BOOKS & ARTS
Exhibitions
Home is where the art is
Martin Gayford
Actions. The image of the world can
be different
Kettle’s Yard, until 6 May
When I first visited Kettle’s Yard, Cam-
bridge, I was shown around by Jim Ede, its
founder and creator. This wasn’t an unusual
event in the 1970s. I was an undergraduate,
and in those days Ede — elderly, elegant
and almost translucently ascetic — showed
round anyone who rang his doorbell. It was
rather as if Henry Clay Frick had given you
a tour of his pied-à-terre on Fifth Avenue,
or Sir Richard Wallace walked you through
his collection. Except, of course, that they
wouldn’t have done that — and Kettle’s
Yard, as Ede (1895–1990) mused in a con-
versation with the artist John Goto, isn’t
really a collection, ‘it’s a number of things
perhaps’.
In fact, it is much more than just a col-
lection. Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge — which
reopens this week after an £11 million
and restructured so that each of its cabins
could hold 20 men. In its new role as the
‘Grey Ghost’, the liner transported three
quarters of a million soldiers, many of them
from Australia to the UK. With conditions
as appalling as they had been on the early
steamers, the ocean liner had come full circle.
It’s little wonder that artists greeted the
resurgence of the luxury liner in the 1950s
with a riot of colour. A beautifully vibrant
print from c.1953 by the suitably named
Abram Games shows passengers playing
quoits aboard an Orient Line to Australia.
It’s images like these that make you most
wistful for the golden age of travel. Dull
photographs of the comparatively function-
al interiors of the QE2 from just 16 years
later give a sense of just how quickly the
spark went out of ocean liners. It was obvi-
ous then that the future lay in the sky.
But might there yet be a future for the
liner? ‘It’s really, really interesting talking
to the designers who work on gigantic ships
like the Harmony of the Seas and the Oasis
of the Seas, which are the largest ships ever
built,’ curator Ghislaine Wood tells me.
‘There are ships so big they can’t dock...
I can see in the not too distant future we
are going to be in a situation where we
are going to have floating cities... people
will live on them and they will have all the
amenities of a town. It’s not too far away.’
A solution to the housing crisis? Time to
invest in a life jacket.
Ocean Liners: Speed and Style is at the
Victoria and Albert Museum until 17 June.
extension and refurbishment — is a unique
combination of house, art gallery and what
might now be called ‘installation’. It contains
some remarkable pictures and sculpture, but
is also a work of art in itself — a creation
you can walk around and which feels like a
private home.
Ede and his wife Helen lived in this
place, made up of four old cottages, after
they moved to Cambridge in the mid-1950s.
Ede was already over 60 by then, with a dis-
tinguished career as a curator. One day in
the 1920s, more or less the entire life’s work
of a half-forgotten sculptor named Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska arrived in his office at
the Tate Gallery. The nation didn’t want to
buy it, so he bought it himself. By the time
he arrived in Cambridge, Ede had amassed
many other works — by his friend Ben
Nicholson, Christopher Wood, the Cornish
seaman Alfred Wallis particularly.
He set about arranging them in the ram-
bling Cambridge house. The result, with
its white walls, bare woodwork and ample
light, has a good deal in common with the
artists’ houses of St Ives — Patrick Heron’s
Eagles Nest, for example. But it is unique
in its sense of harmony and stillness — twowords that Ede chose to describe what he
was doing (the latter meaning ‘to be atten-
tive, to take in, to search’ and also just to be
there and know).
He made an arrangement in which every
item has its place. The 76 spherical pebbles
laid in a spiral on a round table near a down-
stairs window matter just as much as the
small bronze sculpture by Brancusi resting
on the piano upstairs. So does the batteredantique china Ede found one day in a shop,
the chairs and tables, some feathers in a vase.
Shortly after visitors came through the
door, Ede would draw attention to his lit-
tle Miró, ‘Tic Tic’ (1927). This, he wrote,
was an opportunity to tell undergraduates
about ‘the importance of balance’. ‘If,’ he
went on, ‘I put my finger over the spot at
the top right, all the rest of the picture slid
into the left-hand bottom corner.’ Take
out other small round forms, and the pic-
ture became horizontal or everything ‘flew
to the edges’. The point was underlined byA lemon, exactly positioned in the
pewter plate nearby, echoes an oval
yell ow for m in th e MiróDomestic harmony: Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, ‘a work of art in itself’