Geri Morgan
Artist and principal of Byam Shaw School of Art who painted meticulous still lifes and nudes
GERI MORGAN, who has died aged 91, was an artist in the neo-realist figurative tradition who served as principal of the Byam Shaw School of Art for 21 years from 1970 to 1991 and was a lifelong socialist.
Morgan worked closely with what he saw before him and his well-executed paintings, usually oil on canvas, demonstrated his concern with the aesthetics of representation. His meticulously arranged still lifes, nudes perched on simple chairs and landscapes were almost photographic, though with brush strokes thinly painted over the drawing beneath, giving his canvases a translucent quality. The absence of self-conscious striving for originality gave his work a refreshingly old-fashioned honesty and directness.
Morgan took over as principal at the Byam Shaw after the untimely death of his predecessor Maurice de Sausmarez, when the school was still in its original premises in Kensington. It soon became clear that more space was required, and during his time at the school Morgan oversaw three major fundraising appeals, resulting in the school moving, first, to a deconsecrated church in Fulham, then in the 1980s to a former computer factory in Archway.
He also invited many leading artists to teach there including Euan Uglow, Leon Kossof, Frank Auerbach, Peter Kennard, David Hockney, RB Kitaj, Mary Fedden and Bridget Riley, supplementing the school’s full-time staff. The warm and supportive atmosphere he established attracted students from Britain and further afield.
But Morgan’s key strength lay in academic leadership. He encouraged those who wished to explore experimental approaches, but held fast to the Byam Shaw’s figurative tradition and the school was one of the few which retained a life class throughout the time he was principal.
Thomas Geraint Morgan was born in Battersea, south London, on March 19 1926, the youngest of four sons of Welsh schoolteacher parents. During his childhood he spent time in the Rhondda Valley where he learned to train sheepdogs and won a Welsh language declamation prize at his school.
Back in London, he cut his political teeth aged 10 when he accompanied two elder brothers to the “Battle of Cable Street”, a clash in 1936 between the Metropolitan Police, protecting a march by members of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, and various anti-fascist groups. He joined the Communist Party aged 16 in 1942.
Morgan began studying art part-time at St Martin’s School of Art in 1943 while waiting for his Army call-up. However, as the war in Europe ended, not wanting to become part of the army of occupation in Germany, he decided to volunteer to work in the mines. Following initial training he started at Rossington Main Colliery, Yorkshire, qualifying as a face worker. While he left the pit after two years and enrolled full-time at Camberwell School of Art, the friendship he made with a fellow miner, Jack Amos, would be renewed during the 1984/85 miners’ strike when he fund-raised and supported the Rossington pit.
At Camberwell he painted mining scenes in the politicised Socialist Realist style that was de rigueur among Left-wing artists at the time, becoming a member of the Artists’ International Association and contributing paintings to their exhibition on the mining industry in 1950. But increasingly he came under the influence of artists such as William Coldstream, whose brand of realism, based on careful measurement and painting directly from life, would influence Morgan’s later work.
A turning point came in 1953 when, as a prize for a painting of Czech dancers in Trafalgar Square, he won a trip to the 4th World Festival of Youth and Students in Bucharest. There he met young artists from the Soviet Union who were critical of Socialist Realism and got a taste of what life was really like behind the Iron Curtain when, sitting down with a friend to sketch an archway in the Romanian capital, they were accosted by two burly guards and told to leave. It turned out that located behind the arch was the headquarters of the Securitate, Romania’s secret police.
Morgan left the Communist Party in 1957 after the Hungarian Uprising. He was a lifelong reader of the Morning Star, but his resignation from the party led him to eschew overt political messages in his art. He went on to teach pottery and art at the Central London Institute and was a visiting tutor in painting at Hornsey College of Art and Camberwell, and then at the Byam Shaw School
A convivial man, Morgan had three wives, many lovers, countless friends and loved a good party. A devotee of jazz, Marx Brothers films, fast cars and bad puns, for many years he owned a pigeonnier in south-west France, where he built a studio and indulged his love of good food, wine and entertaining. He was a life member of the Chelsea Arts Club where he was snooker captain.
His greatest friend for many years was the artist Euan Uglow, whose interests and enthusiasms mirrored his own. A friend recalled being in the back of Uglow’s Mini in the middle lane at some traffic lights on Euston Road where, despite the noisy protests of other road users, Uglow refused to proceed until he and Morgan had resolved a disagreement about a finer detail of a Cézanne painting.
Morgan married, first, Maureen Ripley, secondly, Katharine Meynell and thirdly Ellen Graubert, who survives him with Linda and Claire the two daughters of his first marriage and Hannah, the daughter of his second.