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Sussex Festival of Ideas celebrates the transformative power of the arts and humanities

Posted on behalf of: School of Media, Arts and Humanities

Last updated: Wednesday, 9 March 2022


 

  • Historic Modernist Archive Acquired for Sussex Special Collections

    The University of Sussex Special Collections have recently acquired the archive of Jeremy Hutchinson, Baron Hutchinson of Lullington QC (1915–2017). Best known to modernist scholars as one of the barristers for the defence of Penguin books during the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Hutchinson's archive also stretches back to the life and writings of his father and mother, St John Hutchinson KC (who also defended D. H. Lawrence against charges of obscenity) and the Bloomsbury socialite, Mary Hutchinson. 

    Hutchinson was a celebrated barrister, considered by many of his generation to be the finest silk in practice at the criminal bar. He famously served on the team defending Penguin Books over their publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; defended the director Michael Bogdanov of the National Theatre when Mary Whitehouse complained about The Romans in Britain; defended Christine Keeler when she was tried for perjury; and represented the drug-smuggler Howard Marks, the art forger Thomas Keating and the spies George Blake and John Vassall. Hutchinson is said to have been the model for John Mortimer’s Rumpole.

    In the 1960 trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the chief prosecutor asked the jury (which consisted of 3 women and 9 men): ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ He was met, infamously, with sniggers and laughter, his concern for the sensibilities of wives and servants already appearing at the dawn of the 1960s as a relic of times past. Amidst the letters contained within this extraordinary archive, the actress Peggy Ashcroft writes to her husband, Jeremy Hutchinson, a central member of the defence:

    "I know how much this case means to you; and how much it means period. It has been marvellous to see you rising to it & grappling with it & I feel if only D.H.L. could have known what a satisfaction he would have had… The TRUTH is going to be said & it’s going to have such vast repercussions that whether it’s vindicated now or not that doesn’t really matter. The battle’s on & thank God some are there to fight it…’)."

    Alongside annotated court papers, lists of witnesses, and correspondence on the trial from figures including John Betjeman, Stephen Spender and Leonard Woolf, the archive also includes a signed first edition of Lady Chatterley, gifted to Hutchinson by his mother, the Bloomsbury socialite Mary Hutchinson, and inscribed ‘In remembrance and honour of the great victory.’ As we approach the 60-year anniversary of the trial of Lady Chatterley this archive will surely add to our existing knowledge of this ‘great victory’ in British publishing and literary history.

    As well as opening up new perspectives on a trial that marked a victory over obscenity laws that had plagued modernist writers and artists throughout the early twentieth century, the catalogue for this extraordinary archive also reads like a ‘Who’s Who?’ of literary and artistic modernism, featuring appearances from Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, T. S. Eliot, Henri Matisse, Paul Nash, W. B. Yeats, Nancy Cunard, and, of course, D. H. Lawrence. Amongst this extraordinary cast, the archive also brings new light to the life and work of Mary Hutchinson. Mary Hutchinson is perhaps best known as a patron of the arts (she was a supporter of Samuel Beckett and maintained a close relationship with T. S. Eliot and his wife Vivien), and for her relationships with Clive Bell, Aldous Huxley and Vita Sackville-West (one letter in this collection reads, tantalisingly, ‘Vita, I left a pearl earring on the table by your bed. I remember exactly where I put it – at the corner near you ….’), but the collection also contains a substantial archive of Mary Hutchinson’s own manuscripts and writings, opening up the literary output of a woman who has often appeared only in the more salacious footnotes of our histories of Bloomsbury modernism.

  • Major new Sussex modernism exhibition opens in London

    'Sussex Modernism: Retreat & Rebellion' tells the story of modernist artists, writers and thinkers inspired by the county since the turn of the 20th Century.

    A new exhibition charting the influence of Sussex on the modernist movement in Britain and beyond will open its doors to the public in London this weekend.

    Sussex Modernism: Retreat & Rebellion opens at Two Temple Place in London from Saturday 28 January until 23 April and is free to attend.

    Curated by Dr Hope Wolf, Lecturer in British Modernist Literature at the University of Sussex, the exhibition seeks to explore the life and work of artists, writers and thinkers inspired by, or seeking refuge in, the Sussex landscape in the early and mid-twentieth century.

    It also examines how metropolitan and cosmopolitan modernists resisted or critiqued their rural and coastal surroundings. 

    Read more

    Images from the Sussex Modernism exhibition

    Images from a new exhibition charting the influence of Sussex on the modernist movement in Britain.

     

  • The often uneasy relationship between Modernists and Sussex: An interview with Dr Hope Wolf

    To themselves they were forward-thinking creatives, making profound statements about art and society.

    A photo of Dr Hope Wolf smiling

    To the locals, they were often seen as outlandish outsiders, detached from Sussex customs and ways of living.

    A major new exhibition, opening next week (28 January), brings together the work and lives of some of the most celebrated artists, writers, sculptors, architects, musicians, film-makers and designers to have trodden the Sussex soil during the last century.

    Among those featured in Sussex Modernism: Rebellion and Retreat, are Ditchling’s controversial sculptor Eric Gill, Rodmell’s strident feminist author Virginia Woolf, Charleston Farmhouse’s homo-erotic artist Duncan Grant, and West Dean’s decadent patron of Surrealism Edward James.

    Although now regarded as having a significant influence on British culture, their relationship with the rural and coastal communities they chose to inhabit was far from cosy.

    Dr Hope Wolf, University of Sussex lecturer in British Modernist Literature and co-director of the university’s Centre for Modernist Studies who has curated the exhibition in London, says this was an important part of the narrative.

    “One of the main things I am trying to show is this friction between the Modernists and Sussex,” she says. “What I am not doing is putting on a show of picturesque Sussex paintings. Modernists were often resistant to all of that.”

    For the free exhibition, which is at Two Temple Place until April 23, Dr Wolf worked with eleven museums and galleries across East and West Sussex to source more than 120 startling works and artefacts, as well some extraordinary stories.

    She came across anecdotes such as how the head of the jam-making circle in Berwick, East Sussex, objected to murals painted in the local church by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s artist sister) and her son Quentin Bell during the Second World War.

    The murals, depicting religious scenes often with a Sussex backdrop – and using friends and family as models – were commissioned by the Bishop of Chichester to foster a better relationship between the church and the arts.

    But, says Dr Wolf, for some, the artists “did not play sufficiently by the rules”. Quentin was (wrongly) accused of being a conscientious objector, and the locals would have been aware that Grant, a pacifist, had not fought in the First World War. “Sussex lost so many men in the First World War”, she says, “and you can see how rifts might have arisen between those who fought and those who did not.”

    Patron of the Surrealists, Edward James, told a story of how, in 1934, in the West Sussex parish of West Dean, the locals objected to his wish to redesign their parish church. His ‘Russian ballet fancy architecture’ was not for them.

    James had painted his home, Monkton House, the hunting lodge of his aristocratic family’s home, a lurid shade of purple and had filled it with strange and fabulous furniture, such as Salvador Dali’s famous ‘Mae West’ lips sofa (now owned by Brighton Museum and Art Gallery).

    A photo of the sofa designed by Salvador Dali, showing Mae West's lips
    Edward James, Salvador Dali, Mae West lips sofa, 1938 - Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

    Although the item no longer seems shocking, Dr Wolf says that in a grand country house, “it would have stood out strikingly from the more prudish, tasteful decoration of the time.”

    Meanwhile, in Bexhill on Sea, the gleaming, shining De La Warr Pavilion, built in 1935 and now regarded as a jewel in the resort’s crown, was met with similar antipathy – and xenophobia  –  because it was designed by German-Jewish émigré Erich Mendelsohn and Russian-born Serge Chermayeff.

    A local resident is reported to have attacked the town clerk in protest against “the employment of an alien architect for the erection of a building buy a public body to the exclusion of British architects”.

    As Dr Wolf points out, Sussex’s location between France and London was likely to have been a major factor for why the area became a haven for artists and European émigres between the wars.

    The exhibition specifically focuses on the years 1910 to 1950 (although it also includes a few works from the 1960s), a period of great social, cultural and political upheaval across the Continent.

    “Sussex was a threshold to Europe. The artists living in Sussex were influenced by European art – and it became a place for artists fleeing Europe to settle.”

    She references a scene in Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between The Acts, about a local amateur dramatic society in a rural village (believed to be based on Rodmell) that has the suitably foreign-sounding Miss La Trobe writing a play that unsettles the community. 

    One section of the exhibition looks at coastal art, but the pieces aren’t calm and picturesque seascapes.  Dr Wolf draws attention to John Piper’s 1933 mixed media piece of Eastbourne’s Seven Sister’s Cliff, Beach and Starfish.

    John Piper, Beach and Star Fish, Seven Sister's Cliff, Eastbourne, 1933-34 -¬ The Piper Estate  DACS 2015
    John Piper, Beach and Star Fish, Seven Sister's Cliff, Eastbourne, 1933-34 -¬ The Piper Estate  DACS 2015

    “At first glance if looks quite naive but when you look closely you seen it’s very political. It incorporates a newspaper cutting about Nazism and socialism, and an advert for English private schools.  And the technique of using collage is European. He’s using the coast to think about Europe.”

    Another painting, Edward Wadsworth’s Bronze Ballet, was based on a scene at Le Havre, but painted in Maresfield in 1940 to the “noisy accompaniment” of the bombardment of Abbeville, Boulogne and Calais.

    While the Modernists may not have found the locals always warm and accommodating, Dr Wolf has plenty of evidence of them making connections with other like-minded individuals across Sussex.

    Virginia and Leonard Woolf visited Eric Gill in Ditchling and his statues graced the gardens of the Bloomsbury group. Duncan Grant is said to have visited Farley Farm House in Muddles Green, the home of Surrealist artist Roland Penrose and his extraordinary photographer wife Lee Miller – herself once a model for the Surrealist photographer Man Ray.

    Many of the artists used their rural retreats to entertain other artists. Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore were familiar faces at Farley Farm.  And socialist artist Peggy Angus’s idiosyncratically decorated home, Furlongs, in Beddingham, was often the scene of political debate with fellow industrial painter Eric Ravilious, and John Piper, to whom she wrote in 1942 “art in our time is so divorced from people’s lives”.

    While the exhibition encompasses a wide range of people and stories, Dr Wolf sees this as being still just the surface of the Modernist landscape in Sussex.

    “I want the project to continue, to find out more about what the local people really thought about these new arrivals,” she says. “There are stories about locals enjoying the works, but the anecdotes that tend to get mentioned emphasise conflict and tension. There’s a lot more exciting research to be done, connecting local history with the study of the Arts.”

    • Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion, is at Two Temple Place, London, WC2R 3BD, from Saturday 28 January until Sunday 23 April. Open Monday to Saturday 10am to 4.30pm. Closed Tuesday. For more, visit www.twotempleplace.org
    • Dr Wolf will be giving talks both at the exhibition venue, and at galleries and museums in Sussex. The first will be on 16 February at Pallant House. Please see the Centre for Modernist Studies website for further information: https://centreformoderniststudiessussex.wordpress.com  If you have stories to share about Modernists in Sussex,  email Dr Wolf:  h.wolf@sussex.ac.uk