‘Damned women’ are back to claim their due
Radical Women/ Jann Haworth Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
In 1919, at a time when a woman revealing her bare leg in public was unthinkable, the British artist Jessica Dismorr is said to have have stripped naked on Oxford Street in London, to express her scorn for convention.
Never heard of her? Not surprising, since Dismorr’s one-time position at the heart of the British artistic avant-garde was almost erased from history by the men among whom she moved.
Dismorr is now receiving her due, though, as the principal subject of a rousing, thoughtful exhibition at Pallant House Gallery. Here, her accomplished, progressive paintings can be seen alongside those by other women present at the forging of British modernism. Because, depressingly, Dismorr isn’t the only one to have been airbrushed from view.
The exhibition traces interactions between about a dozen women, who include Helen Saunders, Winifred Nicholson and Anne Estelle Rice. Though they never formed a group, we know that in various configurations they travelled together, painted each other, bought works from one another.
The works in the exhibition run the full gamut of early 20th-century styles, from striking post-impressionist colour-block landscapes that Dismorr painted between 1905 and 1908, through the wonderfully febrile, tilted perspectives that she and Saunders pursued when in the grip of vorticism, to Dismorr’s cool-edged abstractions from the Thirties.
Yet while Dismorr and Saunders signed the manifesto of the vorticists – the radical group of British artists, formed in 1914, that was inspired by European cubism and futurism – exhibited as part of that group and contributed to its journal, Blast, they were viewed by fellow members as addenda, rather than core crew.
Similarly, when the artist Wyndham Lewis was forming his Rebel Art
Centre – to discuss revolutionary ideas and teach non-representational art – in 1914, his futurist friend CRW Nevinson, said: “Let’s not have any of those damned women.”
Nevinson didn’t win that fight, but Lewis later insisted that the artist Kate Lechmere, whose fortune had paid for the Club, act as hostess, because “organising tea parties was a job for a woman, not an artist”. He wrote Dismorr and Saunders out of the history of vorticism in his autobiography.
Dismorr’s tragedy is not all Lewis’s doing, though. Following a breakdown, she took her own life in 1939 at the age of 54, at which point her work passed into oblivion (aided by her executor, who destroyed all but two of her vorticist works because he thought they cast doubt on her sanity).
Radical Women is showing alongside an exhibition of work by the American artist Jann Haworth, who also wholly deserves to be better known. Haworth, 77, is the former wife of the pop artist Peter Blake and co-creator of the artwork for the cover of the Beatles’ 1967 album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, for which she was only recently credited.
At Pallant House, pride of place is given to her mural Work in Progress, made in collaboration with her daughter, Liberty Blake. It is 28ft long and features more than 100 women who have inspired change, from Anne Frank to Michelle Obama. It’s impressive – and laudable – but doesn’t linger in the mind. The real treat here is Haworth’s work from her pop art years: life-sized soft sculptures so voluptuously hypnotic that they still seem radical now.
Cowboy (1964), Sorceress (1970) and Donuts, Coffee Cups and Comic (1962) began life as a rebuff to Haworth’s experience at the Slade, where a male tutor told Haworth that women were only admitted to keep the boys happy. She frequently uses sewn cloth, which she described as a secret language “that my male colleagues had no inkling of ”.
As the daughter of a Hollywood production designer, Haworth grew up on film sets, where malleable, surreal realities must have soaked into her way of seeing. Consider
Mae West Dressing Table (1965), in which an elderly incarnation of the actress, famous for her fondness for bawdy repartee, is set into a box ringed by dressing-room lights.
Because West’s brush and perfume bottle are positioned in front of the glass, the West you see inside the box is in fact her reflection. Something is awry, but it’s not clear what. Stare at it long enough and she seems to blink: demanding perhaps – like Haworth, Dismorr and Co – to be understood anew by a modern audience.
Until Feb 23. Tickets: 01243 774557; pallant.org.uk