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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.

 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.