Emmy Bridgwater

movement.

Based at times in both Birmingham and London, she was a significant member of the Birmingham Surrealists and of the London-based British Surrealist Group, and was an important link between the surrealists of the two cities. [ [http://www.leicestergalleries.com/provenart/dealer_stock_details.cgi?d_id=&a_id=10490 EMMY BRIDGWATER (1906-99) Modern British Surrealist] The Leicester Galleries, London]

Michel Remy, professor of art history at the University of Nice and author of "Surrealism in Britain", describes her influence as "of the same importance to British surrealism as the arrival of Dalí in the ranks of the French surrealists".Citation | last=Remy | first=Michel | chapter=Towards The Magnetic North: Surrealism in Birmingham | editor-surname=Sidey | title=Surrealism in Birmingham 1935-1954
pages = 10 | publisher=Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery | publication-date=2000 | isbn=0-7093-0235-5.]

Biography

Emmy Bridgwater was born in the upmarket Edgbaston district of Birmingham, the third daughter of a chartered accountant and Methodist. Showing an early interest in painting and drawing, she studied under Bernard Fleetwood-Walker at the Birmingham School of Art for three years from 1922 before further study at a local art school in Oxford paid for by work as a secretary.Citation | last=Rüll | first=Lisa | chapter=Lost and found - family, mythology and Emmy Bridgwater | editor-surname=Sidey | title=Surrealism in Birmingham 1935-1954 | pages = 37-42 | publisher=Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery | publication-date=2000 | isbn=0-7093-0235-5 .]

by Robert Melville.

In early 1940 she officially joined the British Surrealist Group, whose meetings she was to attend for much of the following decade. Forming a close friendship with Edith Rimmington and having a brief but intense affair with Toni del Renzio, she contributed to numerous international surrealist publications (including del Renzio's "Arson: an ardent review") and held her first solo exhibition at Jack Bilbo's "Modern Gallery" in 1942. In 1947 Bridgwater was one of six English artists chosen by André Breton to exhibit at the "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme" at the Galerie Maeght in Paris - the last major international surrealist group exhibition.

By the late 1940s, however, Bridgwater was having to spend increasing amounts of time caring for her aging mother and disabled sister. In 1953 she moved to Stratford-upon-Avon to take on this responsibility full-time and effectively suspended her artistic career.

During the 1970s Bridgwater resumed work, largely in collage, and her earlier work featured in numerous surrealist retrospective exhibitions over the following decades. [ [http://www.madsci.org/~lynn/juju/surr/misc/bridgwater.html Emmy Bridgwater, Biographical Information] The Surrealism Server, 1994-1996] Ceasing work in the mid-1980s, she died in Solihull in 1999.

Work

Emmy Bridgwater's work in the 1930s and 1940s largely consisted of paintings and pen and ink drawings. Her personal iconography often featured organic imagery such as birds, eggs, leaves, fruit and tendril-like automatist lines depicted with a sense of "surrealist black humour and violence", often within a dreamlike landscape. From the 1970s onwards she also worked in collage.

Critical reaction

wrote of Bridgwater's paintings: "We do not see these pictures. We hear their cries and are moved by them. Our own entrails are drawn painfully from us and twisted into the pictures whose significance we did not want to realise." [Citation | last = del Renzio | first = Toni | title = The Uncouth Invasion (The paintings of Emmy Bridgwater) | newspaper = Arson: an ardent review | year = 1942]

Robert Melville described Bridgwater's paintings as depicting "the saddening, half-seen 'presences' encountered by the artist on her journey through the labyrinths of good and evil ... although they are dreamlike in their ambiguity they are realistic documents from a region of phantasmal hopes and murky desires where few stay to observe and fewer still remain clear-sighted." [Citation | last = Melville | first = Robert | title = Challenging Pictures at Coventry Art Circle Exhibition | newspaper = Coventry Standard | year = 1947 | date = 8 November 1947]

Her obituary in "The Independent" said "Her paintings show an ability to enter a personal dream world and transform the visions she experienced there into bold, unselfconscious, emotionally charged landscapes which more often than not strike into the very depths of one's mind. Using a limited palette and painting thickly, she was able to bring together seemingly unrelated objects which she used to fill desolate landscapes, giving the paintings a narrative quality of her own making."

Exhibitions

* 1937 - "The Birmingham Group", Lucy Wertheim Gallery, London
* 1938 - "The Birmingham Group", Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham
* 193? - London Gallery, London
* 1939 - "As We See Ourselves", Chapman Galleries, Birmingham
* 1942 - "Emmy Bridgwater" (Solo Exhibition), Modern Gallery, London
* 1947 - "Coventry Art Circle Exhibition", Coventry
* 1947 - "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme", Galerie Maeght, Paris
* 1948 - "Coventry Art Circle Exhibition", Coventry
* 1949 - "Birmingham Artists Committee Invitation Exhibition", Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, Birmingham
* 1951 - "Coventry Art Circle Exhibition", Coventry
* 1971 - "Britain's Contribution to Surrealism of the 30's and 40's", Hamet Gallery, London
* 1982 - "Peinture Surrealiste en Angleterre 1930-1960: Les Enfants d'Alice", Galerie 1900-2000, Paris
* 1985 - "A Salute to British Surrealism 1930-1950", The Minories, Colchester; Blond Fine Art, London and Ferens Art Gallery, Hull
* 1985 - "British Woman Surrealists", Blond Fine Art, London
* 1986 - "Surrealism in England 1936 and after", Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury
* 1986 - "Contrariwise, Surrealism in Britain 1930-1936", Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea
* 1986 - "Surrealism in Britain in the Thirties: Angels of Anarchy and Machines for Making Clouds", Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds
* 1987 - "Surrealismi", Retretti Art Centre, Suomi, Finland
* 1988 - "I Surrealisti", Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy
* 1989 - "Die Surrealisten", Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany
* 1989 - "British Surrealism", Blond Fine Art, London
* 1990 - "Emmy Bridgwater", Blond Fine Art, London
* 1991 - "The Birmingham Surrealist Group", John Bonham Murray Feely Fine Art, London
* 1992 - "Ten Decades - Ten Women Artists born 1897-1906", Norwich Gallery
* 1992 - "The Foundations of Behaviour", John Bonham Murray Feely Fine Art, London
* 1995 - "Real Surreal: British and European Surrealism", Wolverhampton Art Gallery
* 1996 - "Emmy Bridgwater/Conroy Maddox: The Last Surrealists", Blond Fine Art, London
* 1996 - "The Inner Eye", National Touring Exhibition

External links

* [http://www.bmagic.org.uk/people/Emmy+Bridgwater Emmy Bridgwater] Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery Information Centre
* [http://www.artnet.com/artist/629896/emmy-bridgwater.html Emmy Bridgwater] Artnet

References