From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Since its reopening in 2022, after a major capital development that fully restored its Georgian house and garden, Gainsborough’s House has been enjoying many improvements. Among them is the three-storey exhibition wing, which has gifted Suffolk with its largest gallery. It is proving to be a handsome environment for art of all periods. Currently on show in this venue is an outstanding display of work by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. It includes some of Lett-Haines’s most alluring and subtly subversive experiments with the patterns suggested by nature, and Morris’s engagingly idiosyncratic paintings of landscapes, birds and flowers, as well as his psychologically piercing portraits. Beautifully hung and intelligently curated, it also offers fresh perspectives on their lives and art.
Italian Landscape (n.d.), Arthur Lett-Haines. Courtesy Philip Mould & Company, London
A major bonding ingredient was inevitably their mutual commitment to the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, which Cedric and Lett, as they were familiarly known, founded in 1937. Stories about it abound. Best known is the fact that its initial premises burnt down, owing to the careless disposal of a cigarette, attributed to the young Lucian Freud. No one was blamed. The following day students were encouraged to make drawings of the still smoking ruin and lessons continued, temporarily, in a nearby pub. One neighbour, Alfred Munnings – shortly to become President of the Royal Academy – danced in the street with delight at the building’s ruination, since he abhorred this unconventional, liberal institution, which did not follow the academic year but opened on the first Monday in April and closed on October 31. With Freud and Maggi Hambling among its students, its mythology sometimes occludes a broader understanding of what Morris and Lett-Haines achieved during their sixty-year partnership.
That’s something this first ever joint retrospective of the two artists aims to correct. After their deaths – Lett-Haines in 1978, Morris in 1982 – a silence descended on their reputations. Rampant emphasis on modernism and American art, not to mention the arrival of Carl Andre’s Bricks in 1976 and the furore this work evoked, made the Tate Gallery’s exhibition on Cedric Morris in 1984 a shocking admittance of alternative traditions. It was curated by Richard Morphet, still the most insightful spokesperson on this artist. More recently, in 2018, two exhibitions on Morris – ‘Artist Plantsman’, at the Garden Museum, London, and Philip Mould’s ‘Cedric Morris: Beyond the Garden Wall’, in Pall Mall – further promoted Morris at Lett-Haines’s expense. Portraits of both men confront the visitor at the beginning of this exhibition, asserting a fairer and more balanced account.
It is tempting to see these two portraits, both painted by Morris, as a deliberate pair. There is a harmony between them, created by the choice of colour and composition. In both, head and shoulders are pressed forward by the background, which in the portrait of Lett-Haines is a map of the northernmost peninsula of Morocco, where the two men spent the winter of 1925–26. Likewise in his self-portrait, Morris uses not a map, but a sweeping curve of landscape and river to echo the shape of his head, as if in reminiscence of the earlier portrait of Lett-Haines, inscribed 1925. That same year Morris wrote to him: ‘I know it was through you that my brain developed at all – it was asleep before I met you and so was all the rest of me. That is one reason why we fight so…’
Summer Garden Flowers (1944), Cedric Morris. Courtesy Philip Mould & Company, London
Having met at an Armistice Night party in 1918, they lived together in London and then Cornwall before moving to Paris late in 1920. Judging from their exchange of letters and postcards, their coupledom initially allowed a great deal of independence. It was evidently Lett-Haines, although younger by five years, who opened for Morris the Parisian world of art and literature. And it was Lett-Haines who kept a ‘Chronology Book’, listing the astonishing abundance of famous names who turned out for parties in Morris’s studio, which had been the Life Room in the Académie Delécluse. Many friendships must have been formed in the nearby Café de la Rotonde, which is shown here in a 1921 painting by Morris, a boldly modernist take on city life, with its harsh detail and strong colour. It is matched in intensity by Lett-Haines’s Old Brighton Railway Station, in ink and watercolour, from 1920. Both works are tinged with admiration for Edward Burra.
Amid the crowded world in which they lived in the 1920s, they found time to experiment and to develop their own personal interests and methods. Morris explored the material nature of paint and the textures it creates when thickly applied. This, combined with his emphasis on directness of statement, produces an unusual combination of sophistication and the faux naïf. Lett-Haines, meanwhile, mingling observation of nature with a love of imaginative eeriness, began calling himself a British Surrealist. They also began to exhibit, Lett-Haines leading the way until 1928, when Arthur Tooth gave Morris a solo exhibition at which he sold 40 works. After this, Morris was invited to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.
Cedric Morris with Lett Haines and Rubio the parrot (c. 1929–36), photographer unknown. Photo: © Tate; © Estate of Cedric Morris
The decision to turn their backs on London and its art world, to live in the country and to establish an art school was an unexpected career move. But Morris’s large picture, densely painted, of their first Suffolk house (The Pound, in Dedham Vale) is one of the grandest in this show and a celebration of what they had gained by this move. Morris and LettHaines continued to find inspiration in nature after their later move to Benton End, which was large enough to accommodate school and home. Both men maintained an intense creativity, but when the school took off, it was Lett-Haines who managed much of its organisation, his cooking making a significant contribution to its success. He deliberately left Morris uncurbed, free to develop his painting and to achieve his reputation as a plantsman, gardener and award-winning creator of new irises. As told by this exhibition, it is an insightful and tender story.
‘Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines’ is at Gainsborough’s House, Suffolk, until 3 November.
From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.