Lamps for Delight

As a curator, I was especially affected by two unusual places that housed modern art: the Matisse Chapel in Vence, and Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. The excellent recent biography of Jim Ede by Laura Freeman, which tells of the latter, brought it to mind again. In 1956 Ede bought four semi-derelict 18th century cottages just over Magdalene Bridge in Cambridge, and with an architect’s help, restored and converted them into a home for himself, his wife, Helen, and his artworks. Then, for nearly two decades, visitors were informally welcomed into their house, Ede offering them personal tours of his paintings, sculptures, and found objects. He encouraged students to borrow original art to decorate their walls, and many guests, who had simply knocked on the door and asked to come in, were invited, after their visit, to sit down at the kitchen table, have tea with him, and discuss what they had just seen.

Now part of the university, Kettle’s Yard still holds Ede’s collection and remains much as it was, but it has been renovated and expanded, with a more conventional gallery attached. The original restored house and its miscellaneous objects are hard to classify or define, because what binds them together are Ede’s tastes and interests, which developed over time, and their spirit is perhaps best captured in a book, A Way of Life, that he wrote himself, and which was illustrated with slightly awkward monochrome photographs. Once an aspiring artist, then a curator at the Tate, he slowly became a serious collector, both of modern art and of anything else he considered beautiful, although he never had a great deal of money. The Tate refused to allow him to pursue his enthusiasms during working hours, or to acquire for the gallery any of the art he admired, but he nonetheless surrounded himself in his office with works that pleased and inspired him; some were purchased, but they also included loans and gifts, while a few involved complicated transactions. He seems to have been a shrewd player in the art world, skilled at finding what he liked and found appealing.

Ignored and overlooked at the Tate because of his unconventional taste and shortcomings as an administrator – he once left staff wages in a bag on a bus – Ede nevertheless moved in influential European artistic circles of the interwar years. He met Brancusi, Miró, Picasso, Braque, and Chagall; among his personal friends were Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Christopher Wood, and it was at the Edes’ dinner table in Hampstead that Moore and Hepworth had an argument about which of them was the first to put a hole in a sculpture. He was unusual and somewhat eccentric, and Kettle’s Yard, in some respects more of a cabinet of curiosities than a conventional museum, grew to be the expression of his inner life. Ede spoke of his ‘eye for the invisible’ and sometimes about understanding pictures ‘with my ears rather than through my eyes’; he occasionally talked to them and missed them when they were away. Once, when he lent some paintings to an exhibition, he remarked that he had just been saying something to one of them when he realised it wasn’t there. From time to time, he also consulted furniture about where it would be happy.

Ede spent hours finding perfect settings and juxtapositions for the pieces in his collection. Beside a picture by Miró, for instance, he set a pewter salver on which he laid a single lemon of exactly the shade of yellow of a dot in the painting, a curatorial gesture that has continued to this day. As Rosemary Hill points out in her astute LRB review of Freeman’s book, some people have found this approach, like Ede himself, affected and even deranged, but it is unquestionably compelling. Ironically, Ede’s aesthetic, once offbeat and individual, has become mainstream; it is now emblematic of a kind of refined Englishness that has echoes in both fashion and design.

Most of the artists whom Ede befriended and whose work he collected have become well known and much loved, at least in England, but while some of have risen to be part of the modernist pantheon, others, like Winifred Nicholson, have retained their outlier status. Her story is interesting. During the 1920s, then more successful than her husband Ben, Winifred was involved in London’s new abstract art movement, which included many of their acquaintances and friends, both from home and abroad, but her life and career were dramatically disrupted in 1931, when Ben left her and their three children and went to live with Barbara Hepworth. Winifred took the children to Paris, stayed there for six years, mixing with avant-garde artists, and then returned to a farmhouse in Cumbria. After being close to the centre of the modern movement, she took a more remote path, choosing to paint and exhibit sensitive pictures of flowers and landscapes. Her images, casually handled but full of colour and luminosity, are affirmations of the wonder of life, which is also how she viewed the act of painting, and creation itself.

Winifred Nicholson had a particular fondness for Scotland, and especially for the Hebrides, where she stayed with her family and, on other occasions, with her friend, the poet Kathleen Raine. She loved the isolation in the remote countryside, which she often described in letters; her wise and amusing observations about life and nature sometimes recall the lyrical sensibility of Tove Jansson’s ‘The Summer Book’. She liked to live with simple frugality, and her spirituality, as Raine once described it, was that of the present moment, to which ‘she brought the whole of herself to meet whatever epiphany was present before her eyes, as a gift, as it were, from the ever-flowing world'. Raine considered the times she spent working with Winifred Nicholson in Scotland as among the happiest and most productive of her life.

For further exploration:

Kettle’s Yard: https://www.cam.ac.uk/RediscoverKettlesYard

The new Kettle’s Yard aesthetic: https://apracticeforeverydaylife.com/projects/kettles-yard-identity/

A review in the LRB of Laura Freeman’s biography of Jim Ede: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n10/rosemary-hill/consulting-the-furniture

Winifred Nicholson: https://www.winifrednicholson.com/

Current listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn8x0QbN4f8

Bands and Belts

Glimmer