Doreen Fletcher Mile End Park with Church (1988) oil on canvas 51 x 76cm
Doreen Fletcher Mile End Park with Church (1988) oil on canvas 51 x 76cm SOLD
Lost Time: Doreen Fletcher’s East End 1983 – 2003
Doreen Fletcher arrived in the East End of London in the early 1980s and was immediately aware that the dilapidated buildings and small businesses in the streets around her were about to disappear. The sense of community in the area reminded her of her Midlands childhood and inspired by the excitement of being somewhere new, she started a series of paintings of the East End that continued for the next twenty years.
Aware that she was documenting an urban landscape that would be lost forever, she regularly contacted galleries and magazines to promote not only her paintings, but also an awareness of what was happening in the East End. Their negative response reflected the wider attitude at the time: a complete lack of interest. It was the culmination of centuries of neglect of an area that had long been regarded as a vast slum and dispirited by the rejections and the overwhelming changes to the area, Doreen stopped painting.
As perceptions have changed and we have come to realise what has been lost, Doreen’s work can now be seen as a poignant record of the time at which so much of the legacy of the East End disappeared. It is not only a record of the built environment of the 19th century and earlier, but also of a community that had survived the bombs of the Second World War. This community was in many ways the last vestiges of a late 19th century, tight knit society, in which life revolved around the streets of one’s birth and around family and friends living nearby.
These paintings depict a lost time that has gone and cannot be recovered, but perhaps this exhibition will encourage us to make up for that lost time and demand a new way of looking at future development in our cities, before it really is too late.
Oil on canvas of Rye by James Bolivar Manson dated 1914.
Oil on canvas of Ian Bell by Laura Knight dated 1957. SOLD
A Throw of the Dice
A little over a year ago I stood before Picasso’s ‘Desmoiselles d’Avignon’ in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and for the first time I got a slight sense of what it might have been like to be one of the first to see that painting a hundred years ago. With its complete negation of classicism and of the decorative in painting, in its brutality and aggression it baffled the first of his friends to see it and received a hostile reception from the Parisian public when it was first exhibited in 1916. Picasso himself continued to receive a hostile reception in Britain until after the Second World War. It is easy for us to see with hindsight the impact this painting had on 20th century art, to see it as the beginning of modernism, yet at the time whether loved or loathed, it would probably have been regarded by most as unimportant, and Cubism as a short lived aberration.
The impact of the painting stayed with me and when I bought a cubist paper collage a few months later, indistinctly signed, but British and dating from just before the First World War, I started to look for the influence of Cubism in some of the other paintings by British artists I had been putting aside for exhibitions. During a long period of thinking and reading it eventually became clear that the thread I was following was not the influence of Cubism, but of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 1898), the French poet whose ideas inspired Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism in France and Europe. There was (almost) no equivalent British ‘-ism’ however, despite the complex network of connections, which existed between London and Paris from the 19th century through to the 1930s.
During this period Paris was still the place to go for artistic training and after the First World War was a cheap place to live, with a thriving artistic community. George Bissill was a young miner until after the First World War when he studied art in Nottingham, but as soon as he had his first successful exhibition in London in 1925, he left to spend some time in Paris. Many British artists had visited Paris and knew Picasso and the Paris avant-garde well, yet their ideas apparently failed to take hold. In a modest way this exhibition is an exploration of that theme until around the time of the Second World War.
I also realised during the course of putting this exhibition together, that Mallarmé’s ideas had a strong personal resonance for me as a dealer and collector (most works in the exhibition are for sale, but not quite all). The idea that the juxtaposition of two things each with their own associations for the audience can produce a new, chance idea is as relevant for curators, dealers and collectors as it is for poets, writers and artists. Hence the title for the exhibition is taken from the central idea of Mallarmé’s last great poem: ‘all thought is a throw of the dice’.
A Slice of Spitalfields
When David Milne introduced me to Ben Rea and showed me the painted section he had done of Dennis Severs’ house my immediate reaction was ‘I want one of my building!’ Ben trained as an architect and is about to take up a post with Haworth Tompkins, the Stirling Prize winning architects, but it is his artistic ability and sense of humour in his work that appealed to me.
Ben calls his house-sections ‘Living Sections’ and in them he manages to combine a measured section of the building with both elements of its past and its current life, but with his wonderful humour evident in the detail. His sections of Dennis Sever’s house and Town House will be exhibited here in the gallery from 12th June to 12th July, together with some of his preparatory sketches, so come and have a look. Further examples of his work can be found at benrealivingsections.com
The Huguenot Map of Spitalfields
Many visitors in search of their Huguenot ancestors visit Town House to look at its atmospheric 1720’s panelled interior. Inspired by the tales of the search for your ancestors, I decided to commission a map of the area on which you could all pin your forebears, placing them in context and showing the impact Huguenot immigrants had on late 17th and early 18th century Spitalfields.
The map by Adam Dant based on the mid 18th century map of Spitalfields by Roque, has drawn an overwhelming response from all over the world and names of over 300 Huguenots have been added. The finished 1.5 x 2.5m map will be unveiled at Town House on the 17th June in the presence of as many of the descendants as we can gather together and space will permit. It will be a part of ‘Huguenot Summer’, https://www.huguenotsofspitalfields.org a wide-ranging series of events and talks around the country celebrating the people, places and legacy of the Huguenots
Although three centuries have passed, the story of these people who were expelled from France for their religion, but who found a home here still resonates with their descendants today. It demonstrates the historic significance Spitalfields possesses for Londoners at a time when it is experiencing renewed threat from developers in Norton Folgate and elsewhere.
If you pinned your ancestors on the map and would like to be present at the unveiling on the 17th June please email fiona@townhousewindow.com.
Copies suitable for framing will be available for sale on the evening and afterwards in the shop and on the website
The Mind of the Artist
The catalogue is being printed and after all the preparation I’m looking forward to finally hanging these works next week. 