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.