British Art Fair 28 September - 1 October 2023
Going Global
Curated by Monica Bohm-Duchen and Colin Gleadell
Sir Jacob Epstein (1880-1959)
Sunita
Courtesy of Private Collection
America
Jacob Epstein made his appearance in Britain in 1905 and was to exercise a profound influence on both Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Born in New York in 1880, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, he showed an early aptitude for art and moved to Paris as soon as he had sufficient funds. He then moved to London where he quickly made his name as a prominent (if controversial) public sculptor. An early example of his work are 18 stone figure carvings made in 1908 for the British Medical Association exterior, which show the influence of the classical Indian sculptures he had seen at the Musee Guimet in Paris. In London he was drawn by the African and Polynesian sculptures he saw in the British Museum. After playing a pioneering role in the development of Modernism in this country, Epstein turned to a more naturalistic mode, focussing on portrait busts such as one of his lovers, Isabel Rawsthorne.
A movement with which Epstein never engaged with was the surrealism which infiltrated British art practice during the 1930s. One of those who did was Epstein’s younger compatriot Charles Howard (b 1899), a self-taught artist who took part in the first surrealist exhibition to be staged in America, held at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932. After marrying the English surrealist painter Madge Knight, the pair moved to London in 1933, becoming associated with the historically significant Unit One group formed by Paul Nash. Howard took part in London’s International Surrealist exhibition in 1936 and exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s London gallery, Guggenheim-Jeune, in 1939. After retreating from the war to America in 1941 where he enjoyed some success in California, Howard returned to England in 1946, and was exhibited by the McRoberts & Tunnard Gallery while teaching at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, from 1956 until the 1970s when he retired to Italy. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1942 and 1951, and at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. A similar work to the one exhibited at Crossing Borders is in the permanent collection of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Howard died in 1978.
RB Kitaj was born in the US in 1932 and came to the UK in 1958 to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing. From there he went to the Royal College of Art where he was a contemporary of David Hockney. His first significant exhibition was with the Marlborough New London Gallery with whom he maintained a long relationship.
Admired for his drawing and complex compositions and intellectual references, he became obsessed with his Jewish heritage and his place in the Jewish diaspora. In 1980 he was selected to curate The Artist’s Eye exhibition at The National Gallery and was elected a Royal Academician in 1991 - becoming the only American member at the time. His retrospective at Tate Britain in 1994 was meant to be a grand accolade to someone who had had a great influence on British pop art, but it was slammed by the critics. In spite of this, he was awarded the Golden Lion award in Venice in 1995, but the criticism (which he considered to be fuelled by antisemitism) still riled, and he returned to the US in 1997. One of the paintings he made shortly before he left is The Novelist (My Neighbour, Anita Brookner), about which he wrote later: “A picture from my last days in London showing the (strange like me) Jewish novelist walking her walk in my road, in our Diaspora, toward the (Erich) Mendelsohn House.” Kitaj died in Los Angeles in 2007.
Born in America in 1939 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Liliane Lijn has described herself as a ‘New Yorker by birth, a European by education, and a Londoner by choice.’ She arrived in London in 1966 already classified as a kinetic artist working with light and industrial materials. Five years earlier she had married the Greek kinetic artist, Takis, in Paris. A pioneer in exploring the interaction between art, science and technology, her twin interests in physics and Buddhism led the critic Jasia Reichardt to remark: “There is an intersection [in Lijn’s work] at which science fiction, religion and quantum physics converge”. Her work was first exhibited in London by John Dunbar’s Indica Gallery and she was given her first solo show by the Hanover Gallery in 1970. Institutional recognition came with her major solo show which was held at the Serpentine Gallery in 1976. Her work is represented in many public and corporate collections in Britain, including Tate Britain, the British Museum, and the Arts Council of Great Britain.
Liliane Lijn (b.1939)
Small Cutting, 1965.
Sawn cut perspex and white paint, 28 x 19.5 x 2.5 cm.
Courtesy Austin Desmond Fine Art.
Susan Hiller was born in America in 1940, and studied and then pursued a career in anthropology, but soon decided to ‘relinquish factuality for fantasy’ and became an artist. Settling in London in late 1960, one of her earliest works to create an impression was Dedicated to the Unknown Artists (1972–76) - an installation of over 300 postcards of rough sea images of waves breaking dramatically on the British coastline, now part of the Tate Collection and considered a classic work of conceptual art. Hiller often reworked her ideas into ongoing series, Rough Set (2012-14), which is included in the exhibition, being an example.
The use of postcard imagery was characteristic of Hiller’s interest in mundane and devalued cultural artefacts arranged as if in defiance of the anthropological technique of categorisation for scientific study. She also focussed on the mystical, the subconscious and the paranormal, and used an array of media from slide projections to video and tv screens. Regarded by some as one of the most influential artists working in Britain, she was recognised by mid-career survey exhibitions at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (1986) and Tate Liverpool (1996), and a major retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain (2011). She died in London in 2019.
Li Yuan-chia (1929-1994)
12 + 14 = 36
Oil on board.
Courtesy Richard Saltoun
Taiwan
Li Yuan-chia (b China 1929) was adopted and educated in Taiwan, where he became one of the 8 Great Outlaws, exhibiting at the Sao Paolo Art Biennial in 1957. The group gradually dispersed, with several members emigrating to escape martial law, among them Li, who went to Italy in 1965 and then to London where he established himself among the new wave of experimental artists exhibiting at the short-lived, international avant-garde gallery Signals. In 1968 he moved to Cumbria, where he bought a farmhouse from Winifred Nicholson and turned it into an arts centre (the LYC Museum and Art Gallery). His work, which evolved from abstraction to conceptual, encompassed painting, photography and mixed media, including sculpture, environmental art and interactive installations such as the example exhibited here. Li died in the UK in 1994 and was given a belated retrospective exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre in 2001.
Born into a wealthy family in Taiwan in 1933, Richard Lin was educated in England. He had his first solo show in the UK in 1958 at the ICA and was represented at the prestigious Documenta exhibition in Germany. His flat, minimalist style was informed both by American minimalism and Chinese calligraphy. Lin exhibited with Gimpel Fils from 1959–1964 and with Marlborough, from 1965–1975. Lin spent much time in Wales and returned to Taiwan in 2002, where he died in 2011. His work is in the Tate Collection, Glasgow, Norwich, Manchester City and Leicester Museum collections in the UK as well as numerous museums in America, Europe and Taiwan.
Europe
Peter de Francia was born in France in 1921 to Italian and British parents. He moved to London to study at the Slade School of Art from 1945, spending most of the rest of his professional life teaching at St Martin’s College of Art, the Royal College of Art, and Goldsmith’s, University of London. A committed left-winger, he was influenced by communist sympathisers like Guttuso, Beckmann, Picasso and Grosz, his nervy, expressionist line and earthy colours used to serve allegorical narrative subjects that bore some kind of social commentary. His political leanings made for uneasy relations with the capitalist commercial art world, as did his rejection of fashionable American abstract painting and adherence to the figurative. A significant event was his inclusion alongside Bacon, Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff in The Human Clay exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1976, for which the curator and artist RB Kitaj coined the term ‘School of London’. Subsequently, he enjoyed a major retrospective at the Camden Art Centre in 1977/1983, and solo shows at Tate Britain in 2006 and at Pallant House in 2007. He died in 2012.
Jules de Goede was born in Holland in 1937. De Goede’s family survived war-time Nazi occupation so he could study decorative art and design in his home country where he was influenced by the modernist de Stijl movement and the artist Piet Mondrian. In 1956 he moved with his family to Australia and then to London in 1965, where he took a studio at the innovative SPACE studios in East London, run by Bridget Riley and Peter Sedgley. An abstract painter, he said “I try to show what is invisible.” He had his first exhibition at the cutting-edge Grabowski gallery in 1967, and in 1972 began a 30-year career teaching at Middlesex Polytechnic, where Anish Kapoor and Langlands and Bell were among his students. In 1974 he was selected for a high-profile exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, focusing on just five artists from Holland, where the critic Richard Cork remarked on his ‘pierced and incised canvases.’ A bon viveur to the end, he died in 2007. His work is held in the collections of the Arts Council, the Contemporary Art Society and public museums such as Newcastle and Bristol.
Peter de Francia (1921 – 2012)
An Indian Student (Kulwant Aurora) 1, 1957.
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of James Hyman Gallery
Artists who came to live and work in Britain from all over the world during the 20th century and contributed significantly to its culture, are the subject of a wide-ranging exhibition, Crossing Borders: Internationalism in Modern British Art, at British Art Fair 2023. Artworks from immigrants to the UK from India and Pakistan, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand, and America will all be on display. Works are being supplied by past and present exhibitors of the fair and will be for sale with prices ranging from four to six figures. The exhibition is being co-curated by Colin Gleadell, who is on the fair’s advisory committee, and art historian and author Monica Bohm-Duchen, founding director of the Insiders/Outsiders project.