Projects

Find out more about our current projects

• Grace Lake / Anna Mendelssohn Papers

  

  Born in 1948, Anna Mendelssohn was an activist and a highly regarded avant-garde writer and artist. In 1972, she was sentenced to prison for her political activities; post prison, she was accepted to Cambridge to read English and had a family whilst studying. Among her publications are the volume Implacable Art (Folio/Equipage 2000), a series of chapbooks, predominantly with Rod Mengham's Equipage press, and contributions to anthologies including Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos (Picador 1996).

  When she died Mendelssohn left behind a vast, glorious collection of manuscripts and drawings. Dr Sara Crangle brought the archive to Sussex in 2010 through the generous donation of Anna Mendelssohn's family. In 2020 Sara Crangle brought out a new edition of Mendelssohn’s work, I’m Working Here: The Collected Poems of Anna Mendelssohn (Shearsman Books). The archive is open to the public as of September 2015 and full details are available on The Keep's website.

      

  Images by Anna Mendelssohn, The Keep, SxMs109, used with kind permission of the Mendelssohn estate

• Sussex Modernism

  Sussex Modernism is a research project at the University of Sussex, which has involved public talks, conferences and exhibitions that have taken place since 2015.

  History

  

  Many writers, artists, composers, architects and patrons associated with modernist and surrealist movements lived in Sussex in the early and mid-twentieth century. Eric Gill and David Jones at Ditchling; Virginia and Leonard Woolf at Rodmell; Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant at Charleston; Roland Penrose and Lee Miller at Farley Farm; W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound at Stone Cross; Jacob Epstein near Hastings; Henry James at Lamb House; D. H. Lawrence at Greatham; Edward James at West Dean; Eric Ravilious at Eastbourne; and Peggy Guggenheim at South Harting. Ivy Compton-Burnett was brought up in Hove; E. M. Forster was at preparatory school in Eastbourne as were Cyril Connolly and George Orwell; Evelyn Waugh was educated at Lancing; Grahame Greene lived in Brighton; Patrick Hamilton was born in Hassocks and lived in Hove. Surrealist psychoanalyst and painter Grace Pailthorpe and artist Reuben Mednikoff lived in Ninfield. The composers Edward Elgar, Hubert Parry, John Ireland and Frank Bridge lived in Sussex: Bridge at Friston where his one and only pupil was Benjamin Britten; from 1934 opera at Glyndebourne has brought musical directors, designers, conductors and singers to Sussex. Winifred Ellerman lived and was educated in Eastbourne before becoming a writer, feminist intellectual, partner of the poetess Hilda Doolittle and patroness of European modernist magazines, bookshops and avant-garde cinema; Sydney Schiff, writer and translator, had a house in Eastbourne where he entertained T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield and promoted the work of Marcel Proust in the English-speaking world. Raymond Williams lived and worked as a WEA lecturer in Seaford and Hastings. Walter Hussey was a patron of the arts in Chichester, commissioning Graham Sutherland to paint an altarpiece and Leonard Bernstein to compose the Chichester Psalms, as well as working with John Piper, Cecil Collins, William Walton and Marc Chagall. Rick Mather’s Towner Gallery in Eastbourne and Loftus and Grieve’s Hastings Contemporary are some of the latest additions to modernist public architecture in Sussex. From Mendelsohn and Chermayeff’s De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill to Basil Spence’s University of Sussex at Falmer and Powell and Moya’s Chichester Festival Theatre, Sussex is rich in modernist architecture.

  Sussex Modernism is more than a list of names and places. It is a provocation to reflect on the capacity of the arts to transform places, to think critically about whose stories are remembered and whose forgotten, to ask how and why museums, galleries and universities have spotlighted art made in their localities, and to explore the ways in which art and writing might challenge, rather than strengthen, borders (national, as well as regional ones). 

  Sussex Modernism Events

  The project started with a lecture series in 2015 at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, run by Dr Alistair Davies. He and Dr Hope Wolf ran a second lecture series the following year at the Towner and at the De La Warr Pavilion. Wolf went on to curate two exhibitions: Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion (Two Temple Place, 2017), and A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and the Birth of Psychorealism (De La Warr Pavilion, Camden Arts Centre, and Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange, 2018-20). Conferences organised by the Centre relating to the project include: Late and Later James: James at Lamb House (co-hosted with Lamb House), Bloomsbury in Sussex (co-hosted by Berwick Church and Charleston), Craft Modernism (organised by Annabel Haynes and Wolf), Sussex Modernists and Transformations in the Twentieth-Century Landscape, and Virus of Hate: Responses to Fascism in Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Modernism (co-hosted by the De La Warr Pavilion); a conference entitled Rebuilding: Modernist Pedagogic Spaces, which was to have drawn on the modernist history of the campus had to be rescheduled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A longer history of modernism, and links between modernism and ‘Mods’ in Brighton were explored in Pamela Thurschwell’s conference and book on Quadrophenia. A series of reading groups on Pailthorpe’s unpublished literary works were run alongside A Tale of Mother’s Bones at Camden Arts Centre. A short course on Sussex Modernism was organised with Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. Wolf worked with her students in 2020 on an Heritage Lottery Fund project to preserve the Berwick murals (as part of the module ‘Arts and Community’), and with Helen Tyson and Rosie Cooper, co-curated with students a textual exhibition for the De La Warr Pavilion which took the year 1935 (the year the Pavilion was build) as a starting point for investigations into local art, literary and cultural history. The project continues. Wolf has been awarded a Paul Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship in British Art for 2021-2022 to complete a book on and around the themes of Sussex Modernism.

  Researching Sussex Modernism

  The Keep at Sussex University holds many important collections relating to Sussex Modernism, including the Monk’s House papers (holding Virginia Woolf’s papers), the Leonard Woolf Archive, the Hogarth Press Book Collection, the papers of Rudyard Kipling, the papers of Charles Madge and the Mass Observation Archive. The museums and galleries of the region have strong modernist holdings: Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft, Charleston, Towner Gallery, Pallant House Gallery, Royal Pavilion and Museums, Farley’s House and Gallery and West Dean. The Centre for Modernist Studies welcomes PhD students interested in doing new research on their collections.

  Contact

  Please contact Dr Hope Wolf, H.Wolf@sussex.ac.uk for information about Sussex Modernism. 

  Images

  Installation Shot from A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and the Birth of Psychorealism, Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange, image credit: Steve Tanner

  Montage of Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion, Two Temple Place, 2017; photograph by Matt Kerr