Lamorna Art Colony -an exhibition at Penlee House, Penzance

 Lamorna Colony Pioneers
3 May 2023 until 30 September 2023

An exhibition at Penlee House co curated with David Tovey whose new book, an in-depth study of the colony, Lamorna – An Artistic, Social, Literary History, will be available during the show.

 

Lamorna Birch, St Buryan-the Fowling Pool, 1907

 

There is a quite astonishing contrast between the first picture in this show and the last.

Marlow Moss,Composition Yellow,Black and White, 1949

How did art go from looking carefully to observe life to constructing simple abstract compositions?

There is no catalogue for the show but the labels give interesting information which is not too lengthy to take in.
I found I was absorbed in the paintings - the way they were done - and also fascinated by the stories of the artists and their bohemian enclave.
Then there is also the visual information of what the artists were observing of life, the social history, the clothing and interiors as well as landscape.
So, three aspects that make it a really enjoyable experience.

Munnings Cattle watering in a stream, Zennor

I found the surprise for me was just how lively Alfred Munnings’ work is. Its the wildness of his bruhstrokes that I noticed. A close up of a section of a painting of cows in a field could be a twentieth century abstract expressionist work.

Munnings , detail from 'Cattle Watering in a stream, Zennor, 1912

Munnings I know made a notable speech denouncing Picasso as a charlatan, at the Royal Academy, but he was more modern unconciously than perhaps he realised.

The item I would have liked to take home with me was a ceramic figure of Laura Knight made by Ella Naper. It reminded me of similarly lively works made by the early artists of the Russian Revolution with its vigorous charm.

 

Ella had modelled for Laura Knight’s ‘“Spring’ of 1915,  the landscape background of which the painter risked incarceration to draw as during the first world war outdoor drawing was banned.

There are a couple of other Knight’s, and in ‘My Lady of the Rocks’ there’s rather an awkwardly proportioned figure as if collaged on top of the landscape.

Dod Proctor’s ‘The Steps  at Oakhill Cottage’ 1910, is a delightful early work of observation.

Harold Knight’s ‘Portrait of Robert Morson Hughes’1915,  is startling in its use of space in the composition after so many detailed landscapes. Apparantly it was a study for a work of a group of men originally entitled ‘’How to win the war’ as they sat talking in The Wink pub, but it was retitled   less bluntly when shown at the RA.

 

 Coincidentally Rupert White’s ‘Magic and Modernism’has just been published, which describes the two paths of modernism and surrealism, the latter an uncensored anti bourgeois disorder whereas modernist abstraction aimed to make a more harmious world after the chaos of war. And we see these two divergent approaches in the work of Ithell Colquhoun, and John Tunnard - both weird and surreal and Marlow Moss with her constructed order. 

Ithell Colquhoun, Rock Pool, 1957

How varied art is       

John Tunnard, Arena, 1959

 

 

- observation, imagination, chaos and calm and a treat from way down in Lamorna.

Alfred Munnings at Penlee, Penzance

Alfred Munnings at Penlee House, Penzance, Cornwall, UK 2019 , 15 June - 7 Sept.

Alfred Munnings (1878 - 1959) is known for his reactionary speech as President of London's Royal Academy, 1949, in which he dismissed Picasso and Matisse as worthless.


His own work shows great powers of observation and is executed with a lively panache. His caricature of himself shows him full of verve as he attacks a canvas with outstretched brush.

He was inspired to live in Cornwall by Laura Knight's painting of 1909. 'The Beach' and he fitted into the Newlyn painters' convivial scene. He had sight in only one eye following a boyhood injury and therefore was rejected for WW1 service although he later became a Canadian war artist depicting horses in action.


Horses were Munnings' speciality. It jars now to see a trio of hunting scenes and Penlee try to minimise this by a caption saying that Munnings once had an exhausted fox set free. In a jolly Christmas cartoon he showed a fox standing on a stool joining in dinner as an equal hunter with the two human huntsman.


My favourite work was a painting of a blue stockinged young Phyllis Crocker looking very modern and pensive, seated on rocks with dark hills behind her.


There is a lovely illustrated poem showing a woman riding,with the words, 'My many cares I then forget In wide and peaceful eventide.'
I can't help but see this as a sad allusion to his having married a wife who tried to kill herself on their honeymoon and subsequently fell for his friend, Captain Gilbert Evans, who left to serve overseas. She then succeeded in suicide. Munnings magnaminously gave his bravura painting of her on horseback to her lover. Later he married again, choosing another woman who looked very well on a horse.


The exhibition includes works by other painters of the Newlyn artists' colony plus letters written by Munnings. Thus his work is placed in context and he comes to life as a person, excelling in his painterly realism whilst unable to comprehend the way modern art was developing in France.


Then as now there were many competent and worthwhile arists who leave us interesting observations without aspiring to be avant-garde ground breakers.