, without the exchange of a word. Preferring avoidance to confrontation on most issues, O’Keeffe was the principal agent of collusion in their union.

Stieglitz started photographing O’Keeffe when she visited him in New York City to see her 1917 exhibition. By 1937, when he retired from photography, he had made more than 350 portraits of her. Most of the more erotic photographs were made in the 1910s and early 1920s. In February 1921, forty-five of Stieglitz’s photographs were exhibited in a retrospective exhibition at the Anderson Galleries, including many of O’Keeffe, some of which depicted her in the nude. It created a public sensation. She once made a remark to Pollitzer about the nude photographs which may be the best indication of O’Keeffe’s ultimate reaction to being their subject: “I felt somehow that the photographs had nothing to do with me personally.” In 1978, she wrote about how distant from them she had become: “When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me-some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. If the person in the photographs were living in this world today, she would be quite a different person—but it doesn’t matter—Stieglitz photographed her then.”

Beginning in 1918, O’Keeffe came to know the many early American modernists who were part of Stieglitz’s circle of artists, including Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Paul Strand, and Edward Steichen. Strand’s photography, as well as that of Stieglitz and his many photographer friends, inspired O’Keeffe’s work. Also around this time, O’Keeffe became sick during the 1918 flu pandemic, like so many others. Soon after 1918, she began working primarily in oil, a shift away from having worked primarily in watercolor in the earlier 1910s. By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe began making large-scale paintings of natural forms at close range, as if seen through a magnifying lens. In 1924, she painted her first large-scale flower painting Petunia, No. 2, which was first exhibited in 1925. She also completed a significant body of paintings of New York buildings, such as City Night and New York—Night (1926) and Radiator Bldg—Night, New York (1927).

O’Keeffe turned to working more representationally in the 1920s in an effort to move her critics away from Freudian interpretations. Her earlier work had been mostly abstract, but works such as Black Iris III (1926) evoke a veiled representation of female genitalia while also accurately depicting the center of an iris. O’Keeffe consistently denied the validity of Freudian interpretations of her art, but fifty years after it had first been interpreted in that way, many prominent feminist artists assessed her work similarly; Judy Chicago, for example, gave O’Keeffe a prominent place in her The Dinner Party. Although 1970s feminists celebrated O’Keeffe as the originator of “female iconography”, O’Keeffe rejected their celebration of her work and refused to cooperate with any of their projects.

In 1922, the New York Sun published an article quoting O’Keeffe: “It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” Inspired by Precisionism, The Green Apple, completed in 1922, depicts her notion of simple, meaningful life.

Beginning in 1923, Stieglitz organized annual exhibitions of O’Keeffe’s work. By the mid-1920s, O’Keeffe had become known as one of the most important American artists. Her work commanded high prices; in 1928, Stieglitz masterminded a sale of six of her calla lily paintings for US$25,000, which would have been the largest sum ever paid for a group of paintings by a living American artist. Although the sale fell through, Stieglitz’s promotion of it drew extensive media attention.

Hawaii

In 1938, the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son approached O’Keeffe about creating two paintings for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company) to use in their advertising. Other artists who produced paintings of Hawaii for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company’s advertising include Lloyd Sexton, Jr., Millard Sheets, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Isamu Noguchi, and Miguel Covarrubias. The offer came at a critical time in O’Keeffe’s life: she was 51, and her career seemed to be stalling (critics were calling her focus on New Mexico limited, and branding her desert images “a kind of mass production”). She arrived in Honolulu February 8, 1939 aboard the SS Lurline, and spent nine weeks in Oahu, Maui, Kauai, and the island of Hawaii. By far the most productive and vivid period was on Maui, where she was given complete freedom to explore and paint. She painted flowers, landscapes, and traditional Hawaiian fishhooks. Back in New York, O’Keeffe completed a series of 20 sensual, verdant paintings. However, she did not paint the requested pineapple until the Hawaiian Pineapple Company sent a plant to her New York studio.

New Mexico

By 1929, O’Keeffe acted on her increasing need to find a new source of inspiration for her work and to escape summers at Lake George, where she was surrounded by the Stieglitz family and their friends. O’Keeffe had considered finding a studio separate from Lake George in upstate New York and had also thought about spending the summer in Europe, but opted instead to travel to Santa Fe, with her friend Rebecca Strand. The two set out by train in May 1929 and soon after their arrival, Mabel Dodge Luhan moved them to her house in Taos and provided them with studios. O’Keeffe went on many pack trips exploring the rugged mountains and deserts of the region that summer and later visited the nearby D. H. Lawrence Ranch, where she completed her now famous oil painting, The Lawrence Tree, currently owned by the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut.

While in Taos in 1929, O’Keeffe visited and painted the nearby historical San Francisco de Asis Mission Church at Ranchos de Taos. She made several paintings of the church, as had many artists, and her painting of a fragment of it silhouetted against the sky captured it in a different way.

Between 1929 and 1949, O’Keeffe spent part of nearly every year working in New Mexico. She collected rocks and bones from the desert floor and made them and the distinctive architectural and landscape forms of the area subjects in her work. She also went on several camping trips with friends, visiting important sites in the Southwest, and in 1961, she and others, including photographers Eliot Porter and Todd Webb, went on a rafting trip down the Colorado River about Glen Canyon, Utah.

Late in 1932, O’Keeffe suffered a nervous breakdown that was brought on, in part, because she was unable to complete a Radio City Music Hall mural project that had fallen behind schedule. She was hospitalized in early 1933 and did not paint again until January 1934. In early 1933 and 1934, O’Keeffe recuperated in Bermuda, and she returned to New Mexico in mid-1934. In August of that year, she visited Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiú, for the first time and decided immediately to live there; in 1940, she moved into a house on the ranch property. The varicolored cliffs of Ghost Ranch inspired some of her most famous landscapes. In 1977, O’Keeffe wrote: “[the] cliffs over there are almost painted for you—you think—until you try to paint them.” Among guests to visit her at the ranch over the years were Charles and Anne Lindbergh, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, poet Allen Ginsberg, and photographer Ansel Adams.

Known as a loner, O’Keeffe explored the land she loved often in her Ford Model A, which she purchased and learned to drive in 1929. She often talked about her fondness for Ghost Ranch and Northern New Mexico, as in 1943, when she explained: “Such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the ‘Faraway’. It is a place I have painted before … even now I must do it again.”

In the 1930s and 1940s, O’Keeffe’s reputation and popularity continued to grow, earning her numerous commissions. Her work was included in exhibitions in and around New York. She completed Summer Days, a painting featuring a deer’s skull adorned with various wildflowers, against a desert background in 1936, and it became one of her most famous and well-known works. During the 1940s O’Keeffe had two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago (1943), and the second in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan, the first retrospective MoMA held for a woman artist. O’Keeffe enjoyed many accolades and honorary degrees from numerous universities. In the mid-1940s, the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan sponsored a project to establish the first catalogue of her work.

As early as 1936, O’Keeffe developed an intense interest in what is called the “Black Place”, which was about 150 miles west of her Ghost Ranch house, and she made an extensive series of paintings of this site in the 1940s. She traveled and camped there often with her friend, Maria Chabot, and in 1945 with Eliot Porter as well as in subsequent years,1959, and 1977. O’Keeffe said that the Black Place resembled “a mile of elephants with gray hills and white sand at their feet.” At times the wind was so strong when she was painting there that she had trouble keeping her canvas on the easel. When the heat from the sun became intense, she crawled under her car for shade. The Black Place still remains remote and uninhabited.

She also made paintings of the “White Place”, a white rock formation located near her Abiquiú house. In 1945, O’Keeffe bought a second house, an abandoned hacienda in Abiquiú, some 18 miles (26 km) south of Ghost Ranch. The Abiquiú house was renovated through 1949 by Chabot.

Shortly after O’Keeffe arrived for the summer in New Mexico in 1946, Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis. She immediately flew to New York to be with him. He died on July 13, 1946. She buried his ashes at Lake George. She spent the next three years mostly in New York settling his estate, and moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949. From 1946 through the 1950s, she made the architectural forms of her Abiquiú house—patio wall and door—subjects in her work. Another distinctive painting of the decade was Ladder to the Moon, 1958. From her first world travels in the late 1950s, O’Keeffe produced an extensive series of paintings of clouds, such as Above the Clouds I, 1962/1963. These were inspired by her views from the windows of airplanes. Below is an external link to a color image of one of these aerial cloudscape canvases.

O’Keeffe met photographer Todd Webb in the 1940s, and after his move to New Mexico in 1961, he often made photographs of her, as did numerous other important American photographers, who consistently presented O’Keeffe as a “loner, a severe figure and self-made person.” While O’Keeffe was known to have a “prickly personality”, Webb’s photographs portray her with a kind of “quietness and calm” suggesting a relaxed friendship, and revealing new contours of O’Keeffe’s character.

In late 1970, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted the Georgia O’Keeffe Retrospective Exhibition, the first retrospective exhibition of her work in New York since 1946, the year Stieglitz died. This exhibit did much to revive her public career.

Later years and death

In 1972, O’Keeffe’s eyesight was compromised by macular degeneration, leading to the loss of central vision and leaving her with only peripheral vision. She stopped oil painting without assistance in 1972, but continued working in pencil and charcoal until 1984. Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her ranch house in 1973 looking for work. She hired him for a few odd jobs and soon employed him full-time. He became her closest confidant, companion, and business manager until her death. Hamilton taught O’Keeffe to work with clay and, working with assistance, she produced clay pots and a series of works in watercolor. In 1976, she wrote a book about her art and allowed a film to be made about her in 1977.

O’Keeffe became increasingly frail in her late 90s. She moved to Santa Fe in 1984, where she died on March 6, 1986 at the age of 98. In accordance with her wishes, her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered to the wind at the top of Pedernal Mountain, over her beloved “faraway”.

Awards

In 1962, O’Keeffe was elected to the fifty-member American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1966, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1977, President Gerald R. Ford presented O’Keeffe with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to American civilians. In 1985, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Legacy

Following O’Keeffe’s death, her family contested her will because codicils made to it in the 1980s had left all of her estate to Hamilton. The case was ultimately settled out of court in July 1987. The case became famous as a precedent in estate planning. A substantial part of her estate’s assets were transferred to the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, which dissolved in 2006, leaving these assets to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, established in Santa Fe in 1995 to perpetuate O’Keeffe’s artistic legacy. These assets included a large body of her work, photographs, archival materials, and her Abiquiú house, library, and property. The Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998 and is now owned by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

In 1991, the PBS aired the American Playhouse production A Marriage: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, starring Jane Alexander as O’Keeffe and Christopher Plummer as Alfred Stieglitz.

In 1996, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 32 cent stamp honoring O’Keeffe. In 2013, on the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show, the USPS issued a stamp featuring O’Keeffe’s Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico/Out Back of Marie’s II, 1930 as part of their Modern Art in America series.

In 2006, a fossilized species of archosaur was named after O’Keeffe. Blocks originally quarried in 1947 and 1948 near O’Keeffe’s home at Ghost Ranch were opened fifty years after being collected. The fossil strongly resembles ornithomimid dinosaurs, but are actually more closely related to crocodiles. The specimen was named Effigia okeeffeae (“O’Keeffe’s Ghost”) in January 2006, “in honor of Georgia O’Keeffe for her numerous paintings of the badlands at Ghost Ranch and her interest in the Coelophysis Quarry when it was discovered”.

Lifetime Television produced a biopic of Georgia O’Keeffe starring Joan Allen as O’Keeffe, Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz, Henry Simmons as Jean Toomer, Ed Begley, Jr. as Stieglitz’s brother Lee, and Tyne Daly as Mabel Dodge Luhan. It premiered on September 19, 2009.

On 20 November 2014, O’Keeffe’s 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44,405,000, more than three times the previous world auction record for any female artist.

176 Years Of Bourne & Shepherd

Bourne & Shepherd was an Indian photographic studio and one of the oldest established photographic businesses in the world.  Established in 1863, at its peak, it was the most successful commercial firm in 19th-and early 20th-century India, with agencies all over India, and outlets in London and Paris, and also ran a mail order service. A devastating fire in 1991 destroyed much of the studio’s photographic archive and resulted in a severe financial loss to the firm. The long-term impact of the fire, legal difficulties with the Indian government, which owned the studio building, and the increasing dominance of digital technology, finally forced the studio’s closure in June 2016. At its closure, the studio had operated continuously for 176 years.

Though some sources consider its inception to be 1862, when noted British photographers, Charles Shepherd established a photographic studio, with Arthur Robertson, called ‘Shepherd & Robertson’ in Agra, which later moved to Shimla and eventually became the part of ‘Howard, Bourne & Shepherd’, set up by Samuel Bourne, Charles Shepherd, along with William Howard, first established in Shimla around 1863, Howard’s studio in Kolkata dates back to 1840, where it is still operational today, at Esplanade Row, in Esplanade, Kolkata (Calcutta) under the same name. Today some of their earlier work is preserved at Cambridge University Library, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the National Geographic Society’s Image Collection and the Smithsonian Institution.

Samuel Bourne came to India in 1863, and set up a partnership with an established Calcutta photographer, William Howard, and they set up a new studio ‘Howard & Bourne’ at Shimla. William Howard had set up the Calcutta studio in 1840. Meanwhile, Charles Shepherd, had already established a photographic studio, with Arthur Robertson, called ‘Shepherd & Robertson’ in Agra in 1862, and subsequently he too moved to Shimla in 1864. At some point Robertson left the business and Charles Shepherd, joined Bourne company to form ‘Howard, Bourne & Shepherd’. In 1863, he made first of three major Himalayan photographic expeditions, followed by another one 1866, prior to which he took an expedition to Kashmir in 1864, in fact all photographic histories of that era carry his works. He was known to travel heavy, as he moved with a large retinue of 42 coolies carried his cameras, darkroom tent and chests of chemicals and glass plates, he was to become one of India’s greatest photographers of that era. Charles on the other hand became known as a master printer, he stayed back in Shimla and managed the commercial distribution and printing aspects of the business. Through the 1860s, Bourne’s work was exhibited in public exhibition in Europe and was also part of the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867. He also wrote several despatches for ‘The British Journal of Photography between’ 1863–1870, and the company became an avid provider of the Indian landscape views to the common visitors to the country and also to Britishers back home, and not just survived but the thrived in an era of fierce competition between commercial photographers.

In 1866 after the departure of Howard, the company became ‘Bourne & Shepherd’. In 1867 Bourne returned to England briefly to get married and came back to run the new branch in Calcutta, soon it became the company premier photographic studios in India, at their peak their work was widely retailed throughout the subcontinent by agents and in Britain through wholesale distributors, and were patronised by the upper echelons of the British Raj as well as Indian royalty, so much so that at one point no official engagement, investiture or local durbar was considered complete without being first captured Bourne & Shepherd photographers.

In 1870, the year when Bourne went back to England, Bourne and Shepherd were operating from Shimla and Calcutta. Soon he started cotton-doubling business at Nottingham, and founded the Britannia Cotton Mills, and also become a local magistrate. He sold off his shares in studios, and left commercial photography all together; he also left behind his archive of some 2,200 glass plate negatives with the studio, which were constantly re-printed and sold, over the following 140 years, until their eventual destruction, in a fire at Bourne & Shepherd’s present studio in Calcutta, on 6 February 1991.After Bourne’s departure, new photographic work was undertaken by Colin Murray from 1840 to 84, following which in the 1870s Charles Shepherd continued to photograph and at least sixteen Europeans are listed as assistants.

Later the Bombay branch was opened in about 1876, operated by Charles Shepherd until his own departure from India around 1879, the branch continued operations till about 1902. In 1880, they even brought their services to as far as Lahore for a month, where they advertised in a local newspaper, in fact newspaper advertising has been a primary reason of the success of many photographers of that era. Soon their work was widely retailed throughout the subcontinent by agents and in Britain through wholesale distributors.Between 1870 and 1911 the firm sent photographers to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Burma, Nepal and Singapore, had also become Art Publishers, with titles like ‘Photographs of Architecture of Gujarat and Rajputana’ (1904–05), and were now employing Indian photographers as well.

In 1911, they were the official photographers of the Delhi Durbar held to commemorate the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary as Emperor and Empress of India, where they were given the title, ‘Kaiser-e-Hind’ which they still use as part of their official letterhead. During World Wars the studio thrived on the contracts for photographing Indian, British and American services personnel.

In the following years, the studio changed hands several times, so much so the sequence of owners has been all but lost, however the last European owner, Arthur Musselwhite who took over the studio in the 1930s, later after a major business slump following the independence, and exodus of European community and the end of princely states, he held an auction in 1955, in which it was bought over by its present owners, and today the building itself is a heritage property.

Gallery

Lord Dufferin, in the regalia of the Viceroy of India, Photo by Bourne & Shepherd, Calcutta.

son of H.H. Chunnasee Rajoonath Pant, by Bourne and Shepherd, late 1860s, the Archaeological Survey of India Collections.

Tomb of Muhammad Ghaus at Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, taken by Bourne and Shepherd ca 1883, from the Archaeological Survey of India Collections.

Khusro Bagh, Allahabad, 1870s.

Parsi Marriage, Bourne & Shepherd, Bombay.

Rudyard Kipling, Bourne & Shepherd, c. 1892

Works

Album of early photographs of India, by Charles Shepherd, Samuel Bourne, James Robertson. Published by s.n.

An Album of Photographs of Indian Architecture, Views and People, by Robertson & Shepherd S. Bourne. Published by s.n.

Photographic Views in India, by Bourne & Shepherd. Published by [s.l.], 1866.

Photographic Views of Jumnootri, Mussoorie, Hurdwar, Roorkee, Nynee Tal and Bheem Tal, by Bourne & Shepherd. Published by Bourne & Shepherd., 1867.

A Permanent Record of India: Pictures of Viceroys, Moghul Emperors, Delhi Durbars, Temples, Mosques, Architectures, Types, All Indian Industries, Himalayan Scenes, Views from the Khybar Pass to the Andaman Islands : from 1840 to the Present Day, by Bourne & Shepherd. Published by Bourne & Shepherd.

India and Burma, by Bourne & Shepherd. Published by [s.l.], 1870.

Photographic Views in India, by Bourne and Shepherd, Simla, Calcutta, & Bombay. by Bourne and Shepherd. Published by Bourne & Shepherd.

Photographic Views in India, by Bourne & Shepherd, Calcutta and Simla, by Bourne & Shepherd, Published by Thomas S. Smith, City Press, 1878.

Photographic Views in India, by Bourne & Shepherd, Published by Howard Ricketts Limited.

People : Madhur Jaffrey.

Madhur Jaffrey CBE (Hindi: मधुर जाफ़री madhur jāfrī; born 13 August 1933) is an Indian actress, active in radio, theatre, television and film as well as a food writer, authoring numerous cookbooks and television chef and entrepreneur who, alongside acclaimed performances in such films as Shakespeare Wallah, Six Degrees of Separation and Heat and Dust, introduced the Western world to the many cuisines of India.

Early life

She was born Madhur Bahadur in Delhi, British India, and was educated at Miranda House (of the University of Delhi). After college, she worked for All India Radio. She then attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), from which she graduated with honours in 1957.

Personal life

She then met and married Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey and moved to New York City. She and Saeed divorced in 1965. They have three daughters, Meera, Zia and Sakina Jaffrey. In 1967, she married Sanford Allen, who at the time was a violinist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. She is the aunt of the British journalist Rohit Jaggi and his sister the literary critic Maya Jaggi (their mother Lalit being one of Madhur’s older sisters).

Merchant Ivory films

Madhur Jaffrey is said to have been responsible for introducing James Ivory and Ismail Merchant to one another. She appeared in several early Merchant Ivory films: Shakespeare Wallah (1965) (a role for which she won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival), The Guru (1969), Autobiography of a Princess (1976), Heat and Dust (1983), directed by Ivory, and The Perfect Murder (1988). She starred as the title character in their film Cotton Mary (1999) and co-directed it with Merchant.

Other films and television

She has appeared in Six Degrees of Separation (1993), Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) and Prime (2005). She starred in and produced ABCD (1999) and guest-starred in the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode “Name” as a psychiatrist, and the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode “The Healer” as a lecturer. In 1985, she was in the Hindi film Saagar where she played the role of Rishi Kapoor’s grandmother. In 1992–94 she appeared with Billie Whitelaw in the British television series Firm Friends. In 1999, she appeared with daughter Sakina Jaffrey in the film Chutney Popcorn. In 2003, she played Roshan Seth’s wife in Cosmopolitan, a film broadcast on PBS. She also starred alongside Deborah Kerr in the 1985 made-for-TV movie The Assam Garden. In 2012 she played a doctor in A Late Quartet who diagnoses Christopher Walken’s character with Parkinson’s Disease.

Theatre

In 1962, she appeared in A Tenth of an Inch Makes the Difference by Rolf Forsberg. In 1969, she appeared in The Guide, based on the novel by R. K. Narayan, and in 1970, she appeared in Conduct Unbecoming, written by Barry England. In 1993, she appeared in Two Rooms by Lee Blessing. In 1999, she appeared in Last Dance at Dum Dum by Ayub Khan-Din. In 2004, Jaffrey appeared in Bombay Dreams on Broadway, where she played the main character’s grandmother (Shanti).In 2005, she appeared in India Awakening by Anne Marie Cummings.

Cooking

Jaffrey is the author of cookbooks of Indian, Asian, and world vegetarian cuisines. Many have become best-sellers; some have won James Beard Foundation awards. She has presented cookery series on television, including Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery in 1982, Madhur Jaffrey’s Far Eastern Cookery in 1989 and Madhur Jaffrey’s Flavours of India in 1995. She lives in Manhattan and has a home in upstate New York. As a result of the success of her cookbooks and TV, Jaffrey developed a line of mass-marketed cooking sauces.

Ironically, she did not cook at all as a child growing up in Delhi. She had almost never been in the kitchen and almost failed cooking at school. It was only after she went to London at the age of 19 to study at RADA that she learned how to cook, using recipes of familiar dishes that were provided in correspondence from her mother. Her editor Judith Jones claimed in her memoirs that Jaffrey was an ideal cookbook writer precisely because she had learned to cook childhood comfort food as an adult, and primarily from written instructions. In the 1960s, after her award-winning performance in Shakespeare Wallah, she became known as the “actress who could cook” and was hired by the BBC to present a show on Indian cooking. After an article about her and her cooking appeared in the New York Times in 1966, she received a book contract that produced An Invitation to Indian Cooking, her first book. The recipes in that book came from her mother, although she adapted them for the American kitchen. During the 1970s, she taught classes in Indian cooking, both at the James A. Beard School of Cooking and in her Manhattan apartment. In 1986, the restaurant Dawat opened in Manhattan using recipes that she provided.

The social historian Panikos Panayi described her as the doyen of Indian cookery writers, but noted that their and her influence remained limited to Indian cuisine. Panayi commented that despite Jaffrey’s description of “most Indian restaurants in Britain as ‘second-class establishments that had managed to underplay their own regional uniqueness'”, most of her dishes too “do not appear on dining tables in India”.

Awards

• Best Actress Award from the Berlin Film Festival in 1965 for her performance in Shakespeare Wallah
• Taraknath Das Foundation Award presented by the Taraknath Das Foundation of the Southern Asian Institute of Columbia University in 1993
• Named to Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America by the James Beard Foundation in 1995.
• Muse Award presented by New York Women in Film & Television in 2000.
• Honorary CBE awarded on 11 October 2004 “in recognition of her services to cultural relations between the United Kingdom, India and the United States, through her achievements in film, television and cookery”.

Books

Cookery

• An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973) (James Beard Foundation Awards Cookbook Hall of Fame winner) – ISBN 978-0-224-01152-5
• Madhur Jaffrey’s World of the East Vegetarian Cooking (1981) (James Beard Foundation Awards winner) – ISBN 978-0-394-40271-0
• Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking (1973) – ISBN 978-0-8120-6548-0
• Eastern Vegetarian Cooking (1983) – ISBN 978-0-09-977720-5
• A Taste of India (1988) – ISBN 978-1-86205-098-3
• Madhur Jaffrey’s Cookbook: Easy East/West Menus for Family and Friends (1989) — ISBN 978-0-330-30635-5
• Indian Cooking (1989) — ISBN 978-0-600-56363-1
• A Taste of the Far East (1993) (James Beard Foundation Awards Cookbook of the Year winner) — ISBN 978-0-517-59548-0
• Madhur Jaffrey’s Spice Kitchen (1993) — ISBN 978-0-517-59698-2
• Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Recipes (1994) — ISBN 978-1-85793-397-0
• Entertaining With Madhur Jaffrey (1994) — ISBN 978-1-85793-369-7
• Madhur Jaffrey’s Flavors Of India: Classics and New Discoveries (1995) — ISBN 978-0-517-70012-9
• Cookbook Food for Family and Friends (1995) — ISBN 978-1-85813-154-2
• Madhur Jaffrey’s Quick & Easy Indian Cooking (1996) — ISBN 978-0-8118-5901-1
• The Madhur Jaffrey Cookbook: Over 650 Indian, Vegetarian and Eastern Recipes (1996) — ISBN 978-1-85501-268-4
• Madhur Jaffrey’s Illustrated Indian Cookery (1996) — ISBN 978-0-563-38303-1
• Madhur Jaffrey Cooks Curries (1996) — ISBN 978-0-563-38794-7
• Madhur Jaffrey’s Complete Vegetarian Cookbook (1998) — ISBN 978-0-09-186364-7
• Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian (1999) (James Beard Foundation Awards winner) — ISBN 978-0-517-59632-6
• The Essential Madhur Jaffrey (1999) — ISBN 978-0-09-187174-1
• Madhur Jaffrey’s Step-by-Step Cooking (2001) (James Beard Foundation Awards winner) — ISBN 978-0-06-621402-3
• Foolproof Indian Cooking: Step by Step to Everyone’s Favorite Indian Recipes (2002) — ISBN 978-1-55366-258-7
• Madhur Jaffrey Indian Cooking (2003) — ISBN 978-0-09-188408-6
• From Curries to Kebabs: Recipes from the Indian Spice Trail (2003) (James Beard Foundation Awards winner) — ISBN 978-0-609-60704-6
• Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible (2003) — ISBN 978-0-09-187415-5
• Simple Indian Cookery (2005) — ISBN 978-0-563-52183-9
• At Home with Madhur Jaffrey: Simple Delectable Dishes from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka (2010) — ISBN 978-0-307-26824-2
• Curry Easy (2010) — ISBN 978-0-09-192314-3
• My Kitchen Table: 100 Essential Curries (2011) — ISBN 978-0-09-194052-2

Other

• Seasons of Splendour: Tales, Myths, and Legends of India (Pavilion, 1985) — ISBN 978-0-340377260
• Market Days: From Market to Market Around the World (1995) — ISBN 978-0-8167-3504-4
• Robi Dobi: The Marvelous Adventures of an Indian Elephant (1997) — ISBN 978-0-8037-2193-7
• Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India (2006) — ISBN 978-1-4000-4295-1

Artists : Rene Charles Lalique.

René Jules Lalique (6 April 1860, Ay, Marne – 1 May 1945, Paris) was a French glass designer known for his creations of glass art, perfume bottles, vases, jewelry, chandeliers, clocks and automobile hood ornaments.

Life

Lalique’s early life was spent learning the methods of design and art he would use in his later life. At the age of two, his family moved to the suburbs of Paris, but traveled to Ay for summer holidays. These trips influenced Lalique’ later on in his naturalistic glasswork. With the death of his father two years later, Lalique began working as an apprentice to goldsmith Louis Aucoc in Paris. He died 5 May 1945, Paris. René Lalique was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France. His granddaughter, Marie Claude-Lalique (b. 1936), was also a glass maker. She died on April 14, 2003 in Fort Myers, Florida.

Education

In 1872, when he was twelve, he entered the Collège Turgot where he started drawing and sketching. He attended evening classes at the Ecole des arts décoratifs. He worked there from 1874-1876 and subsequently spent two years at the Crystal Palace School of Art Sydenham, London. At the Sydenham Art College, his skills for graphic design were improved, and his naturalistic approach to art was further developed.

Art Nouveau jewellery designer

When he returned from England, he worked as a freelance artist, designing pieces of jewellery for French jewelers Cartier, Boucheron and others. In 1885, he opened his own business and designed and made his own jewellery and other glass pieces. By 1890, Lalique was recognized as one of France’s foremost Art Nouveau jewellery designers; creating innovative pieces for Samuel Bing’s new Paris shop, Maison de l’Art Nouveau. He went on to be one of the most famous in his field, his name synonymous with creativity, beauty and quality.

Glass maker

Lalique was best known for his creations in glass art. In the 1920s, he became noted for his work in the Art Deco style. He was responsible for the walls of lighted glass and elegant coloured glass columns which filled the dining room and “grand salon” of the SS Normandie and the interior fittings, cross, screens, reredos and font of St. Matthew’s Church at Millbrook in Jersey (Lalique’s “Glass Church”). His earlier experiences in Ay were his defining influence in his later work. As a result, many of his jewellery pieces and vases showcase plants, flowers and flowing lines.

Both unique and commercial works of René Lalique are in the collections of a large number of public museums around the world including the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, the Musée Lalique and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in France, the Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim in Germany, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum and the Corning Museum in New York State, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Artists: Tamara De Limpicka, The Art Deco Queen

paris 1919-1939

Tamara Łempicka, commonly known as Tamara de Lempicka (16 May 1898 – 18 March 1980) was a Polish Art Deco painter and “the first woman artist to be a glamour star”. Influenced by Cubism, Lempicka became the leading representative of the Art Deco style across two continents, a favorite artist of many Hollywood stars, referred to as ‘the baroness with a brush’. She was the most fashionable portrait painter of her generation among the haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy, painting duchesses and grand dukes and socialites. Through her network of friends, she was also able to display her paintings in the most elite salons of the era. Lempicka was criticized as well as admired for her ‘perverse Ingrism’, referring to her modern restatement of the master Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, as displayed in her work Group of Four Nudes (1925) among other studies.

Life

She was born Maria Górska in Warsaw, Congress Poland under the rulership of the Russian Empire, into a wealthy and prominent family. Lempicka was the daughter of Boris Gurwik-Górski, a Russian Jewish attorney for a French trading company, and Malwina Dekler, a Polish socialite who met him at one of the European spas. Maria had two siblings and was the middle child. She attended a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and spent the winter of 1911 with her grandmother in Italy and on the French Riviera, where she was treated to her first taste of the Great Masters of Italian painting. In 1912, her parents divorced, and Maria went to live with her rich Aunt Stefa in St. Petersburg, Russia. When her mother remarried, she became determined to break away to make a life of her own. In 1913, at the age of fifteen, while attending the opera, Maria spotted the man she became determined to marry. She promoted her campaign through her well-connected uncle, and in 1916 she married Tadeusz Łempicki (1888–1951) in St. Petersburg—a well-known ladies’ man, gadabout, and lawyer by title, who was tempted by the significant dowry.

In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, Tadeusz Łempicki was arrested in the dead of night by the Bolsheviks. Maria searched the prisons for him and after several weeks, with the help of the Swedish consul, she secured his release. They traveled to Copenhagen then to London and finally to Paris, to where Maria’s family had also escaped.

Paris and painting

In Paris, the Lempickis lived for a while from the sale of family jewels. Tadeusz proved unwilling or unable to find suitable work, which added to the domestic strain, while Maria gave birth to Kizette Lempicka. Her sister, the designer Adrienne Gorska, made furniture for her Paris apartment and studio in the Art Deco style, complete with chrome-plated furniture. The flat at 7 Rue Mechain was built by the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens known for his clean lines.

Lempicka’s distinctive and bold artistic style developed quickly, influenced by what André Lhote sometimes referred to as “soft cubism” and by the “synthetic cubism” of Maurice Denis, epitomizing the cool yet sensual side of the Art Deco movement. For her, Picasso “embodied the novelty of destruction”. She thought that many of the Impressionists drew badly and employed “dirty” colors. Lempicka’s technique would be novel, clean, precise, and elegant.

For her first major show, in Milan, Italy in 1925, under the sponsorship of Count Emmanuele Castelbarco, Lempicka painted 28 new works in six months. A portrait would take three weeks of work, allowing for the nuisance of dealing with a difficult sitter; by 1927, Lempicka could charge 50,000 French francs for a portrait, a sum equal to about US$2,000 then and more than ten times as much today. Through Castelbarco, she was introduced to Italy’s great man of letters and notorious lover, Gabriele d’Annunzio. She visited the poet twice at his villa on Lake Garda, seeking to paint his portrait; he in turn was set on seduction. After her unsuccessful attempts to secure the commission, she went away angry, while d’Annunzio also remained unsatisfied.

In 1925, Lempicka painted her iconic work Auto-Portrait (Tamara in the Green Bugatti) for the cover of the German fashion magazine Die Dame. As summed up by the magazine Auto-Journal in 1974, “the self-portrait of Tamara de Lempicka is a real image of the independent woman who asserts herself. Her hands are gloved, she is helmeted, and inaccessible; a cold and disturbing beauty [through which] pierces a formidable being—this woman is free!” In 1927 Lempicka won her first major award, the first prize at the Exposition Internationale des Beaux Arts in Bordeaux, France, for her portrait of Kizette on the Balcony.

The Roaring Twenties

In Paris during the Roaring Twenties, Tamara de Lempicka became part of the bohemian life: she knew Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and André Gide. Famous for her libido, she was bisexual. Her affairs with both men and women were conducted in ways that were considered scandalous at the time. She often used formal and narrative elements in her portraits, and her nude studies produced overpowering effects of desire and seduction. In the 1920s she became closely associated with lesbian and bisexual women in writing and artistic circles, such as Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West, and Colette. She also became involved with Suzy Solidor, a night club singer at the Boîte de Nuit, whose portrait she later painted. Her husband eventually tired of their arrangement and abandoned her in 1927. They were divorced in 1931 in Paris.

Obsessed with her work and her social life, Lempicka neglected more than her husband; she rarely saw her daughter. When Kizette was not away at boarding school (France or England), the girl was often with her grandmother Malvina. When Lempicka informed her mother and daughter that she would not be returning from America for Christmas in 1929, Malvina was so angry that she burned Lempicka’s enormous collection of designer hats; Kizette watched them burn, one by one.

Kizette was neglected, but also immortalized. Lempicka painted her only child repeatedly, leaving a striking portrait series: Kizette in Pink, 1926; Kizette on the Balcony, 1927; Kizette Sleeping, 1934; Portrait of Baroness Kizette, 1954–5, etc. In other paintings, the women depicted tend to resemble Kizette.

In 1928, her longtime patron the Baron Raoul Kuffner von Diószeg (1886–1961) visited her studio and commissioned her to paint his mistress. Lempicka finished the portrait, then took the mistress’ place in the Baron’s life. She travelled to the United States for the first time in 1929, to paint a commissioned portrait for Rufus T. Bush and to arrange a show of her work at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The show went well but the money she earned was lost when the bank she used collapsed following the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Lempicka continued both her heavy workload and her frenetic social life through the next decade. The Great Depression had little effect on her; in the early 1930s she was painting King Alfonso XIII of Spain and Queen Elizabeth of Greece. Museums began to collect her works. In 1933 she traveled to Chicago where she worked with Georgia O’Keeffe, Santiago Martínez Delgado and Willem de Kooning. Her social position was cemented when she married her lover, Baron Kuffner, on 3 February 1934 in Zurich (his wife had died the year before). The Baron took her out of her quasi-bohemian life and finally secured her place in high society again, with a title to boot. She repaid him by convincing him to sell many of his estates in Eastern Europe and move his money to Switzerland. She saw the coming of World War II from a long way off, much sooner than most of her contemporaries. She did make a few concessions to the changing times as the decade passed; her art featured a few refugees and common people, and even a Christian saint or two, as well as the usual aristocrats and cold nudes.

Later life

In the winter of 1939, Lempicka and her husband started an “extended vacation” in the United States. She immediately arranged for a show of her work in New York, though the Baron and Baroness chose to settle in Beverly Hills, California, living in the former residence of Hollywood director King Vidor. She cultivated a Garboesque manner. The Baroness would visit the Hollywood stars on their studio sets, such as Tyrone Power, Walter Pidgeon, and George Sanders and they would come to her studio to see her at work. She did war relief work, like many others at the time; and she managed to get Kizette out of Nazi-occupied Paris, via Lisbon, in 1941. Some of her paintings of this time had a Salvador Dalí quality, as displayed in Key and Hand, 1941. In 1943, the couple relocated to New York City. Even though she continued to live in style, socializing continuously, her popularity as a society painter had diminished greatly. They traveled to Europe frequently to visit fashionable spas and so that the Baron could attend to Hungarian refugee work. For a while, she continued to paint in her trademark style, although her range of subject matter expanded to include still lifes, and even some abstracts. Yet eventually she adopted a new style, using palette knife instead of brushes. Her new work was not well received when she exhibited in 1962 at the Iolas Gallery. Lempicka determined never to show her work again, and retired from active life as a professional artist.

Insofar as she still painted at all, Lempicka sometimes reworked earlier pieces in her new style. The crisp and direct Amethyste (1946), for example, became the pink and fuzzy Girl with Guitar (1963). She showcased at the Ror Volmar Gallery in Paris from 30 May to 17 June 1961.

After Baron Kuffner’s death from a heart attack on 3 November 1961 on the ocean liner Liberté en route to New York, she sold most of her possessions and made three around-the-world trips by ship. Finally Lempicka moved to Houston, Texas to be with Kizette and her family. (Kizette had married a man named Harold Foxhall, who was then chief geologist for the Dow Chemical Company; they had two daughters.) There she began her difficult and disagreeable later years. Kizette served as Tamara’s business manager, social secretary, and factotum, and suffered under her mother’s controlling domination and petulant behavior. Tamara complained that not only were the paints and other artists’ materials now inferior to the “old days” but that people in the 1970s lacked the special qualities and “breeding” that inspired her art. The artistry and craftsmanship of her glory days were unrecoverable. In 1978 Tamara moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to live among an aging international set and some of the younger aristocrats. After Kizette’s husband died of cancer, she attended her mother for three months until Tamara died in her sleep on March 18, 1980. She was cremated and her ashes were scattered over the volcano of Popocatepetl on 27 March 1980 by her Mexican friend Victor Manuel Contreras and her daughter Kizette.

Lempicka lived long enough for the wheel of fashion to turn a full circle: before she died a new generation had discovered her art and greeted it with enthusiasm. A retrospective in 1973 drew positive reviews. At the time of her death, her early Art Deco paintings were being shown and purchased once again. A stage play, Tamara, was inspired by her meeting with Gabriele D’Annunzio and was first staged in Toronto; it then ran in Los Angeles for eleven years (1984–1995) at the VFW Post, making it the longest running play in Los Angeles, and some 240 actors were employed over the years. The play was also subsequently produced at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City. In 2005, the actress and artist Kara Wilson performed Deco Diva, a one-woman stage play based on Lempicka’s life. Her life and her relationship with one of her models is fictionalized in Ellis Avery’s novel The Last Nude, which won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards Barbara Gittings Literature Award for 2013.

Legacy

American singer-songwriter and actress Madonna is an admirer and collector of Lempicka’s work and has lent paintings to events and museums. Madonna has also featured Lempicka’s work in her music videos “Open Your Heart” (1987), “Express Yourself” (1989), “Vogue” (1990) and “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” (1998). She also used paintings by Lempicka on the sets of her 1987 Who’s That Girl and 1990 Blond Ambition world tours.

Other notable Lempicka collectors include actor Jack Nicholson and singer-actress Barbra Streisand.

St Ives School : Bernard Leach.

Bernard Howell Leach, CH, CBE (5 January 1887 – 6 May 1979), was a British studio potter and art teacher. He is regarded as the “Father of British studio pottery”.

Biography

Early years (Japan)

Leach was born in Hong Kong, but spent his first years in Japan, until his father, Andrew Leach, moved back to Hong Kong in 1890. Later, he attended the Slade School of Fine Art and the London School of Art, where he studied etching under Frank Brangwyn. Reading books by Lafcadio Hearn, he became interested in Japan.

In 1909 he returned to Japan with his young wife Muriel (née Hoyle) with a view to teaching etching. In Tokyo he gave talks and attended meetings along with Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Shiga Naoya, Yanagi Sōetsu and others from the “Shirakaba-Group”, who were trying to introduce western art to Japan after 250 years of seclusion. In etching, Satomi Ton, Kojima Kikuo, and later Ryūsei Kishida, became pupils of Leach.

About 1911 he attended a Raku-yakipottery party which was his first introduction to ceramics, and through introduction by Ishii Hakutei, he began to study under Urano Shigekichi 浦野繁吉, 1851–1923), who stood as Kenzan 6th in the tradition of potter Ogata Kenzan (1663 -1743). Assisting as interpreter for technical terms was the potter Tomimoto Kenkichi, whom he had met already earlier. From this time Leach wrote articles for the Shirakaba.

1913 he also drafted covers for Shirakaba and “Fyūzan”. Attracted by the Prussian philosopher and art scholar Dr. Alfred Westharp, who at the time was living in Peking, Leach moved to Peking in 1915. There he took on the Name 李奇聞 (for “Leach”), but returned the following year to Japan. – It was the year 1919, when young Hamada Shōji visited Leach for the first time. Leach received a kiln from Kenzan and built it up in Yanai’s garden and called it Tōmon-gama. Now established as a potter, he decided to move to England.

In 1920, before leaving, he had an exhibition in Osaka, where he met the potter Kawai Kanjirō. In Tokyo, a farewell exhibition was organised.

Back in England

Leach returned to England in 1920 on the invitation of Frances Horne. Horne was establishing a Guild of Handicrafts within the existing artist colony of St Ives in Cornwall. On the recommendation of a family friend, Edgar Skinner, she contacted Leach to suggest that he become the potter within this group. Leach and his wife Muriel were accompanied by the young Hamada Shoji and, having identified a suitable site next to the Stennack river on the outskirts of St Ives, the two established the Leach Pottery in 1920. They constructed a traditional Japanese climbing kiln or ‘noborigama’, the first built in the West. however the kiln was poorly built and was reconstructed in 1923 by Matsubayashi Tsurunosuke. Leach promoted pottery as a combination of Western and Eastern arts and philosophies. His work focused on traditional Korean, Japanese and Chinese pottery, in combination with traditional techniques from England and Germany, such as slipware and salt glaze ware. He saw pottery as a combination of art, philosophy, design and craft – even as a greater lifestyle. Publishing A Potter’s Book in 1940 defined Leach’s craft philosophy and techniques, and became his breakthrough to recognition.

In 1934, Tobey and Leach travelled together through France and Italy, then sailed from Naples to Hong Kong and Shanghai, where they parted company, Leach heading on to Japan. Leach formally joined the Bahá’í Faith in 1940. A pilgrimage to the Bahá’í shrines in Haifa, Israel, during 1954 intensified his feeling that he should do more to unite the East and West by returning to the Orient “to try more honestly to do my work there as a Bahá’í and as an artist…”

Midlife

Leach advocated simple and utilitarian forms. His ethical pots stand in opposition to what he called fine art pots, which promoted aesthetic concerns rather than function. Popularized in the 1940s after the publication of A Potter’s Book, his style had lasting influence on counter-culture and modern design in North America during the 1950s and 1960s. Leach’s pottery produced a range of “standard ware” handmade pottery for the general public. He continued to produce pots which were exhibited as works of art.

Many potters from all over the world were apprenticed at the Leach Pottery, and spread Leach’s style and beliefs. His British associates and trainees include Michael Cardew, Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie, David and Michael Leach (his sons), Janet Darnell (whom Leach married in 1956) and William Marshall. His American apprentices include Warren MacKenzie (who likewise influenced many potters through his teaching at the University of Minnesota), Byron Temple, Clary Illian and Jeff Oestrich. He was a major influence on the leading New Zealand potter Len Castle who travelled to London to spend time working with him in the mid-1950s. Many of his Canadian apprentices made up the pottery scene of the Canadian west coast during the 1970s in Vancouver.

Leach was instrumental in organising the only International Conference of Potters and Weavers in July 1952 at Dartington Hall, where he had been working and teaching. It included exhibitions of British pottery and textiles since 1920, Mexican folk art, and works by conference participants, among them Shoji Hamada and US-based Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain. Another important contributor was Japanese aesthetician Soetsu Yanagi, author of The Unknown Craftsman. According to Brent Johnson, “The most important outcome of the conference was that it helped organize the modern studio pottery movement by giving a voice to the people who became its leaders…it gave them [Leach, Hamada and Yanagi] celebrity status…[while] Marguerite Wildenhain emerged from Dartinghall Hall as the most important craft potter in America.”

Later years.

He continued to produce work until 1972 and never ended his passion for travelling, which made him a precursor of today’s artistic globalism. He continued to write about ceramics even after losing his eyesight. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London held a major exhibition of his art in 1977. The Leach Pottery still remains open today, accompanied by a museum displaying many pieces by Leach and his students.

Honours

• Japan Foundation Cultural Award, 1974.
• Companion of Honour, 1973 (UK).
• Order of the Sacred Treasure, 1966 (Japan).
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 1962.

Edmund de Waal’s book

Edmund de Waal, British ceramic artist and Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster, had been taught pottery by Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of Leach, at the King’s School, Canterbury. Whilst in Japan de Waal worked on a monograph of Leach, researching Leach’s papers and journals in the archive room of the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum,

De Waal’s book on Bernard Leach was published in 1998. He described it as “the first ‘de-mystifying’ study of Leach. “The great myth of Leach,” he said, “is that Leach is the great interlocutor for Japan and the East, the person who understood the East, who explained it to us all, brought out the mystery of the East. But in fact the people he was spending time with, and talking to, were very few, highly educated, often Western educated Japanese people, who in themselves had no particular contact with rural, unlettered Japan of peasant craftsmen”.

De Waal noted that Leach did not speak Japanese and had looked at only a narrow range of Japanese ceramics.

Writings (selected)

• 1940: A Potter’s Book. London: Faber & Faber
  • New edition, with introductions by Soyetsu Yanagi and Michael Cardew. London: Faber & Faber, 1976, ISBN 978-0-571-10973-9
• 1985: Beyond East and West: Memoirs, Portraits and Essays. New edition, London: Faber & Faber (September 1985), ISBN 978-0-571-11692-8
• 1988: Drawings, Verse & Belief Oneworld Publications; 3rd edition (1988), ISBN 978-1-85168-012-2

St Ives School : Sir Terry Frost.

Sir Terry Frost RA (born Terence Ernest Manitou Frost) (13 October 1915 – 1 September 2003) was an English abstract artist, who worked in Newlyn, Cornwall, but as part of The St Ives School.

Born in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England, in 1915, he did not become an artist until he was in his 30s. During World War II, he served in France and the Middle East, before joining the commandos. Whilst serving with the commandos in Crete in June 1941 he was captured and became a prisoner of war.^‪ As a prisoner at Stalag 383 in Bavaria, he met and was taught by Adrian Heath. He said of his prison experience that it was a ‘tremendous spiritual experience, a more aware or heightened perception during starvation’.^‪

After the war, he attended Camberwell School of Art and the St. Ives School of Art. In 1951 he worked as an assistant to the sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

Frost’s academic career included teaching at Bath Academy of Art, the Cyprus College of Art and the University of Leeds. Later he became Artist in Residence and Professor of Painting at the Department of Fine Art of the University of Reading.

In 1992, he was elected a Royal Academician and he was knighted in 2000.

He married Kathleen Clarke in 1945. They had five sons and one daughter. His sons Adrian and Anthony also became artists while another son, Stephen, is a comedian and actor. His grandson Luke is also an artist

St Ives School : Peter Lanyon

(George) Peter Lanyon (8 February 1918 – 31 August 1964) was a Cornish painter^‪ of landscapes leaning heavily towards abstraction. Lanyon was one of the most important artists to emerge in post-war Britain. Despite his early death at the age of forty-six he achieved a body of work that is amongst the most original and important reappraisals of modernism in painting to be found anywhere. Combining abstract values with radical ideas about landscape and the figure, Lanyon navigated a course from Constructivism through Abstract Expressionism to a style close to Pop. He also made constructions, pottery and collage.

Lanyon was born in St Ives, Cornwall, the only son of W H Lanyon, an amateur photographer and musician. He was educated at Clifton College. St Ives remained his base, and he received after-school painting lessons from Borlase Smart. In 1937 he met Adrian Stokes, who is thought to have introduced him to contemporary painting and sculpture and who advised him to go to the Euston Road School, where he studied for four months under Victor Pasmore. In 1936-37 he also attended Penzance School of Art. In 1939 he met established artists Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, who had moved to St Ives on the outbreak of war. Lanyon received private art tuition from Nicholson.

The character of his work changed completely and he became very involved with making constructions. Throughout the 1940s the influence of Nicholson and Gabo remained strongly visible in his work

From 1940 to 1945 he served with the Royal Air Force in the Western Desert, Palestine and Italy. In 1946 he married Sheila St John Browne. Six children were born to the couple between 1947 and 1957. Also in 1946 he became an active member of the Crypt Group of Artists, St Ives. During the 1950s he became established as a leading figure in the St. Ives group of artists.

Lanyon took up gliding as a pastime and used the resulting experience extensively in his paintings. He died in Taunton, Somerset, as the result of injuries received in a gliding accident and is buried in St. Uny’s Church, Lelant.

In September 2010 Peter Lanyon’s work was honored with a large-scale retrospective exhibition: Peter Lanyon October 9, 2010 – January 23, 2011 at Tate St Ives. Curated by Chris Stephens, Head of Displays and Curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain, it was the first thorough museum retrospective for almost forty years.

Life and career

• 1918 Born in St Ives Cornwall.
• 1947 First child, Andrew Lanyon
• 1948 Travelled around Italy in the summer.
• 1949 Founder member of Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall.
• 1950 First one-man exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery, London. Began teaching at the Bath Academy of Art, Corsham (until 1957) where William Scott was senior painting master Invited by Arts Council to contribute to their Festival of Britain exhibition 1953. Spent four months living in Italy on Italian government scholarship Elected member of the Newlyn Society of Artists.
• 1954 Awarded Critics Prize, by the British section of the International Association of Art Critics.
• 1957–60 Ran art school, St Peter’s Loft at St Ives with Terry Frost and William Redgrave.
• 1957 Visited New York for his first one-man show there, with Catherine Viviano Gallery and met Rothko, Motherwell and other artists, critics and collectors. He greatly admired the new American painting he saw both in Tate’s exhibition ‘Modern Art in the United States’ and on his trip to New York. Rothko’s work particularly thrilled him.

While Lanyon was becoming increasingly conscious of the English landscape tradition American art sped his development towards a looser and more open kind of painting.

• 1959 he was awarded second prize, 2nd John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool. He began gliding, as he explained ‘to get a more complete knowledge of the landscape’.
• 1961 he was elected Chairman of the Newlyn Society of Artists, Cornwall and was elected a Bard of the Gorseth Kernow, with the bardic name Marghak an Gwyns (Rider of the Winds) for services to Cornish art.
• 1962 he spent seven months painting mural commissioned for house of Stanley J Seeger, New Jersey.
• 1963 he spent three months as visiting painter, San Antonio Art Institute in Texas, also visiting Mexico.
• 1964 he visited Prague and Bratislava to lecture for the British Council.

Peter Lanyon died after a gliding accident on 31 August 1964 at Taunton.

St Ives School : Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham.

Island Sheds, St Ives No. 1 1940 Wilhelmina Barns-Graham 1912-2004 Presented by the artist 1999 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T07546

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham CBE (8 June 1912 – 26 January 2004) was one of the foremost British abstract artists, a member of the influential Penwith Society of Arts, and The St Ives School.

Life

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, known as Willie, was born in St Andrews, Fife, on 8 June 1912. As a child she showed very early signs of creative ability. Determining while at school that she wanted to be an artist, she set her sights on Edinburgh College of Art where, after some dispute with her father, she enrolled in 1931, and after periods of illness, from which she graduated with her diploma in 1937.

At the suggestion of the College’s Principal Hubert Wellington, she moved to St Ives, Cornwall, in 1940, near to where a group of Hampstead-based modernists had settled, at Carbis Bay, to escape the war.This was a pivotal moment in her life. Early on she met Borlase Smart, Alfred Wallis and Bernard Leach, as well as the painter Ben Nicholson and the sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. Barns-Graham became a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists and the St Ives Society of Artists but was to leave the latter when, in 1949, the St Ives art community suffered an acrimonious split, and she became a founder member of a breakaway group of abstract artists, the Penwith Society of Arts. She was also one of the initial exhibitors of the significant Crypt Group. In the same year she married the young author and aspiring poet (later noted architect) David Lewis (the marriage was annulled in 1960).

She travelled regularly over the next 20 years to Switzerland, Italy, Paris, and Spain. With the exception of a short teaching term at Leeds School of Art (1956–1957) and three years in London (1960–1963), she lived and worked in St Ives. From 1960, on inheriting a house outside St Andrews from her aunt Mary Niesh (who had been a support to her throughout her art college years), she split her time between summers in Cornwall and winters in Scotland.

Post-war, when St Ives had ceased to be a pivotal centre of modernism, her work and importance as an artist was sidelined, in part by an art-historical consensus that she had been only as a minor member of the St Ives school. In old age, however, she received belated recognition, receiving honorary doctorates from the University of St Andrews in 1992 and later from the universities of Plymouth, Exeter and Falmouth . In 1999 she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Scottish Watercolourists. She was awarded a CBE in 2001, the same year that saw the publication of the first major monograph on her life and work, written by Lynne Green — W.Barns-Graham : A Studio Life (Lund Humphries). This publication was followed in 2007 by The Prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham : a complete catalogue by Ann Gunn (also a Lund Humphries publication). Her work is found in all major public collections within the UK.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham died in St Andrews on 26 January 2004. She bequeathed her entire estate to The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust, which she had established in 1987. The aims of the trust are to foster and protect her reputation, to advance the knowledge of her life and work, to create an archive of key works of art and papers, and, in a cause close to her heart, to support and inspire art and art history students through offering grants and bursaries to those in selected art college and universities. Information about the trust and its activities is to be found at http://www.barns-grahamtrust.org.uk

Art

Through the course of her life Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s work generally lay on the divide between abstract and representational, typically drawing on inspirations from landscape. From 1940, when she arrived in Cornwall, her pictures are exploratory and even tentative as she began to develop her own method and visual language. The influence of St Ives then starts to arise, to take hold as local shapes and colours appear in the images – the Cornish rocks, landscape and buildings. Perhaps the most significant innovation at this time derived from the ideas of Naum Gabo, who was interested in the principle of stereometry – defining forms in terms of space rather than mass. Barns-Graham’s series of glacier pictures that started in 1949, inspired by her walks on the Grindelwald Glacier in Switzerland, reflect the idea of looking at things in a total view, not only from the outside but from all points, including inside. In 1952 her studies of local forms became more planar and two dimensional, but from the mid-1950s she had developed a more expressionist and free form attitude following journeys to Spain.

In the early 1960s, reflecting the turmoil in her personal life, Barns-Graham adopted a severe geometrical form of abstraction as a way of taking a fresh approach to her painting. Combined with a very intuitive sense of colour and design, the work often has more vitality than is immediately apparent. Squares tumble and circles flow across voids. Colour and movement come together and it is at this point in her work that St Ives perhaps exerts the least influence; rather, this approach more likely reflects an interest in the work of Josef Albers who was exciting UK artists at this time, in embracing new possibilities offered by the optical effects of a more formulaic abstraction.

Nonetheless there is evidence to suggest that many images did stem from observations of the world around her. This is seen in a series of ice paintings in the late 1970s and then in a body of work that explores the hidden energies of sea and wind, composed of multiple wave-like lines drawn in the manner of Paul Klee. The Expanding Form paintings of 1980 are the culmination of many ideas from the previous fifteen years – the poetic movement in these works revealing a more relaxed view.

From the late 1980s and right up until her death, Barns-Graham’s paintings became more and more free; an expression of life and free flowing brushwork not seen since the late 1950s. Working mainly on paper (there are relatively few canvases from this period) the images evolved to become, initially, highly complex, rich in colour and energy, and then, simultaneously, bolder and simpler, reflecting her enjoyment of life and living. “in my paintings I want to express the joy and importance of colour, texture, energy and vibrancy, with an awareness of space and construction. A celebration of life — taking risks so creating the unexpected.” (Barns-Graham, October 2001) This outlook is perfectly expressed in the extraordinary collection of screen prints that she made with Graal Press, Edinburgh, between 1999 and 2003.