Exhibitions 2
Rose Mead 1868-1946 (Manor House Museum, Bury St Edmunds till 31 March) Helen Saunders 1885-1963 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford till 3 March; Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, from 16 March till 20 April)
Two singular women
John Henshall
Tantalising synchronies link Rose Mead with Helen Saunders. Both were ruthlessly devoted to their art. Both were committed feminists who stayed single and mixed with interesting men. Both died in domestic accidents aged 78. Mead fell down stairs and fractured her skull; Saunders was gassed by the central heating system. From their thirties onwards, both excused them- selves from mainstream cultural life but painted obsessively. Mead withdrew to her native Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk; Saunders to a top-floor flat above the Gray's Inn Road in central London.
Mead studied in London and Paris with Auguste-Joseph Delecluse and Beatrice How, then followed a modernist path of portraiture, town and landscape. She exhib- ited at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. Saunders worked with Rosa Waugh and Gwen John, then became a prominent Vorticist alongside Wyndham Lewis. Vorti- cist abstraction, portraits and hypnotic, dreamy townscapes are her oeuvre. Roger Fry was a great admirer. Saunders attended Ezra Pound's Vorticist-Imagist dinners at Gennaro's in Soho.
Mead returned from London to Bury in 1897 to nurse her mother through a final illness. This lasted 22 years and Mead's career never fully recovered. Saunders retreated into a private world at her West End flat. In the midst of life, these two knew limbo. In an apposite introduction to Brigid Peppin's constructive catalogue, Richard Cork recalls his frustration at Cambridge 30 years ago on discovering Saunders and fellow Vorticist Jessie Dismorr — in Blast, then being unable to find out any- thing useful about her. I experienced the same with Mead 20 years later. Now, thanks to Peppin and Christopher Reeve at Bury, things are different.
These artists lived in an era when a patri- archal society seemed to conspire to pre- vent many talented women achieving much worthwhile. Mead habitually harangued young women sitters: don't marry — get a career.
Mead's self-portrait depicts a spirited, no-nonsense sensualist. Lewis's picture of Saunders oozes louche, haunting androgy- ny. Mead was great friends with the joyous- ly dissolute Augustus John. We do not know if they had an affair. Saunders was involved with Walter Sickert. He asked her to marry him but she demurred. Discon- Portrait of a young girl by Rose Mead View of L'Estaque, 1928, by Helen Saunders certingly insecure despite his cultivate rum- bustiousness, Sickert tried to impress Saun- ders by keeping his taxi waiting for an hour while they took tea. Saunders also encoun- tered Augustus John. Whether she ever met Mead is not known.
Mead was famously tempestuous. She was offered £500 — a small fortune in the 1890s — by a gas stove manufacturer who wished to add their logo to the cooker in a self-portrait at her London flat. A woman of principle, her response was all but unre- portable. In Bury, she quarrelled with a friend who acted as her agent: she stormed home and slashed pictures of his family with a carving knife. Once, seeing another Bury painter enjoying an advantageous prime-site shop-window showing, she bel- lowed, 'He's no bloody artist!'
She frequented the Dog & Partridge pub near her studio on Crown Street, Bury, and painted a picture of the bar where she downed Greene King by the pint. She called evenings there 'doing my research'.
A Ms Loder, who like many other sitters Mead buttonholed in the street, remem- bered a fierce, domineering woman: 'For God's sake girl — stop fidgeting!' Loder's portrait drips riveting, modernistic sexuali- ty. Did 12-year-olds like this really stalk the streets of Bury in 1920? Jailbait is barely the word.
Saunders emerges as charming, if curi- ous. Rosa Waugh told how she suffered unexplained 'fits of utter weariness'. After Saunders's death, Waugh said she was 'so like a statue, yet so warm and tender'.
The arch-Vorticist Frederick Etchells told Richard Cork that Saunders was 'com- pletely potty about Lewis'. Etchells and Lewis were influenced by the Viennese philosopher, Otto Weininger, a lager-swill- ing misogynist whose Sex and Character (1903) argued that women were congenital- ly incapable of logical thought. Lewis bade Saunders read this Meisterwerk. It is indica- tive of her regard for him that she didn't simply throw it at him. She commented with gracious irony, 'I still persist in think- ing that I may have a soul.'
The opening of the only major Rose Mead exhibition after her death, on a freezing day in early 1955, was a singular occasion, if the Bury Free Press is to be believed: 'The Mayor (Mr W. Bevis South- gate) presided at the ceremony, which, in the absence owing to the bad weather of the octogenarian Rector of Cockfield (the Rev. E Cornwell Robertson) (second cousin of the artist) was performed by Major J.B. Oakes, himself an artist . Thanks to Major Oakes were voiced by Mr H.C. Wolton .
Of the many exhibitions so far announced for 1996, the Mead and Saun- ders are just two of a gradually growing number which stand out like Joni Mitchell's ruby in a black man's ear. Let us hope these artists' rehabilitation continues apace, following the drear decades of reck- less neglect.
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