Emmy Bridgwater
Encyclopedia
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
and poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
associated with the Surrealist movement.
Based at times in both Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
and London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, she was a significant member of the Birmingham Surrealists
Birmingham Surrealists
The Birmingham Surrealists were an informal grouping of artists and intellectuals associated with the Surrealist movement in art, based in Birmingham, England from the 1930s to the 1950s....
and of the London-based British Surrealist Group
British Surrealist Group
The British Surrealist Group was involved in the organisation of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936.The London Bulletin was published by the Surrealist Group in England, according to the June 1940 edition , edited by E. L. T...
, and was an important link between the surrealists of the two cities.
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
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
in the ranks of the French surrealists".
Biography
Emmy Bridgwater was born in the upmarket EdgbastonEdgbaston
Edgbaston is an area in the city of Birmingham in England. It is also a formal district, managed by its own district committee. The constituency includes the smaller Edgbaston ward and the wards of Bartley Green, Harborne and Quinton....
district of Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
, the third daughter of a chartered accountant
Chartered Accountant
Chartered Accountants were the first accountants to form a professional body, initially established in Britain in 1854. The Edinburgh Society of Accountants , the Glasgow Institute of Accountants and Actuaries and the Aberdeen Society of Accountants were each granted a royal charter almost from...
and Methodist
Methodism
Methodism is a movement of Protestant Christianity represented by a number of denominations and organizations, claiming a total of approximately seventy million adherents worldwide. The movement traces its roots to John Wesley's evangelistic revival movement within Anglicanism. His younger brother...
. Showing an early interest in painting and drawing, she studied under Bernard Fleetwood-Walker
Bernard Fleetwood-Walker
Bernard Fleetwood-Walker was an English artist and teacher of painting.Bernard Fleetwood-Walker was born on the 22 March 1893 in Birmingham, United Kingdom, a twin and one of five children...
at the Birmingham School of Art
Birmingham School of Art
The Birmingham School of Art was a municipal art school based in the centre of Birmingham, England. Although the organisation was absorbed by Birmingham Polytechnic in 1971 and is now part of Birmingham City University's Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, its Grade I listed building on...
for three years from 1922 before further study at a local art school in Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
paid for by work as a secretary.
London International Surrealist Exhibition
The International Surrealist Exhibition was held from 11 June to 4 July 1936 at the New Burlington Galleries in London, England.The exhibition was organised by:* Hugh Sykes Davies* David Gascoyne* Humphrey Jennings* Rupert Lee* Diana Brinton Lee...
in 1936, where she met Conroy Maddox
Conroy Maddox
Conroy Maddox , was an English surrealist painter, collagist, writer and lecturer; and a key figure in the Birmingham Surrealist movement....
, John Melville
John Melville
John Melville was an English surrealist artist, described by Michel Remy in his book Surrealism in Britain as one of the "harbingers of surrealism" in Great Britain....
and Robert Melville
Robert Melville (art critic)
Robert Melville was an English art critic and journalist.Along with the artists Conroy Maddox and John Melville , he was a key member of the Birmingham Surrealists in the 1930s and 1940s...
- the key figures of the Birmingham Surrealists
Birmingham Surrealists
The Birmingham Surrealists were an informal grouping of artists and intellectuals associated with the Surrealist movement in art, based in Birmingham, England from the 1930s to the 1950s....
. From this point on her work began to explore the more fearful sides of the subconscious, often using automatist
Surrealist automatism
Automatism has taken on many forms: the automatic writing and drawing initially practiced by surrealists can be compared to similar, or perhaps parallel phenomena, such as the non-idiomatic improvisation of free jazz....
techniques. Studying for periods at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art
Grosvenor School Of Modern Art
Situated at 33 Warwick Square in Pimlico, London,The Grosvenor School of Modern Art was a British Art School founded by the printmakers and linocut artists Claude Flight, Iain McNab, Cyril Edward Power and Sybil Andrews in 1925....
in London during 1936 and 1937 she retained a base in Birmingham and exhibited as a member of the Birmingham Group throughout the late 1930s, also exhibiting at the London Gallery after being introduced to owner E. L. T. Mesens by Robert Melville.
In early 1940 she officially joined the British Surrealist Group
British Surrealist Group
The British Surrealist Group was involved in the organisation of the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936.The London Bulletin was published by the Surrealist Group in England, according to the June 1940 edition , edited by E. L. T...
, 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
Toni del Renzio
Antonino Romanov del Renzio dei Rossi di Castellone e Venosa , an artist and writer of Italian and Russian parentage, was leader of the British Surrealist Group for a period....
, 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
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
to exhibit at the Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme at the Galerie Maeght in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
- 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
Stratford-upon-Avon
Stratford-upon-Avon is a market town and civil parish in south Warwickshire, England. It lies on the River Avon, south east of Birmingham and south west of Warwick. It is the largest and most populous town of the District of Stratford-on-Avon, which uses the term "on" to indicate that it covers...
to take on this responsibility full-time and effectively suspended her artistic career.
During the 1970s Bridgwater resumed work, largely in collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
, and her earlier work featured in numerous surrealist retrospective exhibitions over the following decades. Ceasing work in the mid-1980s, she died in Solihull
Solihull
Solihull is a town in the West Midlands of England with a population of 94,753. It is a part of the West Midlands conurbation and is located 9 miles southeast of Birmingham city centre...
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 collageCollage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
.
Critical reaction
Toni del Renzio
Antonino Romanov del Renzio dei Rossi di Castellone e Venosa , an artist and writer of Italian and Russian parentage, was leader of the British Surrealist Group for a period....
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."
Robert Melville
Robert Melville (art critic)
Robert Melville was an English art critic and journalist.Along with the artists Conroy Maddox and John Melville , he was a key member of the Birmingham Surrealists in the 1930s and 1940s...
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."
Her obituary in The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
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
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- 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
- Emmy Bridgwater Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery Information Centre
- Emmy Bridgwater Artnet