Liquid Crystal Concrete:
Marginalised Spaces and Émigré Artists

The second in a series of summer research seminars on The Arts of Postwar Britain 1945–1965 with Sheridan Palmer and Jane Eckett

Sheridan Palmer – The Abbey Art Centre: An “All-but-forgotten” Artists’ Colony

In 1947 the Abbey Art Centre was established by the British-born German art dealer and ethnographic collector, William Ohly, at New Barnet. Set on three acres just beyond the outskirts of a desolate London, it attracted a swathe of Australian, British, refugee German, Austrian and Commonwealth artists. Not only did this colony of artists traverse national and temporal boundaries within a single location, it also encouraged cross-cultural dialogues within its diverse residential hub and provided important contacts in the British and European art worlds at a time of increasingly pluralist and international cultural and political activity. Yet the Abbey Art Centre has remained art historically marginalised.

For many of the colony’s residents, including the Scottish painter Alan Davie, the British tachist artist Phillip Martin and the Australian art historian Bernard Smith, the Abbey’s unique atmosphere, together with William Ohly’s aesthetically potent collection of Asian, Mesopotamian, Mexican and Romanesque antiquities, and African and South Pacific artefacts, inspired a modernist primitivism and globalist vision. In uncovering what Okwui Enwezor called “this hidden vein of artistic post-war activity” we can reassess the cultural climate during this major geopolitical phase from a different perspective. In this paper the Abbey Art Centre is considered as a site of transnational artistic experimentation and modernist postwar cultural exchange.

Jane Eckett – On Modernism’s Margins: William Ohly’s Abbey Art Centre in Postwar England

Despite its name, the Abbey Art Centre operated on the peripheries of London’s postwar art world: marginal both in location – situated in then still rural New Barnet, Hertfordshire – and aesthetics. The Abbey’s assortment of salvaged antiquarian buildings, along with its founder William Ohly’s personal collection of ethnographic art, represented the antimony of modernism’s forward-facing aspirations. But it was precisely the stimulus of the past for artists of the present that Ohly sought, and which underpinned his dealings at the Berkeley Galleries, Mayfair, where, from 1941 until his death in 1955, he alternated exhibitions of antiquities with those of contemporary artists. Both the Abbey and the Berkeley Galleries reflected Ohly’s world view as expansive and eclectic and in which the arts were enduring. Furthermore, both functioned to assist relatively unknown artists – particularly refugees from National Socialism and new arrivals from former British colonies. Among the Abbey’s early residents were émigré sculptor Inge Winter (later Inge King), Hungarian painter-filmmaker Peter Foldes, Viennese painters Helen Grunwald and Angela Varga, Simplicissimus illustrator Marcel Frishman and sculptor wife Margret Kroch-Frishman, as well as renowned long-term resident animator Lotte Reiniger and her art historian husband Carl Koch. Working alongside them was a steady stream of Australians, many of them scarred by years of war service, as were the struggling young Britons attracted by the Abbey’s creative and communal way of life, notably Alan and Bili Davie, Phillip Martin and Helen Marshall, and John Coplans. This paper connects Ohly’s activities at the Abbey and the Berkeley Galleries with his efforts to help émigré and newly arrived “Commonwealth” artists struggling to find a foothold in London’s then notoriously provincial artworld, and suggests that the Abbey’s marginality, both physically and art historically-speaking, offers a rich interpretative frame for re-examining this vital period in British postwar art history.