A couple of weeks ago I was in Coventry and, having a little time to spare, walked round the Cathedral. It is an incredible building and one of the few twentieth century church buildings that works as a complete whole. It is full of art works, most from the same period as the building of the Cathedral, effectively the 1950s. This is a period of British art that I still find fascinating and captivating.
Last year we travelled up to Newcastle under Lyme to visit the Trent Art Gallery who were holding an exhibition of the paintings of Maurice Wade. Wade trained at Burslem School of Art in the 1930s and returned to the Potteries in the 1950s. He was painting in the second half of the twentieth century and had a series of shows at a gallery in London. He had something of a following in his day but would generally have been considered a minor artist. This exhibition, as far as we know, is the only celebration of his work since the 1970s or 80s. It consisted of the collection of the drummer from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark who, it appears, was something of a fan.
Most of Wade’s mature work is basically in black, white, and various shades of grey. This is not an affectation, that is what he sees. These are images of buildings (chapels, factories, canals) in the Potteries area and the view is primarily black and white. There was one image in the exhibition, that I remember, that shows a pottery next to a canal and some of the slag falling towards the bank, giving a streak of orange in the centre of image, what the description suggested was a ‘riot of colour’. Wade was not interested in painting people. It is the buildings and the landscapes that he paints. The sky and the water are left as blank white canvas, so the first impression is one of silhouette, but the joy and skill of Wade as painter is in the subtlety of tone and depth of texture in his painting, requiring the viewer to get up close and to see the stunning detail that exists within the expanse of black and grey. They are beautiful images, if the post-industrial can ever be described as beautiful.
Wade is just one among a series of post-industrial artists that we have been drawn to over the years, with a significant cluster as my time at Swansea was drawing to a close. I came across a print of John Piper’s image of East Swansea in a gallery in London and was blown away. I have always loved Piper (one of my father’s favourite painters) and associate him more with churches and the rural. However, he spent considerable time in Wales, and it is perhaps not too surprising that he painted Swansea, the terrace houses descending to the bay.
More recently we came across Jack Simcock, another artist from Stoke, in an auction catalogue. This was an image of a cottage on the Staffordshire moors (slightly more colour than Wade, but not a lot, somewhere between Wade and the Welsh artist Kyffin Williams). Just before Easter my partner found a wonderful little oil of the Mancunium Way at night, with the lights reflected in the rain, also in an auction catalogue, and a small painting of two Jewish boys, probably on Cheetham Hill, but equally could have been painted in Jerusalem, we do not really know. Finally, at the Trent Art gallery there were other Simcocks, including an image of pigeon shacks, also in black and white and, like Wade, with wonderful layers of texture.
I guess each urban locality has its own painters of industrial and post-industrial landscapes from the 1950s onwards. It is a world that we are just getting to know despite my love of 1950s art, inherited from my father. These local artists were never very well known, beyond the local aficionados and they are not the ‘star’ artists of their generation. However, the images themselves, the post-industrial landscape, has, as I have already said, a stark beauty all of its own, and it is very much part of the life history of my partner and I. He was born in Longton and moved to Manchester, where we met. I was bought up in South Yorkshire and gravitated towards the declining steel mills of Sheffield. We both knew Manchester in the 1980s and 90s, a period of classic post-industrial decline, and then we moved to Birmingham.
Each locality also, clearly, has its own artists and its own images. My partner is inevitably drawn to the Potteries, and we both have great affection for Manchester. I really don’t know who was painting in and around Sheffield, but there must be images of furnaces and chimneys, not to mention ruin and decline, as there is, in fact, in Swansea. We should perhaps know more about the equivalent group of artists around Birmingham and the Black Country. Again, I have to say that I am just not aware of who was painting in this area.
The attraction, however, is not simply because these paintings are post-industrial, or local, or even of a particular period. As the cliché says, I know what I like, although I also like to discover new things, so it is not so much a case of ‘I like what I know’, but the art of the 1950s is a particular passion, along with the music and literature of the same kind of period (although perhaps also going back into the 1920s and 30s). The is the period of Coventry cathedral, not a period noted for its architecture, but one which has produced some strong examples of early post-industrial building as well as painting and other arts.
Martin Stringer Quartet 