Kettle’s Yard and its artists

1

Kettle’s Yard and its artists

an anthology

2

3

Kettle’s Yard and its artists

Preface

Kettle’s Yard is the creation and gift of Jim Ede, a one time curator at the Tate Gallery, who wanted to share with others the art and objects he collected over fifty years and more, in what he called ‘a continuing way of life’.

From his earliest visits to grand and porticoed museums the thought grew that art was better approached in the intimate surroundings of a home. And so, in 1957, he adopted and converted four almost derelict cottages in Cambridge and began to hold open house for students and other visitors.

In the 1920s Ede had met Ben and Winifred Nicholson who ‘opened up a world of contemporary art.’ Through them he came to know and collect the work of Christopher Wood, David Jones and Alfred Wallis. He acquired the estate of the French sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska and met Brancusi, Miró and Braque in Paris. Having presented or dismissed himself in post Tate years as ‘just a lecturer in search of an audience’, he later, when asked what he was, would simply say ‘a friend of artists’.

Through the writings of its artists and Jim Ede himself this publication affords a glimpse of the thoughts and friendships which combined to make Kettle’s Yard. It is intended as a companion to the House Guide and Jim Ede’s A Way of Life.

Kettle’s Yard and its Artists was first published in 1995. This new, colour-illustrated edition includes additional material drawn from the archive.

Michael HarrisonDirector

4

BiOGraPHiCal nOtes

1894 ~ Helene (Helen) Schlapp is born on 9 January in Edinburgh. She is the daughter of Otto Schlapp, a professor of German at the University of Edinburgh, and Anna Lotze, a musician.

1895 ~ Harold Stanley ‘Jim’ Ede is born on 7 April in Penarth, near Cardiff. He is the son of Edward Hornby Ede, a solicitor, and Mildred, a schoolteacher.

1903-10 ~ Jim and his older brother Max attend school in Taunton, Caen (France) and Cambridge.1910-14 ~ Jim studies painting at Stanhope Forbes’s academy in Newlyn, Cornwall. He meets Helen in

the spring of 1913, during a visit to the Edinburgh School of Art, where she is a student.1914-19 ~ Jim serves as an officer on the Western Front during World War I. Having been wounded,

he returns to Cambridge to recruit and train officer cadets at Trinity College. He is then posted to India for 18 months.

1919-21 ~ Jim moves to London and studies at the Slade School of Art.1921 ~ Helen and Jim are married in January. In March Jim leaves the Slade to become Photographic

Assistant at the National Gallery. Helen takes up the post of art teacher at King Alfred’s School, Hampstead. Their first daughter, Elisabeth, is born in November.

1922-36 ~ Jim holds a curatorial post at the Tate Gallery and acts as Secretary to the Contemporary Art Society.

1924 ~ Jim and Helen meet Ben and Winifred Nicholson and later, through them, Christopher Wood. David Jones also becomes a close friend. Their second daughter, Mary, is born on 18 August.

1925-36 ~ The Edes live in the Georgian townhouse at 1 Elm Row, in Hampstead. They regularly entertain artists, musicians, poets, collectors and actors, including Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Naum Gabo and Helen Sutherland. During his visits to Paris Jim meets Joan Miró, Constantin Brancusi, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso.

1926 ~ Jim publishes Florentine Drawings of the Quattrocento.1927 ~ Jim purchases virtually the entire output (including the correspondence) of the French

sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.1929 ~ Jim begins corresponding with Alfred Wallis and buying his paintings.1930-31 ~ The first two editions of Savage Messiah, Jim’s biography of Henri Gaudier–Brzeska, based

on the sculptor’s correspondence with Sophie, are published.1933 ~ The Edes make their first visit to Tangier, Morocco.1934 ~ Jim publishes A Chart of British Artists.1936 ~ Jim resigns from the Tate Gallery and the Contemporary Art Society. He and Helen begin

spending part of the year in Tangier, where they commission a house designed by Jim, White Stone.

5

Helen with daughters Elisabeth (left) and Mary

Helen and Jim in the United States, c. 1941

6

1937-43 ~ Accompanied by Helen, Jim travels frequently to the United States to give lectures on art. During the war they spend prolonged periods in the country, meeting Richard Pousette-Dart in New York in 1940.

1942 ~ Jim publishes T.E. Lawrence’s Letters to H.S. Ede, 1927-1935.1943-45 ~ The Edes return to Britain. They are involved in educational activities in support of the war

effort.1945 ~ Jim and Helen move permanently to Tangier. At White Stone they habitually entertain small

groups of British soldiers stationed in Gibraltar.1950 ~ While on a lecture tour in the United States, Jim meets William Congdon.1952 ~ In April Jim and Helen move to Les Charlottières, a farmhouse near Blois, in the Loire Valley,

France. Jim travels to the United States for his last lecture tour.1956 ~ The Edes move to Cambridge.1957 ~ With help from the architect Roland Aldridge, Jim renovates four dilapidated 19th century

cottages, converting them into a single house. At the end of the year the Edes’ new home, Kettle’s Yard, is opened to university students, every weekday afternoon during term.

1958 ~ Jim resumes collecting and over the following years he befriends and acquires work by new artists, including Italo Valenti, George Kennethson and Elisabeth Vellacott.

1959 ~ Jim is awarded the Légion d’Honneur following donations of works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to the Musée des beaux-arts in Orléans and the Musée d’art moderne in Paris. In October he joins the Anglican Church.

1964 ~ Jim donates manuscripts by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and paintings by Alfred Wallis and Christopher Wood to the University of Essex.

1966 ~ Kettle’s Yard is given to the University of Cambridge, with Jim staying as ‘honorary curator’. He makes another substantial gift of sculptures and drawings by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, to the Tate Gallery.

1967 ~ Jim is promoted to Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur after further gifts of works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to French museums.

1970 ~ On 5 May an extension to the house, designed by Leslie Martin and David Owers, is opened by Prince Charles with a performance by Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pré.

1973 ~ In June the Edes leave Cambridge for Edinburgh. Jim begins visiting hospital patients.1977 ~ Helen dies in February, aged 83.1984 ~ Jim publishes A Way of Life.1990 ~ Jim dies on 15 March, aged 94.

7

8

i started as a painter …

… and hoped to be a painter, but the war of 1914 interrupted all that. When the war was over I went to an Art School – for a little while none of my elders tried to bully me into earning a living for I had saved enough during the war to keep myself for a year, and I suppose they thought I deserved it. Then I had to earn my living, and I entered the National Gallery, London, as a photographer. In those days I had really never heard of contemporary painting, except my own, and thought that Art stopped with Giotto. During this period I continued to paint, and I wrote various articles for learned magazines, and published a book on early Florentine drawings. Then came an upheaval – and I was appointed to the British Civil Service and transferred to the Tate Gallery as a curator, to work amongst pictures which not only meant nothing to me, but which I heartily disliked. Here I remained for fifteen years and the change was phenomenal. I gave up painting and became absorbed in the work of contemporary artists. I wrote a great deal about modern painting and sculpture, and came to know most of the leading artists of the day, and also the ones who were not yet known. I found it very stimulating to widen the circle of these latter. I wrote a book on the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska which was widely sold in England and America under the title of ‘Savage Messiah’ and this has resulted in most lively contacts throughout the world.

In London I was privileged to live in a very beautiful Georgian house to which a varied and large circle of people liked to come – musicians and painters and sculptors, writers and scholars and dancers, bank clerks and ‘society’; and this was a very great education to me, and I think a source of pleasure to them. Up to this time I had travelled about a good deal in the world – America, Europe, Africa, Egypt and India. In 1935 I resigned from the Tate Gallery, let my London house, bought land in Tangier, North Africa, and there built a house to my own designs.

I had always been arranging rooms, either my own or other people’s, and once talked over the air on how to furnish a room. My thought was that the one thing a human being really needed was a room to live in, and scarcely any human being lived in one, it lived on him. I advocated clearing it of everything, and furnishing it with the light and air which were its nature; wonderful empty rooms all over Britain, havens of rest in an over-complicated life. The Tangier house and all that it implied was a thrilling experience. Here and there I tried to crystallize my thoughts on Art into a written form. I did a great deal of gardening and each year came on a lecture tour to North America. These tours proved successful beyond expectation, and it excited me to be able to talk to so many people about what I believed in – to show them and myself that Art is the touchstone of our civilization, the manifestation

9

of our culture, and that it is as much an individual living force as human beings themselves. At the end of 1940, being unable to be of further use in Tangier, I embarked on a new enterprise – I turned my back on such material possessions as I had, and took ship to America to earn what I could for the immediate needs of my home-land.

Undated typescript (c.1941)

White Stone, Morocco

10

a room to live in …

… is a subject which we all have to consider either for ourselves or by letting other people consider it for us, and for each one of us who think for ourselves the answer will be different. You will be ready to say that we all live in rooms – but is this true? Do we really live in them? For how many of us is our room the expression of ourselves, so that when we go into it it just receives our natures, giving us a sense of ease and freedom? …

Now in order to make a room such that it will give us pleasure we have to want something very much and aim all the time at achieving that want; and here comes our first difficulty, for we are not likely to have our room to ourselves – it is shared by our family – by our friends and so we must somehow find a common want.

I will suggest that this want is space. A want of space, you may say; and how often indeed have we found our room too small for us, it gets so crowded with things, we don’t know where to move and the eye has no whither to rest.

We all want space – we are spatial beings – we move in space – we ask primarily for space in our daily lives – it is the natural air we breathe and yet owing to circumstances it is the one thing we least allow ourselves or are allowed. We in the cities are terribly cramped,

Interior of White Stone

11

standing in tubes, pushing for buses, wedging our way along the crowded streets. In shops, in offices, our space is limited owing to the varied needs of people about us, and in our minds an equal congestion. Our daily tasks to be carried about with us, our daily interests, all the nightmarish assortment of news in the papers, the continual flicker of movement about us, the closing in of people upon us, their troubles, their excitements, their deceptions, their advances; letters to be read, to be answered; telephones, telegrams, wireless and even me talking to you about it; all these things and a thousand others besieging us from every side until we long for a little change, a little peace; space where we can move about and not be jostled.

This space which we so much want, we can create in our home, in our room. And how? By clearing away all that is in it, coming back to its bare walls, its full spaciousness; and then putting into it only those things which we absolutely need and endeavouring to put them in such a way that they do not seem to make the room look any smaller. Sometimes, indeed, a room can be made to look larger by putting something into it …

First I would empty it … having nothing there but the bare floor and the bare walls – I would probably take away the picture rail, but this would depend on whether I thought it spoilt the shape of the wall or not. Then I would like to distemper the walls with a plain wash, probably white or ivory and if the floors had not been stained I would scrub them with hot water and soda and aim at getting them clean like the deck of a ship. If they had already been stained I would leave them, for it is very hard to have them planed down. The doors and woodwork I should make the same colour as the walls. Having done all this I would turn to the window or windows and see if I needed any curtains. If I felt that I did I would put them in as I have already described to you, and having done this I would consider that the room was now aesthetically furnished. It is a room, private to me, clean and in its first

Les Charlottières, France

12

simplicity, and I can be in it and enjoy its seclusion. I watch how the light comes into it; what parts of it are well lit and what parts are in shadow; I discover the area in relation to the window which I consider already filled by the light which comes into it and since this is full already I shall not add anything to it. I shall then light the fire and watch how it too begins to fill the rooms with its light and with its warm flicker on floor, walls and ceiling; and now the room is ready for me to make it answer my physical needs. I must bring into it some necessary furniture – a table perhaps, chairs, a rug, drawers in which to put things – places for books and so on – all the things that it would be really awkward to be without. All this is no easy matter and personally I find myself preferring some discomfort, some shortage of seats and so on, to cluttering up and spoiling the space which I considered beautiful. You will each know what is the minimum of furniture you can do with, halve that and you will still have more than enough to fill your room …

For the question of pictures and ornaments you must again, of course, please yourselves. On the whole I find myself preferring to have none, or at most one or two, placed in such a way that I can enjoy them. A picture standing on the floor generally looks better than hanging on the wall. You find that it can be moved at any moment and so you are eager to look at it while it is there. If you have a great number of things about, you soon begin not to see them and what is more, they fill the mind with restlessness. Have an empty mantelshelf rather than one with twenty objects on it, unless each of these objects is there for a special purpose – there is no aesthetic need to have anything on it, the light upon it is already beautiful and if in your idea it is not beautiful enough, you will soon find one thing – some glass object perhaps – which completes your desire …

A Room to Live In, for the series Healthy, Wealthy and Wise, BBC radio, broadcast 28 November 1931

i have always been fascinated by pebbles …

… without, I think, ever asking myself just why – in flowers too and in shells. Such things have been for me a sudden contact with the miraculous – as if an angel were to take you by the hand. Words are strange things with which to express feelings and stones are strange expressions of miracles. Both need the intelligence of human insight to endow them with these powers. The poet’s vision is an act of robust rarity – I say robust because it is invulnerable, and rare because it is so seldom articulate. So too is the well shaped stone – you may search a wide seashore or the reaches of many rivers and never find one, and

H. Gaudier-Brzeska, Caritas, 1913

13

Kettle’s Yard and its artists

the complete publication has:84 pages, 210mm x 200mm40 colour, 6 B&W illustrations

further information can be found on our website:www.kettlesyard.co.uk/shop/house_collection/

84

Unless otherwise stated, the texts in this volume are excerpts from manuscripts

and typescripts in the Kettle’s Yard archive

Edited by Sebastiano Barassi

Research, transcriptions, translations and biographies by Sebastiano Barassi,

Nicola Boden, Matthew Gale, Sarah Glennie and Michael Harrison

Design by Paul Allitt

Printed by C3imaging Colchester

Photographs

© Paul Allitt

© Kettle’s Yard Archive pp. 5, 9, 10 and 11

© George Kennethson p. 7

Texts and artworks

© Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, the authors and their estates, 2009

ISBN 978-1-904561-33-0

This and other Kettle’s Yard publications are available from:

Kettle’s Yard, Castle Street, Cambridge, CB3 0AQ • +44 (0)1223 748100 • www.kettlesyard.co.uk

Kettle’s Yard is grant-aided by Arts Council England East, The Arts and Humanities

Research Council, The Friends of Kettle’s Yard and Cambridge City Council.

“Kettle’s Yard is in no way meant to be an art gallery or museum, nor is it simply a collection of works of art reflecting my taste or the taste of a given period. It is rather, a continuing way of life … in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture, in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability which more and more we need to recognise if we are not to be swamped by all that is so rapidly opening up before us.” Jim Ede

Since 1957 generations of Cambridge residents, students and visitors have come to Kettle’s Yard and spread the word about it. In this book the background to Kettle’s Yard is explored through the writings of its artists – including Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, David Jones and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska - and its founder Jim Ede.