A forgotten sculptor finally has his moment
Judith Woods laments a world where actresses are cast as mothers to men a few years their junior
At approximately 4pm this afternoon, a historic moment is on the cards at a sale of Modern British Art at Christie’s. Towards the end of the sale, standing in the shadow of sculptures by Henry Moore, and paintings by LS Lowry and Winston Churchill, is a group of carved wood figures by Ronald Moody.
“Ronald who?” I hear you ask, and you are not alone. Neither Christie’s nor Sotheby’s have sold anything by Moody before. Christie’s does not even mention him in its press release for the sale, perhaps because the sculptures are only expected to make between £1,000 and £6,000 each. Their slightly scuffed condition will not help; but they should still make more than that.
Moody is one of the great, unrecognised British Caribbean artists of the 20th century. Born in Jamaica in 1900, he came to Britain in the Twenties to study dentistry. In the Thirties, he was inspired – like Henry Moore – by a visit to the British Museum’s ancient Egyptian and pre-columbian art galleries.
But while Moore was trained as an artist, Moody taught himself, and his first Bm-inspired efforts at sculpting were in Plasticine. From there, utilising his manual dexterity as a dentist, he learned to carve, realising beautifully rounded, meditative wooden figures with an ageless quality. Moore, meanwhile, dabbled with abstraction and surrealism.
Moody earned himself exhibitions in London and
Paris, which he visited but fled in the face of the German occupation. In 1939, some works were sent to America for a museum show in Baltimore.
Post-war, while the fashion moved towards abstraction, Moody stuck to his Zen-like figurative sculpture, exploring his interests in metaphysics and Gnosticism.
Although not a political activist, he became a leading figure in Britain’s Caribbean Artists’
Movement and was invited to show with several societies, including an occasional work in the Royal Academy.
However, it was only after he died in 1984 that he was taken seriously outside the black arts community. In 1989 he was included in the groundbreaking exhibition The Other Story: Afro-asian Artists in Postwar Britain at the Hayward Gallery, which challenged the notion of the “hero artist” as exclusively white. It was curated by Rasheed Araeen, the British-based Pakistani artist and writer, who wrote: “There is a similarity between the thinking of Moody and Moore, who both use the human figure as their mode of expression. And yet they are different, not only in terms of their life experiences, and what their works signify, but also in their status.
“While the former is modest in ambition, knowing his [marginal] place in colonial society, the later work of Henry Moore seems to relate to the milieu of the post-war imperial ambitions of the British state.”
In 2003, the art critic Guy Brett wrote in Tate magazine that Moody stood out for “the way he used the grain of the wood.” Although both artists adhered to the then fashionable “truth to materials” doctrine, he added, Moore bought his wood from timber merchants, while Moody used found objects like the oak beam of a cider press, a railway sleeper or a ship’s fender.
A small number of collectors bought Moody’s work, and several museums in the UK also have examples. The most significant were acquired posthumously. The Tate’s first acquisition was not until 1992: a Thirties elm wood carving of a figure, Johannan, which is prominently displayed in one “room” of Tate Britain’s current online exhibition Walk Through British Art.
The collection being sold at Christie’s was formed by the late Wallace Ransford Campbell, a supermarket owner in Jamaica. Ransford also bought his Moodys after the artist died, and his family is now disposing of them. There is no knowing how much they will fetch, but the timing of the sale is good.
The international contemporary art sales have been awash with record prices for African American artists these last few years, as museums lead the way in diversifying their collections.
While the younger generation of black British artists, such as Chris Ofili and Michael Armitage, have met few barriers, the older generation, such as Aubrey Williams and Donald Locke (and with the recent exception of octogenarian Frank Bowling RA) certainly struggled.
Now, however, the tide is turning. In December, Tate Britain opens Art from Britain and the Caribbean, which will include work by Williams and Locke together with younger superstars of today, such as Hurvin Anderson and Peter Doig (who lives in Trinidad). The senior artist in this gathering, though, will most likely be Moody, who, after today, should also be more of a known quantity in the marketplace.
You know how women claim they become invisible after 50? It’s hard to escape the truth of it in film and television, where diversity in race, religion and sexuality are trumpeted and yet the treatment of older actresses remains a shocking blind spot.
Cate Blanchett drily observed a few years ago that “actresses age in dog years”. Now former Royle Family star Sue Johnston has witheringly observed that, having once been cast as Sean Bean’s wife in an episode of Inspector Morse, 30 years on she is playing his mother, in the new BBC drama
Time. There may be an age gap of 15 years or so, but had Bean been older than Johnston, I am sure nobody would have considered him for the role of her father.
An outrage? Maybe, but it’s simply business as usual in the entertainment industry. Not so long ago, actress Maggie Gyllenhaal admitted she had lost a part in a film due to her age – then 37. Why? She was apparently too decrepit to play the love interest for a 55-year-old man. It reminds me of a fabulously scurrilous Amy Schumer sketch featuring Tina Fey, Julia Louis-dreyfus and Patricia Arquette called “Last F---able Day” which looks at the sudden drop in desire for an actress of a certain age. Fey explains that nobody formally tells an actress she’s been put out to pasture, but the signs are there: “You know how Sally Field was Tom Hanks’s love interest in Punchline and then 20 minutes later she was his mother in Forrest Gump?” The scene ends with Louis-dreyfus, realising her days are numbered, being pushed out into the river in a canoe without any oars, smoking a huge cigar.
If only the passage from box office saucepot to sexless frump were always as dignified. I’m still struggling with the fact that, back in 2004, Angelina Jolie played Colin Farrell’s mother in Alexander; he was 28, she was a biologically impossible 29. Sadly, this disparity has been going on for decades. Famously, The Graduate starred Anne Bancroft as the “older woman” who seduces Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin. She was just six years older than Hoffman at the time. It’s all very well for industry apologists to point out that these days there are more complex roles across the board for older actresses, which there are, but it’s hardly progress if these parts are given to young women. Ageing up for women is already so much par for the course we scarcely noticed anything amiss about Carey Mulligan, 35, playing 56-year-old Suffolk landowner Edith Pretty in this year’s Netflix archaeology gem The Dig. Her co-star Ralph Fiennes, 58, was cast as the excavator Basil Brown, aged 51.
But when audiences see authenticity, they recognise it, pace Julia Ormond’s sensuous performance in the television series Gold Digger. She played a 60-year-old divorcee who has an entirely believable affair with a 26-year-old man; her family were horrified but viewers (this one included) punched the air to the roar of an imaginary crowd.
We also have Viola Davis, Annalise Keating on the Netflix hit How to Get Away with Murder. When accepting her Screen Actors Guild award she praised her unconventional character, saying, “Thank you … for thinking that a sexualised, messy, mysterious woman could be a 49-year-old, dark-skinned, African-american woman who looks like me.”
She’s 55 now, but presumably nobody has noticed. And even if they do, I’m not sure Davis will be fobbed off with a canoe and a cigar...
Last week, writes Julian Pottage, Bridge Correspondent, the highest scores each day in the English Bridge Union’s main online matchpoint duplicate pairs sessions were as follows:
Monday: 81.44%, scored by Gerardo Luis Siano and izik47 (also Argentinian) in Game 1 (2 pm).
Tuesday: 72.22%, scored by Jacqueline Marsh and Melanie Boynton in Game 1.
Wednesday: 78.23%, scored by
Ann Robinson and an Advanced BBO Bot in Game 3 (7.30 pm).
Thursday: 74.06%, scored by Keith Bush and Anthony Mutukisna in Game 2 (3.30 pm).
Friday: 76.56%, scored by John Dagnall and Andrew Bannock in Game 4 (9 pm). Saturday: 75.30%, scored by Christopher Whitehouse and Mary-ann Sheehy in Game 2.
Sunday: 70.42%, scored by Hristo Toshev and an Advanced BBO Bot in Game 3.