Omega watch

Roger Fry was high-handed, pontificating and condemnatory, and as a result was not well liked. The war artist Richard Seddon tells in his memoir, A Hand Uplifted (1963), how Margaret Nash, Paul’s wife, effectively pricked the balloon of Fry’s conceit. She took against him when he attacked her husband’s work and claimed that no good artists were ever war artists. (Nash’s first world war paintings are terrifying masterpieces: beautiful images of death and devastation.) When Fry went off on holiday to Italy he arranged for his work for the New English Art Club to be collected from his flat. By chance, Margaret Nash was able to select Fry’s submission and included ‘a ludicrous attempt at a war picture...absurd, outdated and jingoistic’. It made Fry a laughing stock among the very people he’d been criticising. So are pompous self-appointed arbiters deflated.

An additional display in Room 12 of prints and toy designs by Winifred Gill (1891–1981) pays effective tribute to the unsung heroine of the Omega Workshops who was both designer and business manager. Gill’s hand-coloured linocuts — such as the prints of flowers and the one of Glastonbury — are the best things in this display, bold in design and execution. Omega may have been a laboratory of radical design, but it was short-lived and never widely popular or profitable. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating moment in art and design history and the Courtauld covers it well.