WATERHOUSE & DODD






                  












DOROTHY MEAD
1928 - 1975


Re-Making Michelangelo

An Online Exhibition of Drawings by Dorothy Mead inspired by Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling

With a selection of newly discovered paintings and drawings from the Dorothy Mead Estate




CONTENTS  




- An Introduction to Dorothy Mead


- Dorothy and the Old Masters


- Catalogue of Drawings Inspired by Michelangelo


- Additional Works from the Artist’s Estate


- Dorothy Mead - A Life


- Artist’s CV













DOROTHY MEAD   Self Portrait
Ruth Borchard Collection. Not for sale

















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AN INTRODUCTION TO DOROTHY MEAD


Dorothy Mead (1928-1975) was one of the leading figures among the pupils of David Bomberg, and a founder-member of the Borough Group and Borough Bottega. Nonetheless any assessment of her career is overshadowed by the oft-repeated fact that during her sadly curtailed life she never had a one-person show. Both David Bomberg and the majority of his followers had a natural inclination to see themselves as hard-done-by outsiders, misunderstood and deliberately neglected, and the correspondence between members of the group is littered with heavily barbed aphorisms, such as Cliff Holden’s quip: “Asking an artist why doesn’t he like critics is like asking a lamp post why it doesn’t like dogs.” With her life cut tragically short, and perpetually blighted by lack of funds and the need to find work of any kind, it is too easy within this narrative to overlook Dorothy’s many triumphs. 
Throughout her life, from early student days, she was looked up to and respected by many young artists outside her natural milieu. From 1958-59 she was President of the Young Contemporaries, the student exhibiting society which was soon to become the launch pad for a generation of Pop artists from the Royal College – Hockney, Kitaj, Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield etc. Acknowledged as a promising young artist in the early 1960s, Dorothy was included alongside Bridget Riley, Peter Blake, David Hockney, William Crozier and Ewan Uglow in the Arts Council’s ‘6 Young Painters’ exhibition of 1964 (see image from the exhibition catalogue, right).

































In 1971 she was elected the first lady president of the London Group, the same year her work ‘Chess Board, 1958’ entered the permanent collection of the Tate. And as a result of Dorothy’s influence upon Andrew Forge, and in turn his influence upon his close colleague, David Sylvester, the Borough Group received far more critical attention than hitherto. In the early 1960s David Sylvester went so far as to state that, in his opinion, the Borough Group was “the only vital new movement to have emerged since the war.”

Dorothy participated in mixed and group shows in England, America, New Zealand and Sweden. But the fact remains that in spite of critical admiration of her work, the first solo show of her paintings took place 30 years after her death. Dorothy believed her difficulty establishing her reputation was due to her gender and was an avowed feminist, albeit a decade before the concept became so widespread. Her sister Val Long remembered, ‘She once said to me that she thought she would change her name to ‘George’ (their father’s name) as people didn’t hold much score for women artists.’ Like many women artists and writers before her, she often went by her gender-neutral initial, as D. Mead. Dorothy remained strong-minded and independent, but she was resolutely feminine and was well known in artistic circles for her sophisticated and highly personal sense of style - dashing around town, attending plays and concerts, buying her paints in Berkeley Square, before retreating to her studio near Ladbroke Grove. But at the Slade she was best remembered for smoking a pipe and playing Mahler very loudly on a Dansette record player in the basement.






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DOROTHY AND THE OLD MASTERS 

Following Bomberg’s lead, Dorothy, like his other pupils, constantly referred to past generations of artists rather than any contemporary painters. Although possessed of a range of quite radical ideas in both art and life (Cliff Holden, Dorothy’s partner from the age of 17 to 28, was Chairman of the Anarchist Federation and organiser of illegal ‘wildcat’ strikes), the group nonetheless developed their own intellectual pantheon of greats from the past. Musically, Dorothy adored Wagner, Beethoven, Mahler and Berlioz, and often sang parts of Handel’s Messiah. In literature, her shelves were densely packed with both classical and avant-garde writing, by Tolstoy, Wilde, Chekhov, Cocteau and Nabokov (among many others). And in art, Dorothy and the rest of the group traced a thread through art history (with occasional digressions) of their primary influences: from Giotto through Cimabue and Masaccio to Michelangelo, and thence through Titian and Rembrandt, Goya and Velasquez, Chardin, Turner, Delacroix, Géricault, Courbet, late Monet and Van Gogh to Cézanne. The obverse side of this was their dismissal of, for instance, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Ingres, David, Meissonier, André Lhote and Fernand Léger. 



























The ‘Ignudi’ are 20 seated male nudes, serving a decorative function at the corners of the main bays but also having an iconographic significance as "intermediary spirits between men and the Godhead" (Charles de Tolnay). Michelangelo’s models for the Ignudi were largely his own studio assistants whose extraordinary musculature was developed by carrying blocks of marble from a young age.
Alice Mayes, Bomberg’s first wife, wrote: “David explained that the modern pictures had their beginning with the Old Masters and Michael Angelo was the chief of these.’ His followers felt a strong attachment to this lineage, and indeed Cliff Holden recalled that Peter (Miles) Richmond had the notion that “to be a great artist one should emulate Michelangelo and therefore he did not wash and he wore the same old paint-covered clothes and a dirty old mac which was his habitual uniform”. As Michelangelo was the greatest of the early Masters, so the Sistine Ceiling was regarded at the time as his highpoint as a painter.

There are sadly very few remaining records of Dorothy’s own thoughts on art, and so we have to piece together the often contradictory recollections of her immediate circle. But when this group of drawings came to light earlier this year, there was sufficient information known for us to work out her probable motivations. During the 1960s Dorothy took inspiration from a number of paintings from the past, works that she would dismantle in her own mind and then re-assemble according to her own sensibilities and taste, and the set of beliefs passed down from Bomberg including (to some extent) the mantra of the ‘Spirit in the Mass’. Sometimes she would have spent hours in front of these paintings (often works in the National Gallery), or that she had seen on her travels, or sometimes just come across in reproduction. 

Of the two paintings she exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in the exhibition ‘British Painting 1974’ one was a very personal re-working of Courbet’s ‘The Studio’ measuring 70 x 120 inches. In a surviving fragment of a letter, she discusses the struggle to paint the foreground nude in the manner of one of her own nudes while suiting the whole composition. This was the conundrum that inspired her, to create something fresh and new that was both true to her and her artistic principles, while also true to the original artwork. 









In the case of Dorothy’s drawings after the ‘Ignudi’ from Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling we can reconstruct her processes with some confidence. All of the drawings are dated August 1960, so we know exactly when they were executed. Meanwhile, most bear numbers from 59-76, which tally with a numbering system for the various elements of the Sistine Ceiling used in Ludwig Goldscheider’s comprehensive book on Michelangelo, which was still the standard work on the artist in 1960 (the images reproduced in the catalogue for comparison with Dorothy’s drawings are from a later edition of Goldsheider’s tome). 

However, it would clearly be impossible to create such lively and highly personal recreations of the figures from such small reproductions, nor would Dorothy have attempted it. The drawings are clearly closely related to the many charcoal drawings that Dorothy, like all of Bomberg’s followers, produced in endless life classes throughout her life. According to Dorothy’s younger sister, Val, at this time Dorothy’s most used model was a young man, John Hall, who lived above her in St Marks Road. And so we can vividly recreate the scene like a tableau from an old film: Dorothy spending a sweltering August in her flat in North Kensington (recorded temperatures were around 85°F / 30°C) with the upstairs neighbour posing nude in close imitation of the figures illustrated in Dorothy’s copy of Goldscheider.














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CATALOGUE OF DRAWINGS INSPIRED
BY MICHELANGELO






1. Ignudo from the Separation of Light from Darkness I
Dated: August 1960
Charcoal on Paper
31 x 23 in / 78 x 57.5 cm















               












2. Ignudo from the Sacrifice of Noah I
Dated: August 1960 (no. 72)
Charcoal on Paper
30.5 x 23 in / 77.5 x 58 cm

























3. Ignudo from the Separation of Land and Water I
Dated: August 1960 (no. 65)
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 22.5 in / 76 x 57 cm

                                                                                                        









    The Teyler Museum, Haarlem














4. Ignudo from the Drunkenness of Noah
Dated: August 1960 (no. 76)
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 23 in / 77 x 57.5 cm

























5. Ignudo from the Sacrifice of Noah II
Dated: August 1960 (no. 71)
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 23 in / 76 x 58.5 cm















 





















         






                      

                                     6. Ignudo from the Separation of Land and Water II
                          Dated: August 1960 (no. 64). Label on Verso.
                          Charcoal on Paper
                          30 x 23 in / 76.5 x 58 cm                                



     7. Ignudo from the Separation of Land and Water III
     Dated: August 1960 (no. 64)
     Charcoal on Paper
     30 x 23 / 77 x 58 cm


8. Ignudo from the Creation of Eve 
Dated: August 1960 (no. 67)
Charcoal on Paper
30.5 x 23 in / 77 x 58 cm






















9. Ignudo from the Separation of Light From Darkness II
Dated: August 1960 (no. 59)
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 23 in / 77 x 58 cm














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ADDITIONAL WORKS FROM THE ARTIST’S ESTATE





































                                   Michelangelo Buonarroti 
                                   David 1501 to 1504
                                   Carrara Marble
                                    203.5 x 78.5 in / 517 cm × 199 cm          
                                    In the Galleria dell'Accademia10. Life Class Study - Michelangelo’s David 
Painted: circa 1960
Oil on Panel
56 x 31.5 in / 143 x 80 cm11. Michelangelo David
Dated: January 1960
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 22.5 in / 76 x 56.5 cm









 

    

      12. Seated Figure, Legs Crossed
      Dated: April 1958
      Charcoal on Paper
      30 x 22 in / 76 x 56 cm13. Man in an Arm Chair
Painted: circa 1958
Oil on Canvas
40.5 x 30.5 in / 102 x 77 cm











 14. Model Reading 
 Dated: October 1963
 Charcoal on Paper
 22 x 30 in / 56 x 76.5 cm15. Lovers
Dated: July 1963
Charcoal on Paper
22 x 30 in / 56 x 76.5 cm













16. Seated Figure
Dated: May 1958
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 22.5 in / 76.5 x 56.5 cm17. Two Males Back View
Signed & Dated: 1947
Oil on Board
36 x 23.5 in / 91 x 60 cm





 


















18. Nude Reclining on a Day Bed (Detail)
 18. Nude Reclining on a Day Bed
Painted: circa 1955
Oil on Canvas
36.5 x 40.5 in / 92 x 102 cm












19. Deposition of Christ
Dated: September 1965
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 22 in / 76 x 56 cm
20. The Conversation
Painted: circa 1965
Oil on Board
36.5 x 25 in / 93 x 63.5 cm










21. Life Room
Painted: circa 1951
Oil on Canvas
40 x 36.5 in / 101.5 x 92 cm
 22. Seated Woman
Dated: March 1964
Charcoal and Brown Chalk on Paper
27.5 x 20 in x 70 x 50 cm








 

23. Girl Reclining
Dated: April 1970
Charcoal on Paper
22.5 x 30 in / 56.5 x 76.5 cm
24. Self Portrait - Recto
Dated: 1957
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 22 in / 76.5 x 56 cm24. Self Portrait - Verso
Dated: 1957
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 22 in / 76.5 x 56 cm












25. Self Portrait
Dated: July 1965
Charcoal on Paper
30 x 22 in / 76.5 x 56 cm
26. Self Portrait
Signed & Dated: 1969
Oil on Canvas
30 x 24 in / 76 x 61 cm







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DOROTHY MEAD - A LIFE


Born in 1928, Dorothy had been adopted as a three month old baby by a family living in Walthamstow, East London, where her mother had a florist’s shop. The family moved to Romford in Essex in 1939, and at the age of 14 she found out that she had been adopted when an aunt inadvertently broke the news to her. At 16, when she was off school because of a bicycling accident, her school art teacher came to visit her and suggested she attend Dagenham School of Art, where David Bomberg was teaching part-time. 

At this time, in 1944, Bomberg held two teaching posts, teaching drawing “to a group of ladies” at the City Literary Institute, while also teaching part-time South East Essex College of Art in Dagenham. Apparently Dorothy (then aged just 16) and another young artist, Edna Mann, led a revolt against his unorthodox teaching methods, and caused problems for Bomberg with the authorities there. While both Dorothy and Edna came to understand and appreciate his teaching methods, Bomberg was asked to leave and they moved with him to the ‘City Lit’. There they joined Cliff Holden who had been studying philosophy until he asked Bomberg if he could become his student. These three became Bomberg’s most devoted followers, and Dorothy became Cliff Holden’s partner. For 11 years, between 1945 and 1956, they lived and worked together, continuing their working relationship until her death.






  













    They worked with Bomberg on an almost daily basis, an all-consuming apprenticeship. It included intensive drawing lessons from life casts at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and working in the studio mainly from the model, simply because a model was usually available and because Bomberg regarded the human figure as so complex. It was often said by those outside the group that they painted more like each other than like their master, Bomberg. But this was the essence of his teaching, that unlike the French masters Fernand Léger and André Lhote whose pupils slavishly copied their work as well as their theories, Bomberg’s pupils were encouraged to find their own way. Cliff Holden wrote “If there are any influences within the movement it is that of Dorothy Mead. Both Creffield and Mario Dubsky, and many others are indebted to her.” 

Nonetheless Bomberg expected his followers to adhere strictly to his essential philosophies, even if they could occasionally be confusing and contradictory. His concept of the ‘Spirit in the Mass’ was rarely understood outside his inner circle, and even then there were arguments about its interpretation. One aspect being, in Bomberg’s phrase “where the hand works at high tension and organises as it simplifies, reducing to bare essentials”. This doing away with extraneous detail could be achieved by particularly vigorous brushwork (see detail of catalogue no.23 ‘Nude reclining on a day bed’), and by seeking to reveal a sense of structure and immanence through the painter's intense engagement with the physical world, by capturing someone as they are in the world rather than seen as a subject. Meanwhile a central tenet of Bomberg’s teaching method was the fact that a pupil’s critical faculty developed more slowly than his creative potential, and it was primarily the role of the master to bring him or her into a consciousness of what they were doing - sometimes very bluntly, as Bomberg’s classes were not for the faint-hearted.














After seven years with Bomberg Mead went to the Slade in 1956, where, as a mature student, she had a widespread influence. She won prizes there and had a good relationship with Professor Coldstream, but was refused a diploma and a further year at the Slade because of her refusal to sit the examination on perspective, which she considered outdated and irrelevant to the art of the mid 20th century. This was not mere petulance, but a deeply held conviction and a considered response on a point of honour from which Mead refused to back down. As did Coldstream, in spite of receiving an impassioned, lengthy and closely argued letter from her partner, Cliff Holden. As Paul Trewhela later noted, Dorothy’s treatment by the Slade stood in stark contrast to that of David Hockney by the Royal College of Art two years later, when the principal there, Robin Darwin, “waved through Hockney and four colleagues who had failed a course, since it was unthinkable that Hockney – already a media star – should be seen to have failed.” It should perhaps in fairness be noted that copies of the satirical sketch Hockney submitted in lieu of his final exam paper at the RCA now reside in the Tate and V&A. To add to Dorothy’s sense of grievance, just a couple of years after she left the Slade they withdrew perspective from their curriculum.

The lack of a diploma meant that for many years Dorothy had difficulty getting teaching jobs. She managed to obtain occasional employment at Goldsmith’s, Chelsea School of Art, and Morley College. But she struggled for much of her life, finding employment hop and fruit picking in Kent, waitressing at Joe Lyons corner house cafe, as a cashier at the Curzon Cinema, and as an occasional model.




















 
Clip from Polygamous Polonius
More interestingly (for her and us) she worked as an animator for several studios. She contributed to both John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1954), and Polygamous Polonius (1960) for the director Bob Godfrey. The latter film, now considered a classic, tells the story of a middle-aged woman art historian whose lectures about great nudes in art excite a man in the audience. She misunderstands his interest, thinking he wants to marry her, when in fact he enjoys art for the same reason he likes pin-up girls. The film, which was animated by three women (including Mead) and one male animator, is a lively mixture of cartoon, collage and text. In style, it anticipates arthouse animations of the later 1960s and indeed today, though its comic vision of contemporary sexual mores is very much of its time. (See POLYGAMOUS POLONIUS on BFI Player or alternatively click here)


While at the Slade she met Andrew Forge (who taught there) and they became lovers. The relationship lasted for 15 years (from 1956 until 1971) and continued intermittently until 1973. They never lived together though Dorothy had hopes he would divorce his wife, Sheila and marry her. What actually happened was that Forge remained with his wife, Sheila, and only divorced her in order to marry an American woman, with whom he fled to America in 1973. However, in the following year, in spite of Forge’s conversion to American Pop Art and “coloured flat surfaces” and his shabby treatment of Dorothy, he included two large paintings by Dorothy in an exhibition he was curating at the Hayward Gallery, ‘British Painting 1974’ – a re-working of Courbet’s ‘The Studio’, and a jousting painting from a series she had been working on since the 1960s. 







These were Dorothy’s last exhibited pieces and she died in the following year at the age of 47 from a brain tumour. Today seventeen of her works are held by the London South Bank University as part of the Sarah Rose Collection, and other paintings are in the Tate, the Government Art Collection, and the Arts Council Collection. An exhibition devoted solely to Dorothy’s work was finally held at the Boundary Gallery in 2005, thirty years after her death, with another at the Borough Road Gallery in 2013, and a further one at Waterhouse & Dodd in the following year, almost exactly 10 years ago - see images to the right.























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ARTIST CV


DOROTHY MEAD
1928 Born, London1944 South East Essex School of Art, Dagenham,
(first contact with David Bomberg)
1945 City Literary Institute, London
(also studying under David Bomberg)
1946-51 Borough Polytechnic,
A founder member of the Borough Group
gathered around David Bomberg
1947 Starts exhibiting with the London Group
1956-59 Slade school of Art, London
Studied as a mature student
1958 Won prize for Figure Painting, Slade School
Won the Steer Prize for Landscape Painting
Slade School
1959 Elected Member of the London Group.
Fails final year exams at the Slade for
refusal to sit a paper on perspective, declaring to
the Principle (Sir William Coldstream) that
perspective had no place in her art.1958-59 President of the Young Contemporaries
1973 Elected first woman President
of the London Group
1975 Died June 12th 1975, age 47

Solo Exhibitions

2005 Dorothy Mead, Boundary Gallery, London
2013 Recognising Dorothy Mead: David Bomberg,
the Slade, and After,
Borough Road Gallery, London
DOROTHY MEAD
Group Exhibitions

1947 Borough Group, Archer Gallery
1948 Borough Group: Second Annual Exhibition
1949 Borough Group: JCR, Brasenose College,
Oxford and Everyman Cinema, London
Monthly Borough Group exhibitions at the
Bookworm Gallery, London
Borough Group Third Annual Exhibition
1951 Four Contemporary Painters;
Creffield, Holden, Mead & Richmond,
Parson’s Gallery, London
1952 Fyra Engelsmann:
Creffield, Holden, Mead & Richmond,
Gummesons Konstgalleri, Stockholm
1956 Halland Museum of Art, Sweden
(with Holden)
1959 Figure Variations, Paris Gallery, London,
British Aquarelles, touring USA.1960 7 Figurative Painters: Dennis Creffield,
Mario Dubsky, Andrew Forge, Michael
Fussell, Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead,
& Joe Tilson,
Artist’s International Association, London
Boras Museum of Art, Sweden
(Joint exhibition with Cliff Holden)1964 London Group Jubilee Exhibition 1914-64,
Tate Gallery, London
David Hockney, Bridget Riley & Euan Uglow
Arts Council Touring exhibition
OROTHY MEAD
1974 British Painting ‘74, Arts Council,
Hayward Gallery, London
1989 The Borough Group and Bottega,
Fine Arts Associates, London
1991 David Bomberg, Some Students and
Current Influences,
Towner Art Gallery & Museum, Eastbourne
1992 Bomberg and his Students, South Bank
University Centenary 1892-1992, London
2004 Bomberg and Pupils – the Borough Group,
Boundary Gallery, London
2012 Since the opening of the Borough Road
Gallery in June 2012, Mead’s work has
featured in numerous group surveys centred
around the Sarah Rose Collection.
Mead’s art is represented in the collection of the Arts
Council of Great Britain, the Tate Gallery, the British
Academy and the Government Art Collection.