Dorothy Mead
'[Mead]'s work… seemed challenging, radical and heroic.'
No surviving correspondence between Dorothy Mead and Ruth Borchard survives. However, in an undated letter some time in 1964, the painter and critic Andrew Forge (q.v.) refers to his forthcoming visit to Ruth in Reigate, and asks, 'May I bring a painter friend, Dorothy Mead, who expressed a great desire to see your collection as she had heard about it from other artists?' It thus seems quite likely that Ruth bought Mead's self-portrait in 1964, or soon after. Dorothy would have heard about Ruth's collection from Cliff Holden, whose own self-portrait Ruth had bought. In the same year, Ruth also purchased self-portraits by Mario Dubsky and Dennis Creffield – both greatly influenced by Mead, herself a passionate disciple of Bomberg.
Born in London in 1928, Dorothy Mead was about thirty-two years old when she painted this self-portrait (signed 'D. Mead. 60' in red). Above a tall, slender, firm neck, the head – with features strongly yet delicately abstracted rather in the manner of a Benin bronze or a Modigliani head – radiates gentle authority. Here is an upfront, sensitive, questioning presence without a hint of arrogance.
The picture is composed of very broad brushstrokes of mostly understated colours with, here and there, a more vibrant frisson: a swathe of orange around her left eye, a purple patch above and at the top of her forehead. The brushstrokes seem freshly deliberated – around the bottom of the neck, for example, is a zigzagging grey brushstroke, its genesis still thrillingly clear to the eye. A vivid sense of overall structure (what Bomberg famously called 'the spirit in the mass'), predominates.
For many years after her death. Dorothy Mead occupied a curious position within the history of modern British painting. When her paintings were shown as part of the 1991 exhibition 'Bomberg and his Legacy' at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, Sarah Rose wrote that during Mead's lifetime – despite her strong influence on other artists – 'dealers in London displayed no interest. She never had a one person show in England before her death in 1975.' And yet around the time that Ruth Borchard bought her self-portrait, Mead was being accorded some degree of official recognition as a gifted, radical youngish painter – for example, she was one of '6 Young Painters' in the 1964 touring Arts Council exhibition of that name; fellow exhibitors were Peter Blake, William Crozier (q.v.), David Hockney, Bridget Riley and Euan Uglow (q.v.).
In 1991, Rose noted: 'Time is bringing deeper appreciation of Bomberg's art but there has been a surprising lack of curiosity about those who worked with him [excepting, as Rose notes, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff], and a consequent tragic neglect. It is surely true that a continental equivalent to the 'School of Bomberg' would be accorded utmost critical and public respect, even a certain reverence. Bomberg's 'Legacy' – in the form of his many talented students like Mead, Creffield, Dubsky, Holden and Marr –has not yet been given its full due.'
From 10th June to 16th July 2005, Agi Katz's Boundary Gallery in St John's Wood, London accorded Mead her first one-person show since a 1975 memorial exhibition. For the 2005 retrospective exhibition catalogue, John Russell Taylor wrote a critical essay, 'Her Own Woman: The Art of Dorothy Mead', and the author contributed a further essay.
In June 2012 the Borough Road Gallery opened at the London South Bank University (on the original site where Bomberg had held evening art classes), with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund; the gallery's exhibition and event programme made use of A David Bomberg Legacy – The Sarah Rose Collection as a resource and inspiration. This collection of over 150 works by the artists David Bomberg (q.v.), Dorothy Mead, Dennis Creffield (q.v.), Cliff Holden (q.v.), Thomas Holden (b.1957), Edna Mann (1926-1985) and Miles Richmond (1922-2008) had been built up over a period of thirty years by Rose, an independent collector, with the stated aim to 'draw much needed attention to the teachings of Bomberg, and to the artists who worked closely with him'. Rose's collection was always intended for the public domain and in 2008 she placed the collection in Trust at London's South Bank University (formerly Borough Polytechnic), where Bomberg taught after the Second World War, and where his students included Creffield, Holden, Mead, Mann and Richmond (known in his early days as a painter as Peter Richmond); these artists were among members of the Borough Group, which exhibited together from 1946-51. Sarah Rose grew up in Brisbane, Australia, and moved to London with her husband in 1951. It was here that she met Cliff Holden, out of which her enduring interest in the art of Bomberg and the Borough Group was born.
Lasting from 26th April to 27th July 2013, the first solo exhibition at Borough Road Gallery, South Bank University was a momentous occasion – as the gallery itself stated in a press release, honouring 'a significant twentieth century artist Dorothy Mead, marking the end of decades of neglect with her first ever solo show in a public gallery, 'Recognising Dorothy Mead: David Bomberg, the Slade and After'.’
In late 2014, Waterhouse & Dodd, the London gallery, hosted a major exhibition, 'Dorothy Mead (1928-1975): Paintings and works on paper from the artist's estate'. The author was commissioned to write the following catalogue essay (for which, as part of the background research, I spoke at some length to Dorothy's sister Valerie Long, and also to the artist Barry Martin, a one-time pupil of Mead.):
Dorothy Mead remains one of the most curiously paradoxical figures in twentieth century British art. An exhilaratingly original painter […] she never had a one-person exhibition in her lifetime. An exceptionally dedicated artist, she struggled to sustain herself by an intermittent art teaching career as well as casual jobs – including spells as cartoon animator at a firm in Berkeley Square, hop picker in Kent, West End theatrical costume designer, waitress at Lyons – yet in her own time her dynamic talents were sometimes (if infrequently) given their due by leading contemporary artists and critics.
In a letter from the early 1970s, she describes a visit by the painter Josef Herman to her studio: ‘Josef was most complimentary about my recent work, and said that, if I go along with that, I will [...] be in the master class.’
Writing in The New Statesman in January 1960, the art critic David Sylvester singled out her talents amongst other pupils of […]Bomberg: 'Dorothy Mead's way of thinking [...] tends to affirm the supremacy of light, as women's painting often does: the sensation is reconstructed almost as a crystalline structure with an inner light.'
Her partner of eleven years, the painter Cliff Holden […] wrote that 'Dorothy had courage, stuck to her principals but like myself and Bomberg, was an outsider. She never sold herself, never sought to turn her work into a saleable commodity.' Many 1960s critics tended ignorantly to lump Bomberg's pupils together as stylistically monotonous and uniformly drab-in-palette – then brusquely dismiss them. However, the painter and astutely progressive art historian Andrew Forge – Mead's later partner for fifteen years – writing in The New Statesman in 1964 – 'sought to offer a brief run-down on some of the Bombergian painters in the hope that one day it will be possible for them to be looked at in terms of their individual qualities', and he singled out Mead's 'monumental intention' as a painter.
The relative neglect of Mead in her lifetime undoubtedly owes something to then prevailing attitudes towards women as creators and disseminators of radical ideas. Looking back at critical writings by even other Bombergian pupils – and Andrew Forge himself – Mead's status tends to be addressed in scant (if invariably admiring) words, whereas her fellow male artists are given much broader scrutiny. Though not outwardly embittered, Mead did once confide (half-jokingly but with a determined edge of seriousness) to her younger sister Val that 'she would change her name to George – our Dad's name – giving her much more chance of being recognised as a painter'.
The artist Barry Martin, whom Dorothy taught at Goldsmith's College, describes a telling incident in the still life room in the mid-sixties when Dorothy – 'a sparkling person, punching her weight, very open, straightforward and honest with no hidden agenda' – was riled to breaking point by a pugnacious male student who deliberately contradicted every helpful suggestion she made about his drawing of two female nudes posing side by side as they sat or lay or leaned on white box plinths that Dorothy had arranged as a kind of minimalist sculptural setting. 'Cigarette in mouth as usual, looking gallant in a white blouse, Dorothy – who never sought to impose her own painting style on her students, and was always sensitive – had had enough of the acerbic, goading young man, and she erupted, uncharacteristically but forcefully, ‘What do you want me to do, take off my blouse and show you my tits?’
Painting and drawing were Mead's abiding early interest. She had been adopted as a baby at three months old by a family living in Walthamstow; her [adoptive] mother had a florist's shop. The family moved to Romford in 1939. She didn't discover until she was fourteen that she was adopted – when an aunt inadvertently broke the news. Following a bicycle accident when she was sixteen, her school art teacher came to visit her, suggesting she attend Dagenham School of Art. […] Bomberg then was teaching there part-time, and as Holden has written, leading a revolt against his unorthodox views 'were two typical but intensely conservative students, Dorothy Mead and Edna Mann. Gradually they began to understand what Bomberg believed in, producing a profound change of heart so that they became [his] fervent disciples.' They followed Bomberg to his classes at the City Literary Institute in London, and in 1945, at the Borough Polytechnic. Bomberg's Borough Group, exhibiting works by his pupils Mead, Holden, Dennis Creffield, Leslie Mann and others, was founded in 1946.
In his classes Bomberg referred constantly to classical sources of inspiration – especially Giotto, Cimabue, Massaccio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Cézanne – with some references to contemporary artists, notably Chaim Soutine, whom Bomberg referred to as 'brother Soutine', having met him on a visit to Paris in 1913 – he later described Soutine in retrospect as 'a superb manipulator of oil paint as he was a great and individual stylist'; Picasso, whom he had met on the same visit, whom he said ‘was appreciative of my aims’; and Modigliani, from whom in 1913 he had acquired a marvellous, […] attenuated sculpted head and a roll of drawings, (the latter stolen when he had left them lying around during the break in one of his classes). Bomberg constantly alluded too in these classes to the Bible and Shakespeare.
Holden has evoked something of Bomberg's fluid teaching approach, whereby the model was sometimes illumined by sunlight, ‘sometimes by a hard overall light and sometimes [...] completely in the dark. The painting was from light to dark and dark to light. In this way both the model and the landscape were viewed as nature in constant flux and change.’ Bomberg encouraged his students to rebut ‘the static attitudes of the academics. We would walk around the model and approach from different angles and perspectives.’ Bomberg sought to trigger a quite mystical intuition in his students of ‘the spirit in the mass’ – through drawing (in Leslie Marr's phrase) ‘where the hand works at high tension and organises as it simplifies, reducing to bare essentials’.
In the early 1950s, Mead and Holden lived together in Sweden, where the palpitating impasto painting of Evert Lundquist (1904-1994) – with its intense focus on, and simplification of, individual forms – impressed them greatly. From 1956-59, Mead attended the Slade School of Art as a mature student. ‘Under the mentorship of Dorothy Mead’, wrote the painter Mario Dubsky, ‘I wholeheartedly subscribed to the Bombergian approach.’ Another Slade student Anthony Green RA has recalled her ‘life-enhancing’ presence and how she encouraged younger painters, a role that persisted when she became the first female President of the London Group in 1973.
She left the Slade without a degree, defiantly refusing to attend the perspective exam, finding (as she wrote to Professor Coldstream) ‘the scientific method, academic attitude antithetical to creation.’
Barry Martin says that ‘an instant breath of fresh air blew through Goldsmith's when Forge and Mead arrived in 1964 – they focussed very professionally on the hands-on work, the nature of art, a kind of truth as an artist. I see Dorothy as a buccaneering voyager through a very choppy period, challenging old notions of gentlemanly bohemia (very few women taught then at art college), austerity and stubborn class preconceptions.’
Val Long now recalls her sister as ‘living on the edge – but never starving’. After returning from Sweden, Mead settled in a large studio room near Ladbroke Grove, its walls dense with shelves of books on both classical and avant-garde art and literature (Val recalls works by Tolstoy, Wilde, Chekhov, Musil, Cocteau and Nabokov). The sisters were always fizzing around London in taxis in the lunch hour when they worked together in Berkeley Square (and when Dorothy was in funds) – buying canvases and paints, visiting exhibitions, often eating out. Dennis Creffield has described Mead as ‘a very abundant, very positive person, who had a great love of art, theatre and music (passionate especially about Beethoven and Wagner), who was immensely stylish in appearance’.
A key to understanding the nature of Mead's audacity and originality as an artist, her uninhibited yet discerning handling of paint, is found in an undated draft letter (1970s): ‘It seems that I do not ‘toe the line’. I recognise no line. I accept only myself. The line is an unreal thing to me, and the gamble on myself has to be made, not just in energy and work, but in self-belief.’ Never seeking to 'toe the line' or 'turn her work into a saleable commodity' gave her an existentialist freedom to take unprecedented, even wild risks in art. Her painting of an Acrobat (in The Sarah Rose Collection at London South Bank University, Borough Road) seen balancing precariously with grace and vertiginous glee on a high-wire, epitomises the nature of her philosophical stance.
Two 1956 paintings – the [rivetingly] dark, minatory Landscape (with its sparing yet lucid accents of yellow and pink) and Rooftops (with its daring concatenations of sparring, jousting lines) – show that this artist who recognised no line, was also supremely the painter of the line – explosively wayward, exploratory lines that are partly reminiscent of Bomberg's early abstract pictures and his wartime Bomb Store paintings. The taut linear structure of a 1956 Cityscape shows a city in a state of dynamic equilibrium but also perhaps on the verge of apocalyptic implosion [reminiscent too of some of Soutine's own early townscapes].
The painting Overlooking London (1969) evidences the more serenely harmonious, less raw vision characteristic of her later years. Lines no longer joust wildly here; deep crimsons and umbers of earlier days are jettisoned so that London's roofscape appears as beatifically composed of coruscating swathes of gentle yet incandescent colour.
Even in her earlier dark paintings there is what David Sylvester called ‘the sensation’ of an almost ‘crystalline structure with an inner light’. John Russell Taylor has related how her sister Val ‘once dared to ask her why all her paintings were so dark and gloomy. Her answer was characteristically terse and practical: it was, she said, because white paint was so expensive that she could not afford to use too much of it.’ And as a young woman, Mead invariably requested white paint as a Christmas or birthday present. [However, Sarah Rose contests these stories, saying that white paint was actually relatively cheap at the time.]
Reclining Figure (1961) portrays an apparently nude female figure in a pose of graceful ease. The featureless figure is somewhat reminiscent of nudes by Evert Lundquist – and here the tempestuous luxuriance of abstracted expanses of white flesh suggests that Mead had imbibed a freedom and new direction by observing American Expressionist paintings (Andrew Forge, her partner at the time, was highly knowledgeable about new developments in American art).
The exquisite structure of her Seated Nude (1962) is reminiscent of her contemporaneous cityscapes and landscapes: rigorously deliberated yet composed of fresh, coalescing, calligraphically spontaneous lines and brushstrokes. In Blue Nude(1968), the sensuous weight and pose of the reclining figure is inimitably conveyed through the use of a subtle, succinct colourism with Fauvist roots. Her portrait of a Woman in Chair reading (c.1972) is a brilliantly observed, humane study of introspectiveness and ease.
The portrait of Bomberg's step-daughter Dinora Mendelson (1947) – with its enigmatic […] features and sombre background – exudes a […] tragic gravitas, reminiscent of Bomberg's own richly nuanced portraiture of the human inscape.
Mead's Self-Portrait (c.1955) is a relatively realistic depiction, depicting her short, bobbed hair, long, slender neck and sloping shoulders. Partly through the effect of its glowingly [muted]palette, it radiates a presence of gentle authority and sublime self-assurance. [The Waterhouse & Dodd catalogue also illustrates a 1958 charcoal on paper Self-portrait study – in which the artist's head with short dark hair, tentative mien and highlighted brow and nose emerge from a capacious black polo neck, at that time iconic style symbol of the radical Beat intellectual.]
Several paintings here – The Temptation (after Michelangelo) (1966), Pieta (after Van Gogh) (1972) and paintings of The Arrest of Christ (1966 and 1967), the latter mirroring Fra Angelico's treatment of the subject (though the heads – quite orbic in the latter version – seem to take on Lundquist's style of occluding features) – show how Mead contemplated and made her own sensitively original studies of the at once […] human and universal dramas in classical and modern religious masterpieces. Neither a church-goer nor overtly spiritual, Mead appreciated religious traditions in art and music (she enjoyed singing parts of Handel's Messiah, and had a fine voice herself). She had seemingly imbibed the sustaining spirit of Bomberg's own appreciation of great classical religious art.
Seascape (1966) was painted following a visit to her sister Val Long and her family at their home in Holland-on-Sea in Essex. It was based on a drawing she did there; she did much sketching on that trip, including studies of dead starfish. The painting is a tour de force of the sensuous bravura of the brushstroke evoking nature in a state of Bombergian flux.
The […] passages of […] intermixed blue, indigo, black and white paint – expressionistically pervading beach and headland as well sea and sky – show Mead's painterly hand working ‘at high tension and organis[ing] as it simplifies, reducing to bare essentials’. Mead's […] response to nature, as seen in this painting, was evidently an expansive visionary one of awe and delight.
- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004