Harry Thubron, pioneer of British modernism

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Glyn Thompson reveals two original works by Harry Thubron

Enthusiasts for British art of the 1960s will be interested to learn of the perhaps hitherto unsuspected existence of two works by Harry Thubron (1915–85) not exhibited in public for five decades. They extend the known list of his works.

These two paintings have been in my possession since the 1970s, when I acquired them from Frank Lisle, the ex-principal of Jacob Kramer College (now Leeds College of Art and Design). Frank appointed me to teach history, theory and practice of art and design at Jacob Kramer in 1972. Frank, who had taught the young David Hockney at Bradford, had taught with Thubron at Leeds College of Art and got to know him well. After Frank’s retirement to Shillingstone, in Dorset, I helped him clear his damp cellar in Leeds, where the two works had languished. I bought the two Thubrons from him: he had exchanged work of his own with Thubron for them; that generation did this a lot, when they failed to sell. Frank told me that he had never exhibited them, and I haven't either. They are images 1 and 2 on the lightbox above.

There has been renewed interest in Thubron’s philosophy for the teaching of art, and in his painterly practice. This was recently marked by the sale, by the Austin Desmond Gallery, of a number of Thubron’s Schwitters-inspired collages produced in Andalucia. They were bought by Damian Hirst, the most celebrated of the young British artists (‘yBas’) who came to the fore in the 1990s.

Hirst is keen to locate his own oeuvre within that strand of the distinguished lineage of British modernism that Thubron’s work exemplifies. Hirst’s direct engagement with British modernism began before his enrolment at Goldsmiths College (where Thubron had also taught).  In fact, Hirst would have learnt about early British modernism while taking the Foundation Course at Jacob Kramer College. At that time (1983–5), the college still occupied the original Leeds College of Art building in which Thubron  himself had taught until 1964. Thubron’s Basic Design Course at Leeds was inspired by the work of the Bauhaus school of art and design in Germany before the Second World War and by the work of the influential British art critic and writer, Herbert Read (1893–1968).

Thubron is known as an artist who, during the 1950s and ’60s, was devoted to the eradication of traditional methods of academic art teaching and production, which he saw as too restrictive of individual creativity. At Leeds, Thubron surrounded himself with a team of artists who shared this aim, including Patrick Heron and a series of Gregory Fellows from the University: Alan Davie, Terry Frost, Hubert Dalwood and Trevor Bell, plus the writers and critics Norbert Lynton and Maurice de Sausmarez. The latter later codified the ‘curriculum’ (a concept Thubron abhorred) that Thubron had developed  into a widely consumed instruction manual entitled  Basic Design:  The Dynamics of Visual Form.

The process Thubron advocated was open-ended, spontaneous, exploratory and proactive, its purpose being self-discovery. Focused in aesthetic practices developed at St Ives before the war, the revolution at Leeds was symptomatic of the times, being pioneered by, for example, Olive Sullivan at Manchester School of Art, and by Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, at Newcastle. Thubron himself took his method to Lancaster and then to Goldsmiths’ College. In this way he might be said to have ‘colonised’ metropolitan and provincial British art education.

Thubron’s method was re-evaluation of visual language and the creative process, modelled on the philosophy of the Bauhaus as expressed in Johannes Itten’s Basic Course and Paul Klee’s  Pedagogical Sketchbook (both dating from the 1920s).  Its core was aseries of exercises grounded in an assumption of the universality of ‘pure’ form, exploring the dynamics of line, plane, tone, chromatics, texture, pattern, form, surface, movement and materials, with their application in construction. The ‘gods’ of this art were three of the founders of non-objective (or ‘abstract’) painting, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian.

Thubron was also inspired by Dada, the art movement that had grown up as a reaction to the First World War, particularly the work of Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters.

In the period before Thubron left Leeds, in 1964, he turned to a meditative pictorial aesthetic derived from the philosophy of Zen.

Of the two works illustrated here, Image 1 is a wooden relief similar in size, format, style and technique to that now in the collection of Leeds City Art Gallery, entitled Red Circle, a ‘signature’ Thubron relief. Red Circle was acquired from the exhibition of work by staff and students entitled The Teaching Image, of 1964, held at that Gallery. The catalogue cites eight recent works by Thubron. The subject of numbers (61) to (63) take us to into the aesthetic territory of the second, a painting on canvas, since these are entitled Japanese, Floating Gold and Floating Orange and Plum Red. Their imagery clearly derives from the Zen aesthetic as it was understood at the time.

This second work (Image 2), bearing a black image on a light grey ground, is still mounted on its original board support. There still exist slides of work by Thubron, some at exhibition, and contemporaneous student work in progress in the College of Art studios (images 3, 4 and 5 on the lightbox).  This includes an image of the painting in its original condition (image 6) indicating little physical change over the subsequent years. It shows that the ground was never white. Another slide is of a Zen-inspired painting which appears to have been reproduced nowhere until now (image 7).