John Tunnard: Inner Space to Outer Space
until 6 June
St Ives and Beyond
until 31 May
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
John Tunnard (1900–71) is one of that shamefully extensive body of distinguished 20th-century British artists whose work is largely unfamiliar today. For reasons best known to itself, the Tate doesn’t see it as its duty to bring such artists before the public for reassessment, so the job is left to others. Thankfully, there are smaller museums in this country with the necessary initiative and interest, notably Pallant House in Chichester, currently mounting the first museum show of Tunnard in more than 30 years. This is a broadly chronological survey which begins in the mid-1930s when Tunnard was already a mature artist, and examines his achievement thematically through three rooms and over three decades.
Tunnard was a bit of a character, a semi-professional jazz drummer and party-thrower, given to wearing loud checks and a pink tie and to smoking a pipe. His friend Julian Trevelyan said he had ‘a face that’s a mixture between a fox’s and a giant panda’. Tunnard enrolled as a design student at the Royal College of Art in 1919, with textile design as his specialism. In the 1920s he worked for textile and carpet manufacturers and became the fabric selector for John Lewis. But he wanted to paint, and to this end he moved to Cornwall with his wife and settled in Cadgwith. Both husband and wife designed and hand-block printed silk to make a living, and Tunnard painted. His early work has strong affinities with Miró and Klee, and he is often associated with the Surrealist movement. But he deliberately kept his distance, and looked first to the natural world and then to space travel for his inspiration, rather than following the dictates of the subconscious as the Surrealists preached.
In fact, his work often seems to operate in a kind of ‘no-other-man’s-land’ between Surrealism and Constructivism. Tunnard was a great original — inventing imagery that he claimed was quite real to him, which sometimes recalled windswept trees or large boulders, at others lunar wastes or submarine depths — and to begin with he was recognised as such. In 1939 he was given a major solo show by Peggy Guggenheim at her gallery in London. His work was bought by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and admired by the Abstract Expressionists, including Mark Rothko. The second world war interrupted Tunnard’s promising career, and the post-war world offered a very different reality. As he continued to experiment, his imagery grew increasingly cosmic, frequently suggestive of radar or electromagnetic waves. His work sold well, but it never achieved the prominence that might have been predicted for it.
This exhibition begins with a room designated ‘Abstraction, Music, Surrealism’, which includes such early pieces as the Miró-esque ‘Diabolo on the Quay’ (1936), once owned by Julian Trevelyan, and ‘Man, Woman and Iron’ (1942). The latter is a beautiful incised tempera panel, inventively mingling abstract form and figurative linearity. Room 2, ‘Nature, Landscape, Seascape’, has a couple of horrors in it (‘Return’ and ‘Levant Zawn’) and the wonderfully lucid ‘Outfall’ (1946), the best painting in this room which also includes ‘Davy Jones’ Locker’ and ‘Reclamation’. The third section, ‘Science, Technology and Space Travel’, is rather overloaded with pictures, though there are still excellent things to be seen, some of the finest of which are owned by Brian Whitton, leading Tunnard expert. My overwhelming impression was of visual indigestion: not uncommon in the presence of strong originality. I returned to one or two paintings again and again, and particularly admired some of the smaller works.
This is an interesting exhibition, though one which paradoxically closes Tunnard down rather than opening him up. Perhaps this is partly the fault of the framing of the work, which often seems to enclose Tunnard’s great spaces rather than allow them to breathe. There are many ways to frame a painting, and though all ultimately surround the picture, not all shut the image in. Tunnard needs sympathetic framing which allows the breadth of his remarkable imagery to continue to extend beyond the frame, not be confined within it. (I am reminded of how the lives of dolphins in aquaria are radically shortened because their sonic communication bounces back at them and drives them mad.)
Perhaps this feeling of unnatural containment is partly to do with the selection, or the slightly fussy installation (I’m all for coloured walls, but four colours distract too much), or simply due to the melancholy fact that too many Tunnards together only serve to diminish his impact, not enhance it.
Pallant House is full of treasures, and for those of you who are unfamiliar with its permanent collection there are treats in store. There are also a number of fine things on loan, including a 1975 Francis Bacon painting of two figures, in an unusually narrow upright format, hung intriguingly next to a hot Graham Sutherland landscape of the south of France. A display called St Ives and Beyond focuses on some of the pioneers of the Modern Movement in Cornwall, concentrating particularly on the Christopher Wood–Ben Nicholson–Alfred Wallis nexus. There are memorable paintings here, including Wood’s ‘China Dogs in St Ives’ (1926), Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Portrait of William Nicholson’ (Ben’s father and her father-in-law) and Ben’s lovely landscape ‘Birch Craig, Winter’ (1930), but any examination of St Ives in this period is incomplete without the work of Margaret Mellis (1914–2009). Mellis’s early years have been rather overlooked by historians, a fact I hope to remedy with the monograph I’ve written about her work, to be published by Lund Humphries later this year. There’s an artist Pallant House could usefully bring to wider public attention.
Last chance to see a fine selection of still-life and flower paintings by George Rowlett (born 1941) at 108 Fine Art, Harrogate, until 12 May. Readers of this column will be aware of my staunch support for Rowlett’s thick and luscious paintings, but his beautiful flower studies are a less familiar aspect of his work. Recommended.
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