Leaving aside Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, the most well known members of the London Calling group for the moment, let me share a little about Michael Andrews whose work is deserving of more attention.
Andrews was a student of Freud's at the Slade. While still at art school, he painted A Man Who Suddenly Fell Over. It's surreal and whimsical but realistic all at once. He was only 24. He won the Rome scholarship, but, unusually, returned to London mid stream, unable to settle in Italy. He needed his posse.
Andrews went from painting small groups to larger, more social groups and back again. One of which is the group at Colony Room 1, 1962, which was a drinking club favored by his pals. Party scenes and social gatherings drawn from his own life as well as newspaper images had begun to preoccupy him.
His recollections of a typical evening at the club included images of John Deakin (who had taken the wonderful photo at Wheeler's of the group, back to viewer), Henrietta Moraes who sat for Bacon and Freud (in blue dress), Freud (in dark coat facing out), Bacon (seated) and other friends. He thrived on this social interaction.
Andrews said, " "I think we thought our responses to people and circumstances and life were more important than nursing some systematic idea of what painting was all about.
Courtesy Estate of Michael Andrews
Britain Bucket List, Part 3
Bucket list: Britain 3. Eileen Agar is another one of the women being featured as under represented by history. Her exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London shows similarities with many of the avant-garde women artists working at the time: Collage, surrealism, photography and documents, and a certain eccentricity.
She was Argentinian born to a Scottish father and American mother, both with family enterprises. Growing up in England, she was exposed to Surrealism in particular and became part of that movement (the Whitechapel show contains other "Phantoms of Surrealism" women artists though I wouldn't call Claude Cahun a phantom). Agar was one of few to synthesize surrealism with cubism.
In 1930 she began to work with found objects especially marine life, shells, bones and plants. (in this she reminded me of Charlotte Perriand). She was part of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition held London.
Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape , 1942
Charleston House, Bloomsbury's hideaway, is at risk
In 2005 on July 7, the world stopped in London. I was on my way to meet the author of a book about the love triangle of surrealists Max Ernst, Gala Dali and poet Paul Eluard before a trip to Charleston House, the home of Vanessa and Clive Bell and Duncan Grant. I waited at Victoria Station for what seemed like forever and suddenly agents in acid green vests began running through the station. There had been a tube bombing and the station was being evacuated. After some desperate attempts to reach the author, I boarded the train to Sussex. I only found out later that he had been on the train behind the train that was bombed. But my day at Charleston was thus also surreal: the house is a wonder of color and decoration, evoking a bygone time when home and hearth were the breeding ground of creativity. Now, Charleston(get IG address) is in jeopardy like many other cultural sites and all our homes are the only safe haven. The Covidbomb, just another terrifying moment in history.
Mary Quant at the V and A
A Mary Quant retrospective opens in London at the V and A today. Along with Biba, her stores were THE place to get your clothes. Quant was designing in the height of the sixties- The Doors, The Stones, the Beatles and Hendrix all released new albums. But at the same time the Apollo 1 astronauts went up in flames, we doubled down in Vietnam, and the middle east erupted in the Six Day War. Quant was untrained but understood that stretchy knits and tights were the way forward.
Image courtesy the V and A