Cedric Morris returns
Paintings by Cedric Morris were as prized as the plants he bred. Now his reputation is in bloom again. About time, says Andrew Lambirth
Cedric Morris (1889-1982) is one of the great independent spirits of modern British art. A wonderfully original and inventive painter of flowers, landscapes and people, he was also an internationally celebrated plantsman, specialising in irises of which he bred at least ninety named varieties.
In recent years, Sir Cedric Morris, Bt, the Swansea-born son of an industrialist, has been best remembered as the teacher of Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling, two of the many talented pupils from his East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing.
But now a Morris revival is underway, and his work is once more in great demand. While his paintings achieve increasingly high prices at auction, fought over by art dealers and private collectors, three exhibitions of his work will be staged this spring, two in museums. Clearly it’s time to look closely again at the art of Cedric Morris.
The first exhibition will be at Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, Suffolk, not far from Morris’s last home, at Benton End in Hadleigh. He lived there for 42 years, creating a remarkable garden in the grounds and running his art school from the house, where students were not only taught (by encouragement and example, not theory), but also fed and accommodated.
The cooking was conducted by Morris’s life partner, Arthur Lett-haines, known to all as Lett, who presided over the kitchen and the school with subversive authority. A man of wicked humour and sharp understanding, he met Morris on Armistice Night 1918, fell in love and remained with him until his own death sixty years later.
There were flagrant infidelities on both sides. Lett was bisexual, and one of his more celebrated liaisons was with Kathleen Hale, author of Orlando (the Marmalade Cat). Undoubtedly Lett
came to resent the fact that he’d put his own life as an artist on hold in order to promote Cedric’s.
Ironically, Lett was artistically the more radical and experimental of the pair, but he did not hesitate to take over the running of Cedric’s life and administer the art school. By the time he tried to revive his career in the 1960s, it was difficult to regain the momentum of forty years earlier.
Benton End was not just a private art school; it was a phenomenon. Among the visitors inspired by its artistic, culinary and botanical achievements, or charmed by its bohemian raffishness, were Elizabeth David, Ronald Blythe, Beth Chatto, Francis Bacon, Vita SackvilleWest, John Nash, Rosamund Lehmann, John Skeaping and Matthew Smith.
From 1930, Suffolk was
Morris’s retreat and, in 1940, Benton End became his home. Despite early acclaim, four successful solo exhibitions in London and others in Rome, New York and the Hague, plus representation at the Venice Biennale and the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Morris withdrew from the art world and concentrated on painting what mattered to him most: his friends, the landscape and the plants and flowers with which he surrounded himself.
The Gainsborough’s House exhibition consists of a dozen canvases, including seven landscapes, mostly foreign, three portraits, an allegory and an interior of the Café de la Rotonde in Paris.
To complement these, there are 12 works on paper, mostly drawings from the 1920s, of Russian refugees and prostitutes in Paris, along with more café scenes (a favourite early subject). Cedric and Lett lived in Paris for a while and knew the beau monde. A striking couple, they were noticed by Hemingway who put them in The Sun Also Rises. Maggi Hambling, one of Cedric’s executors, has selected this exhibition from more than 100 works donated to the museum by the Morris estate. It is intended as an introduction to his work, the first of a series of exhibitions devoted to the artist.
The Garden Museum in London is mounting an ambitious show of Cedric’s flower and garden paintings, the first major museum display of his work since a 1984 Tate retrospective. The plan is to have a carefully selected exhibition inside the museum contrasted with living examples of Cedric’s irises outside. The plants have been tracked down and identified by horticultural sleuth Sarah Cook, who exhibited some 25 varieties of Morris’s tall, bearded irises for the first time in sixty years at the 2015 Chelsea Flower Show. They are now available again commercially, a particularly joyous aspect of the Morris revival.
The exhibition indoors focuses on cut flowers in pots and vases, on the Suffolk gardens Morris created (at The Pound, Higham, and Benton End), on vegetable still-life paintings and portraits of the main protagonists.
Cedric’s famous painting Iris Seedlings has been lent by the Tate, while Gutted School (1939) tells the story of how the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing (in its first incarnation in Dedham, before it moved to Hadleigh) was burnt down one night by a carelessly discarded cigarette end, apparently smoked by Lucian Freud. Cedric assembled his students the next morning before the blackened ruin and told them to draw what they saw; he himself painted it. Alfred Munnings, neighbour and arch-enemy of modern art, had his chauffeur drive him up and down the street while he shouted triumphalist abuse at Morris.
Morris’s magnificent flower paintings have always been popular, but they have suddenly come back into fashion. Sometimes an artist’s reputation dips after their death and there is a fallow period before reassessment. The Tate retrospective was too soon to re-establish his standing, but now, with several authors keen to write books on him and exhibitions of his work proliferating, it is clearly the right moment.
The third Morris exhibition takes place at the Pall Mall premises of art dealer Philip Mould, familiar to many for his appearances in the popular TV series Fake or Fortune?
Mould has been dubbed ‘the art detective’, so it is appropriate that he should now be so busy rediscovering the genius of Cedric Morris. He has acquired a considerable collection of works by the master, some of which he hangs in his home, so much does he admire them.
To coincide with the Garden Museum’s exhibition, Mould will be showing paintings from Morris’s trips abroad, as he went in search of winter warmth and rare specimens to transplant to Suffolk. The combination of three shows of his exuberant work will allow the public to judge what an extraordinary artist Cedric Morris was: a natural, pure painter who dared celebrate the beauty of the world with intensity and love.