The Observer - 25.08.2019

The Observer

25.08.19 47

Shelagh
Delaney in
September 1960.
Photographs by
Tom Stuttard/
the Guardian

A brush with sexism

In 1926 , a young woman who

liked to be known as Dod Procter

• her name was actually Doris –
  submitted a painting to the Royal
  Academy’s Summer Exhibition.
  Entitled Morning , it depicted Cissie
  Barnes , the 16-year-old daughter of
  a Cornish fi sherman , lying on a bed
  in her nightdress, sunlight falling on
  her bare arms and legs. A strikingly
  intimate picture – it speaks of dust
  motes and the smell of crumpled
  linen – this oil made Procter the
  most talked about artist in Britain,
  at least for a while. Public and critics
  alike thrilled to its intensity, and
  one of the latter, from the Daily Mail ,
  would go on to buy it for the nation.
  But for the female artist, success
  was a more than usually complicated
  business. Two years later, another
  painting by Procter, Virginal , in which
  Cissie Barnes posed naked,
  was turned down by the
  Academy; there was,
  perhaps, something
  a little too graphic in
  the artist’s depiction
  of her model’s pubic
  hair. In the moment,
  such rejection mattered
  relatively little. Procter’s
  fame only grew and in 1942
  she became a full member of the
  Royal Academy , still a rare honour
  for a woman ( Annie Swynnerton ,
  the fi rst female RA member in its
  then 15 4-year history, was elected
  only in 1922 ). Nevertheless, in the
  context of her career, it appears as a
  dark arrow, pointing to the way her
  work would fall out of favour even in
  her own lifetime. Oh, Dod, one-time
  employee of the Omega Workshops
  and admirer of Picasso. How many
  people know your name now?
  Procter appears early on in
  Voyaging Out, Carolyn Trant ’s
  lavishly illustra ted history of British
  female artists from suffrage to
  the 60s, and her story is in many
  ways representative. It isn’t only
  that her prodigious talent was
  of so little use in the face of the
  male establishment; that Virginal,
  painted at a time when art schools
  were still segregated, when female
  models were often considered to
  be little better th an prostitutes, and
  when the male models used by
  female students had to wear posing

Voyaging Out

Carolyn Trant

Thames & Hudson, £24.95, pp304

A lavish chronicle of

female artists and their

struggle to be accepted is

full of surprising detail,

writes Rachel Cooke

Art

pouches, attracted the kind of

salacious talk male artists no longer

had to deal with. What matters most

is the question of her visibility.

That Trant needed to write this

book at all – why does it not exist

already? why must women artists

still be clumped together in one great

mass like this? – tells you everything

you need to know about what her

subjects had to put up with, from the

shackles of domesticity, the needs

of their often unsupportive and

babyish partners, to the way they

were excluded from the various art

movements of their time (“let’s not

have any of those damned women,”

said C R W Nevinson to Wyndham

Lewis during a discussion of the

latter’s Rebel Art Centre – though

both men were happy enough to

accept the money of a woman, Kate

Lechmere , to fund it ).

Trant’s book is diligent, detailed

and full of surprises: everyone is

here, from the still celebrated ( Sybil

Andrews , Vanessa Bell , Barbara

Hepworth) to the little known and

the almost completely forgotten

(Catherine Giles , Ithell Colquhoun ,

Cecile Walton ). She pays attention

not only to these women’s lives

and work but makes room, too,

for their weirdnesses and quirks:

here are occultists and outsiders,

crafters and cross-dressers. I spent

several minutes staring at the

marvellous photograph she

includes of the self-taught

Madge Gill displaying a

4.5m calico drape mural

in her London home in

1947; Gill was reluctant to

sell her work in her lifetime

because she believed it all

belonged to Myrnineres t, her

spirit medium.

Inevitably, a book like this is

unsatisfying to a degree. Trant

set herself a huge task in covering

such a long period of time, one that

takes in two wars. Occasionally,

her narrative has the feeling of a

list; sometimes she tells when she

should show ( Peggy Guggenheim

“encountered misogyny wherever

she went”, she says of the great

gallerist and collector, without

giving us any examples). But it also

sends you away determined to fi nd

out more. Who knew, to take just

one example, that the constructivist

Marlow Moss , long consigned to a

minor role in art history, may have

infl uenced her friend Mondrian as

much as he did her? In this sense,

Voyaging Out bulges with hope for

the future: for more research, for

more books and, above all, for more

inclusive and wide-reaching shows.

To order Voyaging Out for £21.96

go to guardianbookshop.com or call

0330 333 6846

Madge Gill,

right, in 1947. An

exhibition of her

work is at the

William Morris

Gallery, London

E17, until 22

September.

Popperfoto/Getty

the community and this wallpaper’s

contemporary.” Yet Delaney resisted

being typecast as an “angry young

woman” to counterbalance John

Osborne and the “angry young men”.

Although Delaney is remembered

as a one-hit wonder, her second

play, The Lion in Love (1960), was a

success by ordinary standards and

she went on to an impressive career

as a screenwriter in television and

fi lm. In particular, her screenplay for

the 1985 fi lm Dance With a Stranger

about Ruth Ellis (the last woman to

be executed in the UK for murder)

put her back in the limelight.

Through extensive research and

help from Delaney’s daughter,

Todd offers a tactful portrait

of her character – all the more

sympathetic for revealing that

Delaney was as faulty as the rest of

us. Lindsay Anderson , who admired

her (he directed the fi lm of her

short story The White Bus i n 1967),

noted: “She fi nds it diffi cult to turn

the stuff out (apart from anything

else, she is very lazy).” She loved

fast cars and food (an impertinent

interviewer in the Observer noted:

“In spite of an enormous appetite

she is slim and supple”). She

was private about her private life

perhaps partly because the love of

her life was a married American

comedy writer and talent agent 20

years her senior: Harvey Orkin by

whom she would become pregnant.

Delaney had written about

being a single mother and, in 1964,

became one. And while her situation

in a bohemian house in London’s

Islington was entirely different –

and far easier – than Jo’s, questions

surface about the price she paid

for freedom. How many tastes of

honey did life offer her? These

questions are – perhaps inevitably –

incompletely answered.

The only irritation with this book

is its editing (Delaney’s father comes

home from the war a changed man

more than once, Richard Hoggart’s

view of sin in the The Uses of Literacy

is explained twice and that Sheila

Rowbotham is an Oxford graduate

is needlessly repeated). And it would

have been lovely to have had more

pictures. Were there none of Delaney

in her defi ant fi sherman’s sweaters

and paint-spattered jeans?

Yet these are minor troubles and

do not spoil a story that reminds

us what an inspiration Delaney has

been to many – including Morrissey

who said: “at least 50 % of my

reason for writing can be blamed

on Shelagh Delaney”, and Jeanette

Winterson, who likened Delaney’s

work in the 50s to “a lighthouse

pointing the way and warning about

the rocks underneath” – and Selina

Todd herself , moved to write this

splendid and illuminating book.

To order Tastes of Honey for £18.99

go to guardianbookshop.com or call

0330 333 6846

This

week

Daniel Rachel

Kitty Empire on an

entertaining oral

history of the Cool

Britannia years

Salman Rushdie

Johanna Thomas-Corr

reviews the novelist’s

lively reimagining of

Don Quixote 

Ibram X Kendi

The American historian’s

How to Be an Antiracist

is vital and insightful.

By Colin Grant