- Birmingham Group
: "Disambiguation: you may be searching for the
Birmingham School ."The Birmingham Group were an important school of artists, one of the last outposts of lateRomanticism in the visual arts, and an important link between the last of thePre-Raphaelites and the new Slade Symbolists.Members included, among others:
*
Joseph Southall (1861 - 1944)
*Maxwell Armfield (1881–1972) [Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Peyton Skipwith, ‘Armfield, Maxwell Ashby (1881–1972)’, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30765] accessed 9 June 2007]
*Conroy Maddox (1912 - 2005)
*Arthur Gaskin
*John Melville (1902 -1986)
*Sidney Meteyard
* Henry Payne
*Charles March Gere
*Benjamin Creswick (1853 - 1946)
*Bernard Sleigh (1872 - 1954)
*Emmy Bridgwater (1906 - 1999)They began to form in an informal manner in the 1890s. Many were later to become teachers in Birmingham (especially the great
Birmingham Municipal School of Art underEdward R. Taylor ), and this meant that theEdward Burne-Jones style influenced all those who studied at the Birmingham art schools. Many were also heavily influenced by the ideas and practices ofJohn Ruskin andWilliam Morris , and had indeed personally known those men. Several had undertaken work for theKelmscott Press , withCharles March Gere producing the famous frontpiece to "News from Nowhere ". Many, unable to support themselves only through their art, also became fine crafts makers as well as teachers.There was initially no formal membership, but during the 1930s they were known to have had a membership secretary.
Some of their members later became part of the
Birmingham Surrealists group of artists, thus carrying to English Surrealism the rich vein of Romantic concern with emotional states in pictures, with myth and fantasy, with visions, and with a "natural supernaturalist" experience conveyed through art. The Birmingham Surrealists had made contact with the London Surrealist Group around 1940 and ex Birmingham Group members such as Emmy Bridgwater exhibited at the International Surrealist show in Paris in 1947. (See: Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, "Surrealism in Birmingham: 1935 - 1954" (2001).The Fine Art Society held an extensive exhibition of Birmingham Group works in 1969. The galleries of the Birmingham Group's works formed a keystone of the major "The Last Romantics" exhibition at the Barbican in 1989.
References
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