SOUTINE | KOSSOFF ON FILM!

Soutine I Kossoff exhibition at Hastings Contemporary from Hastings Contemporary on Vimeo.

Seafaring: the Movie!

Well it's less than a minute long, but I think this is a great introduction to my exhibition Seafaring, which runs at Hastings Contemporary until the autumn. Made by Ali Jassim - who can find on Instagram as @just_jassim - the film follows two young visitors as they tour the exhibition, stopping to look at an array of works by artists such as Cecily Brown, Eric Ravilious and Maggi Hambling.

Seafaring runs until 25 September: you can find out all about the show here.

SEAFARING EXHIBITION AT HASTINGS CONTEMPORARY!

Richard Eurich, Survivors from a Torpedoed Ship, 1942, Tate

 

From fishermen to submariners, migrants to merchant seamen, people throughout the ages have shared the experience of being at sea. Seafaring explores the perils and pleasures of life at sea, while at the same time taking visitors on an art historical voyage from the early 19th century to the present.

At the heart of the exhibition is Lost at Sea, a show-within-a-show featuring three oil paintings by innovative contemporary artist Cecily Brown from her critically-acclaimed Shipwreck series. These are set alongside works by three Romantic artists who inspired her. Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault and J.M.W Turner were among the first painters to focus attention on the plight of  shipwrecked mariners, ordinary people who found themselves at the mercy of the sea. Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa inspired another contemporary artist, Martin Kippenberger, to explore his own mortality in a set of lithographs.

The themes of shipwreck and rescue also play out across the wider Seafaring exhibition, as do those of voyage and migration, work and leisure, war and peace. The exhibition includes works based on artists’ observation of the sea and the creatures that inhabit it, and depictions of the people who, for different reasons, travel the sea by ship or boat. In the late 19th century James Tissot studied travellers embarking and disembarking at the Port of London, while Edward Burne-Jones painted a poignant portrait of a young wife longing for the safe return of her husband from sea. Early in the next, Frank Brangwyn portrayed trawlermen battling rough seas. World War Two gave artists such as Ronald Searle and Edward Ardizzone the opportunity to observe maritime life at first hand. Eric Ravilious briefly became the unofficial artist-in-residence aboard a training submarine. More recently Peter de Francia and Maggi Hambling have explored very different aspects of migration by sea, while Chris Orr offers a light-hearted view on life aboard an ocean liner that complements the elegant posters of the interwar years.  

Seafaring opens at Hastings Contemporary on Saturday 30 April!

Seaside Modern Lecture

Eric Ravilious, Mackerel Sky, 1938, watercolour

 

LINK FOR TICKETS: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/seaside-modern-art-and-life-on-the-beach-tickets-163634325673

Whether you've been to Seaside Modern at Hastings Contemporary, are planning to go or wish you could go but can't, you might enjoy my online lecture on 22 July. It includes many of the artworks in the show along with works that were either unavailable or couldn't be squeezed in, and there are more archive photos and that kind of thing.

When I was putting the exhibition together I realised that there were two stories to be told, neither of which I'd considered before; two interwoven stories. The first is about people in Britain and their relationship with the beach, which changed from being predominantly a working environment in the early 19th century to being a place to relax. The numbers of people who were able to enjoy a day or more at the beach every year went up and up and up until the 1970s, when we started jetting to the Med instead. Women were liberated from the bathing machine...

Artists too joined the rush to the coast, not only the more conventional painters of views but some of the most adventurous modern artists of the day. Paul Nash enjoyed two periods of intense creativity by the sea. Ravilious made his name with some stunning work on the coast. Moore and Hepworth were inspired by the erosion of stones. 

Henry and Irina Moore, Ben Nicholson, Mary Jenkins,
Happisburgh 1931

I put together this lecture in part because it allows me to explore these themes in different ways, and to show works and archive material that were unavailable or just didn't fit. I hope you'll join me!

 Seaside Modern: Art and Life on the Beach - online lecture, 7.30pm, 22 July (recording available for ticket holders), tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/seaside-modern-art-and-life-on-the-beach-tickets-163634325673

Seaside Modern: Walkies

Pat Faulkener, Heather Odd, Michele Morize, Barbara Hunt and Wendy Spenceley, Ramsgate, 1959.
© SEAS Photography / Wendy Arnhiem.

Life on the beach has been documented by photographers for over a century. Early on, only the wealthiest beach-goers could afford to take pictures (or shoot cine film) themselves, or to have them taken, but by the late 1930s beach photographers had become a feature of seaside life.
At Margate, Kent, the Sunbeam Photographic Agency documented seaside life on a huge scale, its photographers taking casual snaps - known as Walkies - of holidaymakers, who then had the opportunity to buy the pictures for a small fee. 

Wendy Hollet (nee Marsh) on a Sunbeam donkey
SEAS Photography / Vincent Marsh

Often photographers used props, particularly models of animals, on the backs of which children would perch. The resulting pictures are as strange as anything dreamt up by a Surrealist, and also warm-hearted, as these beach photographs generally are. There is nothing exploitative nor overtly staged about them. They are simply pictures of ordinary people enjoying their day on the beach: leisure that was theirs to enjoy by right. 

 

Promenade Group, © SEAS Photography / Paul Godfrey.

The beaches of Britain were the setting and inspiration for remarkable developments in modern art, and architectural gems dot the coast, from the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea to the Midland Hotel, Morecambe. Yet in a way what made the 20th century British seaside truly modern were the social and political advances that enabled so many to enjoy a day at the beach.

This is an edited excerpt from my catalogue essay for Seaside Modern: Art and Life on the Beach, which runs until October at Hastings Contemporary. I am grateful to the South East Archive of Seaside Photography for lending us a selection of wonderful Walkies!

Seaside Modern: Art & Life on the Beach

Coming to Hastings this summer, my new exhibition explores an intriguing cultural phenomenon. In the first half of the 20th century, and particularly between the wars, the British seaside was both popular and fashionable. The young and sophisticated stripped off layers of Victorian prudery and cavorted on the sand in the latest daring swimwear. Artists hit the beach in search of new inspiration. And as governments introduced compulsory holidays for workers, people flocked to the seaside in ever-increasing numbers.

This exhibition doesn't only celebrate the best of Modern British, with top notch works by LS Lowry, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious, Barbara Hepworth and a host of other stars. It also explores the evolving story of our relationship with the seaside. How were resorts advertised, and how did ads develop as social attitudes changed? What did people wear on the beach, and how did they behave? Look out for rarely seen archive photos as well as posters and other artefacts.

Having spent two weeks of every childhood summer at Sandbanks in Poole I have an enduring love of the seaside. Putting this show together has been an absolute treat.

'Seaside Modern: Art and Life on the Beach' opens at Hastings Contemporary on July 4. I've put together a lecture exploring the themes of the exhibition which I'll explain more about in due course. Roll on summer!

Hastings

I travel quite a lot doing research and giving lectures, but it isn't very often I come across a town like Hastings. Admittedly I was only there one night, but the place made an impression. I was there to give a talk on Eric Ravilious at the Beacon Arts Centre, an eccentric and altogether delightful institution that I would recommend as a place to stay; unusually for an arts venue, it also does B and B.

A former boarding school, the Beacon is, as its name suggests, perched on a hillside overlooking the town, with a garden surrounded by trees that made me feel as though I'd wandered into a Paul Nash painting. The audience for my talk was so lively I wondered at first whether I'd be able to get a word in; I also recorded my youngest lecturee, an exuberant 9-month old baby.

The next morning I set off down the hill into Old Hastings, negotiating a maze of alleys and stairways between houses and gardens. With its junk shops, cafes and characterful old buildings the place is a bit like Rye, but more real and less postcardy. In a particularly notable shop called Robert's Rummage I found a copy of 'Pompeii and Herculaneum: The Glory and the Grief' with photos by Edwin Smith; the proprietor described how, on a recent visit to Pompeii, he had stood for hours in a queue for the brothel.

'Crazy,' he said, 'The place had been shut for 2,000 years!'

On down the hill to the seafront, which has been known since pre-Norman days as the Stade. I'd planned to have a look at the Jerwood Gallery before catching the train home, but ended up wandering round for hours. There can't be many other stretches of the south coast where so much is going on, from an impressive array of seaside entertainments - gokarts, crazy golf, etc - to the bustle of an extremely active local fishing industry.

I remembered reading a few years ago that the siting of Jerwood on the Stade had been unpopular with the local fishing community, but I had no idea quite how close the new building is to the fishermen (about twenty yards) and quite how striking the contrast is between the workaday sprawl of huts, boats and gear, and the elegant gallery.

The Jerwood really is a fine building, rather unassuming from the outside and nicely proportioned within to fit a collection of Modern British Art that is generally on a modest scale. There was a small but invigorating exhibition of Edward Burra watercolours upstairs - including two beautiful 1920s landscapes - and a rather grander show of Scottish paintings that featured some lovely work by Anne Redpath, John Bellany and Craigie Aitchison, among others.

Edward Burra, The Harbour, Hastings, 1947 (copyright Burra est/Lefevre Fine Art)

One or two fishing boats had made it into the Burra show, but there were many more out on the shingle, showing great variety in age and design but sharing a robust fitness-for-purpose. With a brisk sou'westerly blowing and the sea crashing on the stones below this was the sort of scene that inspired a number of the artists on show at Jerwood. Let's hope both the gallery and the fishermen enjoy a prosperous future.

PS If you enjoyed this post, then you may well enjoy the one over here.