Reader's Digest: May 27, 2023
I had forgotten most of what I knew about Jim Ede, the ill-used Tate curator who established Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, a sanctuary I loved—without originality—as an undergraduate. My then-girlfriend had the idea of working in the lucid beauty of the house-turned-museum, treating it like an off-campus office. Genius.
Kettle’s Yard is an edifice of light, an unassuming gallery with a small study space. I remember the experience of thinking there, the still silence and the quiet colour palette, but not the artwork on the walls, the backdrop to my first fumbling forays in philosophy. My favourite painting in Cambridge is Gwen John’s 1923-4 iteration of The Convalescent. As I discovered when I fact-checked Life is Hard, my memory had mislocated it in Kettle’s Yard; in fact, it’s on display at the Fitzwilliam.
Still, it was a joy to return to Kettle’s Yard this week, by way of Rosemary Hill, reviewing Laura Freeman’s Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists in the LRB. I should get hold of the book itself, but Hill’s review hits some highlights. One involves the social circle of Jim and Helen Ede:
It was at the Edes’ dinner table that Moore and Barbara Hepworth had their famous argument about which of them was the first to put a hole in a sculpture.
I had never heard of this dispute, but Hepworth seems to have been the winner.
Other artists were rescued from obscurity by Ede, who had unsuccessfully lobbied the Tate to open its doors to post-Impressionist and Cubist work.
On 27 April 1926, the life’s work, worldly possessions and archive of Gaudier-Brzeska and his Polish companion Sophie Brzeska were ‘dumped’ in the boardroom of the Tate, which was at the time also Ede’s unofficial office. The posthumous estate had arrived via the treasury solicitor after Sophie died in 1925, intestate, in a mental hospital. … Ede was intrigued. He read Ezra Pound’s book on Gaudier-Brzeska and, as he lived among his art, he felt its pure force—the inevitability of line and form… The Tate wanted to dispose of the stuff, much of which, including Sophie’s diaries and Gaudier-Brzeska’s carving tools, they thought valueless. Ede, into whose soul the iron had entered after all the rejected Van Goghs and Picassos, embarked on a series of dubious high-wire manoeuvres around the truth in order to secure most of it for himself.
Ede went on to write a book about Gaudier-Brzeska and to quit his job at the Tate, frustrated with what he called “the bishop’s question”:
After a lecture on Van Gogh a bishop in the audience had asked: ‘Why should a chair not look like a chair?’ … The Tate was dominated by ‘bishops’ and Ede could get nothing past them. He did manage to get Rex Whistler a commission for a mural in the gallery dining room and would no doubt be exasperated but unsurprised to know that the bishop’s latter-day descendants have deemed it so offensive that the whole restaurant has been closed. In 1936, in the teeth of opposition from his father and friends, he resigned.
Twenty years later, Ede made magic out of pebbles: “Kettle’s Yard became the manifestation of his mental life. A cabinet of curiosities, a mind museum.” In retrospect, the decor is uncomfortably reminiscent of a nice Airbnb.
To philosophize here is to dwell in someone else’s mind, borrowing its clarity and calm, to plot the pebbles of reflection one by one in an inevitable arc, a simplicity that might be truth—or kitsch.